They creatively transform idiomatic speech, army slang and Mizrachi or East European migrant
sociolect. It is partially for this reason that they themselves have become popular idioms and sayings often quoted by people who are unaware of their original context.
Among the topics are the Aramaic of the Zohar: the status quaestionis, single-script mixed-code literary sources from the Cairo Genizah and their sociolinguistic context, Jewish Berber: a brief linguistic sketch, the schism between perceptions of the Yiddish language and Yiddish cultural realities, and Judeo-Arabic language or Jewish Arabic
sociolect: linguistic terminology between linguistics and ideology.
Their Shylocks spoke Kanak Sprak, the originally Turkish-German
sociolect which in the last two decades has been adopted, in a stylized version, by more heterogeneous urban youth subcultures.
Having two sharks speaking with the (stereotypical)
sociolect of German-speaking Turks is a highly domesticating choice; a choice that builds upon and relies on the familiarity of the German-speaking audience with this particular comedy duo and its type of humour.
(18) Jarrell's essay is full of such absurd defenses of what he several times calls Whitman's "queer" style, but if despite Jarrell's riff Whitman's lines strike you as first Charlotte Smith then Wallace Stevens, that may be because their speech genre is not the pathetic plea of the foreign curiosity, but the patent
sociolect of the Romantic ode, which as de Man and Culler have pointed out, came to be understood in the twentieth century as lyric addressivity.
Both participants in a given communicative situation share a mutual encoding and decoding process, which entails a relatively plausible means of spotting distinguishable lexical units of a specific
sociolect in a synchronic manner.
(28) See Anne Scott, "Language as
Sociolect: Havelok the Dane" Studies in Philology 89.2 (1992): 150.
In all of his plays, Tremblay explores what it means to speak in one's own tongue, whether in the broad sense of a language or in the more restricted sense of a
sociolect.
For instance, it makes a difference whether 'right inuff' is translated from a Scottish or a class perspective: a translation into, say, Kanak Sprak (the German
sociolect associated with Turkish immigrants) would probably be considered less appropriate to the former than to the latter.