Language may be defined as a human system of communication that uses arbitrary signals, such

as voice sounds, gestures, or written symbols. The system of communication may have varieties
and these varieties are called dialects.
(a) Explain your understanding about what a dialect is and why there are dialects in a
language.
(b) Bell (1976) has expounded seven criteria that differentiate language and dialect. Discuss
the seven criteria.
(c) In your opinion, why one has to speak with the appropriate social dialect? Give examples.

The introduction is inviting, states the main topic and

previews the structure of the paper.

There is one clear, well-focused topic. Main idea

stands out and is supported by detailed information.
All outside sources are properly cited/ referenced.

12

The conclusion is strong and leaves the reader with a

feeling that they understand what the writer is "getting
at."

Details are placed in a logical order and the way they

are presented effectively keeps the interest of the
reader.
Writer makes no errors in grammar or spelling that
distracts the reader from the content.

8
8

1.0

What is a dialect ? and why there are dialects in a language.

A dialect is typically a form or variation of a specific language. In other words, a language could
be influenced socially or regionally and therefore its discourse (grammar, pronunciation and/or
vocabulary) may differ. For instance, North Americans, Scots and Indians may not use the same
version of the English language. The languages used in poems by ancient poets, such as William
Shakespeare, John Keats, etc., are dialects of the modern English language. A dialect is different
from an accent. Accents are more into a languages pronunciation style; dialects are more than
this mere utterance the words and vocabulary would differ. Basically, an accent is an element
of a dialect. The language variation need not always be courtesy a region or place; it could also
be associated with social groups or demographics female or male, old or young, etc.

OGrady et al. define dialect as, "A regional or social variety of a language characterized by its
own phonological, syntactic, and lexical properties. The term dialect is often associated with
regional varieties of speech. In addition, though, there are dialect varieties associated with
particular ethnic groups (sometimes called ethnolects), socioeconomic classes (sometimes called
sociolects), or other social or cultural groups.

The language used by the people of a specific area, class, district or any other group of people.
The term dialect involves the spelling, sounds, grammar and pronunciation used by a particular
group of people and it distinguishes them from other people around them. Dialect is a very
powerful and common way of characterization, which elaborates the geographic and social
background of any character.

There are plenty of dialect examples in literature that show the best usage of dialect as a literary
device. One of them is Mark Twains Huckleberry Finn where he used exaggerated dialect to
distinguish between the characters:
Example #1
Jim: Wes safe, Huck, wes safe! Jump up and crack yo heels. Dats de good ole Cairo at las, I
jis knows it.
Huck: Ill take the canoe and go see, Jim. It mightnt be, you know.
Example #2
The characters that are less educated and less sophisticated usually are shown to be speaking
with a much stronger dialect. At certain points you might even need translations. Such as:
Walter: Reckon I have. Almost died first year I come to school and et them pecans folks say
he pizened em and put em over on the school side of the fence.
(To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee)
Translation: I suppose I have. The first year I came to school and ate those pecans, I almost died.
Some people accuse him [Mr. Radley] of poisoning them and keeping them over on the school
side of the fence.
Example #3
Lula: I wants to know why you bringing white chillun to nigger church.
(To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee)
Translation: I want to know why you are bringing white children to a church for Negroes.
Dialect Examples from Poetry
Example #4

Will no one say hush! to thee,

poor lass, poor bit of a wench?
Will never a man say: Come, my pigeon,
come an be still wi me, my own bit of a wench!
(Poor Bit of a Wench by D.H. Lawrence)
Example #5
I, the man with the red scarf,
Will give thee what I have, this last weeks earnings.
Take them and buy thee a silver ring
And wed me, to ease my yearnings.
For the rest when thou art wedded
Ill wet my brow for thee
With sweat, Ill enter a house for thy sake,
Thou shalt shut doors on me.
(Gipsy by D.H. Lawrence)
You can also find great examples of dialect usage in two of George Eliots novels named Silas
Mariner and Middlemarch. Another method of using dialect is to knowingly misspell a word to
build an artistic aura around a character, which is termed as Metaplasmus.
Dialects in American and British English
There have been several very unique dialects in literature in the past, out of which some have
grown to be more dominant. Old and middle English had distinctive regional dialects. The major
dialects in old English involved Kentish, Northumbrian, Mercian and West Saxon English
dialects, while as years passed, the West Saxon dialect became the standard. Moreover, middle
English included Southern, West Midlands, Northern, East Midlands and Kentish dialects.
In the British Isles, modern English give out hints of class as well as regional dialects. Almost
every British country has its own variation to a certain extent. A.C Baugh pointed out that in one

