Dialect
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What is a dialect?
A dialect is a regional or social variety of a language that reflects a person's origin, background, or occupation. Dialects are distinguished by grammar and vocabulary, while accent refers to pronunciation.
Dialects arise through linguistic changes, with geographical factors and social interactions influencing their evolution. The most widespread dialectal differentiation is regional. Social factors, such as class, education, and profession, also play a role, with standard language features more common among educated speakers.
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How is a dialect different from a language?
A dialect is a regional or social variety of a language distinguished by grammar, vocabulary, and sometimes pronunciation. While dialects of the same language differ, they share a common core of features and are usually mutually intelligible.
The distinction between dialect and language can be challenging and, at times, arbitrary. Factors such as intelligibility, historical context, and sociopolitical considerations often play a role in determining whether two linguistic varieties are dialects of the same language or separate languages. For example, what was once considered Serbo-Croatian is now referred to as Croatian and Serbian due to ethnic conflicts in the Balkans.
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Why do different regions have their own dialects?
Dialects emerge and persist due to a combination of geographic, social, and historical factors.
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Geographic barriers Mountains, rivers, and uninhabited areas can limit contact between communities, allowing linguistic changes to develop independently.
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Social factors Social class, education level, and even race and ethnicity can influence the way people speak within a community.
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Migration Migrations can either create a uniform dialect over broad areas or increase dialect differentiation when different groups come into contact.
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Linguistic change Languages constantly undergo changes, but these changes don't occur uniformly across all regions or social groups.
Over time, these factors contribute to the diversification of language, resulting in the various dialects we see today.
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What are some features that make dialects unique, like vocabulary or pronunciation?
Dialects are unique due to variations in linguistic structure, grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation. Geographic dialects are the most widespread, with each locality exhibiting slight differences in speech. These differences accumulate over distance, marked by isoglosses, which are boundary lines for dialectal features.
Vocabulary is a key differentiator; for example, American English uses "subway," while British English uses "underground". Pronunciation and intonation also vary, sometimes referred to as accents rather than dialects. Social factors like class, education, and profession also influence dialectal differences, with slang and professional jargon adding further layers of uniqueness.
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How can dialects change over time?
Dialects evolve through various mechanisms, including contact, social factors, and geographical movement.
Communication and urbanization can unify dialects, as prestigious urban dialects often replace less valued ones. Increased contact diminishes dialectal differences, while reduced contact increases them. Social status plays a role, with speakers sometimes adopting prestigious dialects.
Population movements and migrations contribute to dialect formation and change. Linguistic changes occur gradually through the transmission of language, with vocabulary reflecting cultural shifts. Social variables such as education, class, age, ethnicity, and gender also influence dialectal variations.
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How do dialects influence the way people communicate and understand each other?
Dialects significantly shape communication and understanding by reflecting a person's origin, social background, or occupation. Dialectal differences arise from variations in linguistic structure, including grammar and vocabulary. While dialects of the same language differ, they maintain a common core of features, and are generally considered mutually intelligible.
These variations can either impede or enhance communication depending on the degree of difference and the listener's familiarity with the dialect. Social factors, such as class and education, also influence dialect use, with more-educated speakers often using features of the standard language. The rise of urbanization, mass media, and education tends to promote larger regional dialects, which decreases the prevalence of smaller, localized dialects.
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Dialect, a variety of a language that signals where a person comes from. The notion is usually interpreted geographically (regional dialect), but it also has some application in relation to a person’s social background (class dialect) or occupation (occupational dialect). The word dialect comes from the Ancient Greek dialektos “discourse, language, dialect,” which is derived from dialegesthai “to discourse, talk.” A dialect is chiefly distinguished from other dialects of the same language by features of linguistic structure—i.e., grammar (specifically morphology and syntax) and vocabulary. In morphology (word formation), various dialects in the Atlantic states have clim, clum, clome, or cloome instead of climbed, and, in syntax (sentence structure), there are “sick to his stomach,” “sick at his stomach,” “sick in,” “sick on,” and “sick with.” On the level of vocabulary, examples of dialectal differences include American English subway, contrasting with British English underground; and corn, which means “maize” in the United States, Canada, and Australia, “wheat” in England, and “oats” in Scotland. Nevertheless, while dialects of the same language differ, they still possess a common core of features.
