Doculect

The term doculect is sometimes used for a variety of a language that has been described or otherwise documented in a coherent way.

Examples

For instance, two grammars of Egyptian Arabic describe two different doculects, even if they are both about, say, educated middle-class colloquial Cairo Arabic. The mere fact that there are two different descriptions makes the varieties described in them different doculects. Another example would be two different corpora, e.g. a corpus of French based on Le Monde and one based on Agence France Press. Even though one would perhaps not expect any differences in the structure of the language between the two corpora, the two varieties are by definition different doculects.

Origin

The term arose in discussions between Michael Cysouw, Jeff Good and Martin Haspelmath in 2006 at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. It is based on the term lect and the word documentation.

"Jeff Good (pers. comm.) has introduced the term ‘doculect’ to refer to the variety of the ‘language’ that ends up in the documentation." (Bowern 2008:8)

References

Bowern, Claire. 2008. Linguistic fieldwork. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Other languages

German Dokulekt