Ethnolect
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Ethnolect is a variant of a language spoken by a certain ethnic/cultural subgroup and serves as a distinguishing mark of social identity. The term combines the concepts of an ethnic group and dialect.
Example: African American Vernacular in the American English context as a feature of African American or Black society.
The term was first used to describe the monolingual English of descendants of European immigrants in Buffalo, New York (Carlock, E. and Wölck, W. 'A method for isolating diagnostic linguistic variables: The Buffalo ethnolects experiment' in D. Sankoff and H. Cedergren, ed.: Variation Omnibus. Edmonton 1981:17-24).
Because there are no universally accepted criteria for distinguishing languages from dialects, some scholars understand the term ethnolect as language or dialect.
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