Although some linguists include phonological features (such as vowels, consonants, and intonation) among the dimensions of dialect, the standard practice is to treat such features as aspects of accent. In the sound system of American English, for example, some speakers pronounce greasy with an “s” sound, while others pronounce it with a “z” sound. Accent differences of this kind are extremely important as regional and class indicators in every language. Their role is well recognized in Great Britain, for example, where the prestige accent, called Received Pronunciation, is used as an educated standard and differences in regional accent, both rural and urban, are frequent. There is far less accent variation in Canada, Australia, and large parts of the United States.
Frequently, the label dialect, or dialectal, is attached to substandard speech, language usage that deviates from the accepted norm—e.g., the speech of many of the heroes of Mark Twain’s novels. On the other hand, the standard language can also be regarded as one of the dialects of a given language, though one that has attracted special prestige. In a historical sense, the term dialect is sometimes applied to a language considered as one of a group deriving from a common ancestor. Thus, English, Swedish, and German are sometimes treated as Germanic dialects.
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There is often considerable difficulty in deciding whether two linguistic varieties are dialects of the same language or two separate but closely related languages; this is especially true in parts of the world where speech communities have been little studied. In these cases especially, decisions regarding dialects versus languages must be to some extent arbitrary.
Normally, dialects of the same language are considered to be mutually intelligible, while different languages are not. Intelligibility between dialects is, however, almost never absolutely complete. On the other hand, speakers of closely related languages can still communicate to a certain extent when each uses his own mother tongue. Thus, the criterion of intelligibility is quite relative. In more-developed societies the distinction between dialects and related languages is easier to make because of the existence of standard languages.
Sometimes sociopolitical factors play a role in drawing the distinction between dialect and language. Linguistic varieties that are considered dialects in one set of historical circumstances may be considered languages in another. Before the ethnic conflicts in the Balkans in the 1990s, Serbo-Croatian was viewed by its speakers as a single language consisting of several dialects, spoken in Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Croatia; afterward, local communities began to talk of Croatian and Serbian as distinct languages.
Among the synonyms for dialect, the word idiom refers to any kind of dialect, or even language, whereas patois, a term from French, denotes rural or provincial dialects, often with a deprecatory connotation. A similar term is vernacular, which refers to the common, everyday speech of the ordinary people of a region. An idiolect is the dialect of an individual person at one time. This term implies an awareness that no two persons speak in exactly the same way and that each person’s dialect is constantly undergoing change—e.g., by the introduction of newly acquired words. Most recent investigations emphasize the versatility of each person’s speech habits according to levels or styles of language usage.
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Varieties of dialects
Geographic dialects
The most widespread type of dialectal differentiation is regional, or geographic. As a rule, the speech of one locality differs at least slightly from that of any other place. Differences between neighbouring local dialects are usually small, but, in traveling farther in the same direction, differences accumulate. Every dialectal feature has its own boundary line, called an isogloss (or sometimes heterogloss). Isoglosses of various linguistic phenomena rarely coincide completely, and by crossing and interweaving they constitute intricate patterns on dialect maps. Frequently, however, several isoglosses are grouped approximately together into a bundle of isoglosses. This grouping is caused either by geographic obstacles that arrest the diffusion of a number of innovations along the same line or by historical circumstances, such as political borders of long standing, or by migrations that have brought into contact two populations whose dialects were developed in noncontiguous areas.
Geographic dialects include local ones (e.g., the Yankee English of Cape Cod or of Boston, the Russian of Moscow or of Smolensk) or broader regional ones, such as Delaware Valley English, Australian English, or Tuscan Italian. Such entities are of unequal rank; South Carolina English, for instance, is included in Southern American English. Regional dialects do have some internal variation, but the differences within a regional dialect are supposedly smaller than differences between two regional dialects of the same rank. In a number of areas (“linguistic landscapes”) where the dialectal differentiation is essentially even, it is hardly justified to speak of regional dialects. This uniformity has led many linguists to deny the meaningfulness of such a notion altogether; very frequently, however, bundles of isoglosses—or even a single isogloss of major importance—permit the division of a territory into regional dialects. The public is often aware of such divisions, usually associating them with names of geographic regions or provinces or with some feature of pronunciation—e.g., Southern English or Russian o-dialects and a-dialects. Especially clear-cut cases of division are those in which geographic isolation has played the principal role—e.g., Australian English or Louisiana French.