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Linguistics

Notes cinema military theatre
commerce music trignometry
cricket nautical zoology
Though this list covers a fairly wide range of language registers, yet it should not be regarded as final
and complete.
Register and Style
Registers may be classified on the basis of style. We may talk of, for example religion, in a temple
with the old folk or at a seminar with scholars, or in a restaurant with friends. Depending on who
participates (passively or actively) in the discourse or discussion, the tone, the words etc. will vary. In
a religious gathering or temple we may be serious and reverential in our speech; in a seminar we may
be analytical; in a restaurant casual. The topic is a serious one but our treatment of it may be highly
formal or frozen; it may be, at the other extremes, highly informal or casual. The degree of formality
may vary according to the style or manner of discourse. In the restaurant we may say that water is
‘dirty’, but in a laboratory we may have to say it is ‘impure’ or ‘polluted.’
On the basis of stylistic values the following types of stylistic varieties have been listed in The Advanced
Learner’s Dictionary (1976):
archaic formal pejorative
colloquial historical poetic
dated humorous proverb
derogatory ironical rare
dialect jocular slang
emphatic laudatory taboo
emotive literary vulgar
euphimistic literal
facetious modern
figurative old use
Nevertheless, it is difficult to draw a sharp dividing line between the two axes of register and style;
and register classification, instead of being a pigeon-hole classification, is only a workable solution.
Register, says Dr. S.K. Verma, is primarily “field (of discourse)-bond and situationally conditioned.
It is a restricted code of social behaviour.” Furthermore, ‘register is a variety of language with marked
phonological, grammatical and lexical features correlating with distinctive situational features. Hence
registral varieties, like any other variety, can be analysed and described at the interpreting levels of
phonology, grammar and lexis. One of the marked features of a register is predominance of a particular
type of technical terms. It is only with the help of certain marked lexical features that we delimit and
classify registers, e.g. in the passage quoted above. (S.K. Verma. “Towards a Linguistic Analysis of
Registral Features,” Acta Linguistica Academica, Budapest).
Style in linguistics has to do with those components or features of the form of a literary composition
which give to it its individual stamp, marking it out as the work of a particular author and producing
a certain effect upon the reader. The analysis of style in this sense is commonly called stylistics
13.2.5 Idiolect

Idiolect is a variety of language used by one individual speaker, including pecularities of pronunciation,
grammar, vocabulary, etc. A dialect is made of idiolects of a group of speakers in a social or regional
subdivision of a speech community. Linguists often analyse their own idiolect to make general
statements about language. So the idiolect is “an identifiable pattern of speech characteristic of an
individual.” or “Idiolect is the individual’s personal variety of the community language system” (A
Dictionary of Linguistics: 1954).

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