place, at times, you can mark three dialectal regions in a single shire. Modern American English
consists of dialects such as Eastern New England, Mid-southern, Inland Northern, Southern,
General American North, Midland, New York, and Black English Vernacular.
Function of Dialect
The narrative voice in literature usually aspires to speak in concert with the reality it illustrates.
African American authors often criticize this condition while discussing the significance of
speaking in so-called standard American English in comparison with African American
English. Toni Cade Bambara has made a remarkable contribution in this aspect by choosing the
language of her culture and community. She used her language as a very productive critical tool
and her dialect illustration in The Lesson functioned as an examination of how the people who
listen to it ultimately hear the disparaged talking. By reviving the language that was long
marginalized she contributes towards the effort to salvage the cultural identity of African
Americans. This integration of non-standard linguistic features into the literature in the lesson
works as an insightful response to marginalization. It also proves the strength and power of
language in portraying the diverse realities of people from different places.

A dialect is a variety of language shared by a group of people (usually defined in terms of region
and/or ethnicity) that has some grammatical patterns and words that differ from the standard,
as well as nonstandard pronunciations. You may believe that dialects are wrong as linguist
Ralph Fasold so aptly puts it, dialects such as African-American English are bad English, in the
same sense that French is bad English but they are certainly powerful markers of social
solidarity, and that means more to most people than being correct. If you are a speaker of a
dialect that is considered standard or good (which is a social distinction, not a linguistic
one), you may never have faced social prejudice due to the way you speak, so you may think this
discussion doesnt concern you. It does, though! Just like gender (masculine and feminine
communication styles), people can turn their dialect up or down to send social messages.
Dialects are social, not biologicalClick to hide

Although linguists have traditionally studied dialects in terms of objective identity

characteristics (where youre from, your ethnicity), they know that this is an oversimplification.
What matters is who you interact with over and over again, and how you see those relationships.
If you have a strong and close social network with others of your group, you will display more
dialect markers of that group, especially when speaking in-network. If you have only weak ties
with members of a dialect community, it doesnt matter whether you share the same heritage or
grew up together. So, for instance, some African-Americans may use African-American English
(AAE) all the time (because they wish to express pride in their heritage, no matter what the
situation), some may use more dialect features with other African-Americans than with anyone
else (so they create more solidarity with whoever theyre speaking to), some may continue to use
AAE sound patterns while adopting more standard vocabulary and grammar, and some AfricanAmericans may speak in a standard dialect all the time (either because they didnt grow up in
an African-American dialect community to begin with, or because they have sought to avoid the
stigma that the rest of the American society has traditionally attached to ethnic dialects). Your
biology has nothing to do with it, and your history has only a little to do with it: this is a social
phenomenon. Members of the same family may end up sounding quite different, depending on
their social choices and goals.

Power & Social Class

Dialect speakers are consistently rated lower than standard speakers on all power-related
variables: status, wealth, education, intelligence, ambition, etc.) (And yes, this is true even when
the judges belong to the same dialect community as the speakers.) There is actually some
sociological logic behind these judgments.
Working-class people tend to have tight social networks that remain fairly stable over the course
of their lives: they go to school with the kids from the neighborhood, they end up working
together, socializing together, intermarrying, their kids become friends, etc. There is no
expectation that they will move away, go to college, or interact regularly with people outside of
their primary social network so theres no real pressure on them to use more standard
varieties of English. Using their dialect makes much more sense, since it obviously effects their

solidarity with the people who are most important: their friends, family, co-workers, etc. This is
why stigmatized dialects continue to thrive, despite considerable pressure from the rest of
society.
On the other hand, the upper-middle and upper class tend to be more mobile (they go away to
college, then move on to graduate and professional schools, then perhaps move elsewhere again
to establish a career). They get more education (which reinforces a standard variety of English)
and are also required to speak more across group boundary lines, so it is not surprising that we
see fewer dialect-specific features in their speech.

Intercultural Communication
Regions and ethnicities dont just have different dialects, they may have other cultures
differences that influence how members of these groups communicate.

Responding to the use of dialects in conversation

Someone who chooses to use a regional or ethnic dialect when speaking with you is either being
informal to signal friendliness or is angry or emotional enough not to care how you judge them.
How you respond will differ, according to what you perceive as the motivation for the use of the
dialect, and whether or not you are a member of the same dialect community. (To distinguish
friendly (happy) displays from displays of anger, see expressing emotions.)
Someone who uses their dialect with you in a friendly way is trusting you not to judge them
harshly, not to believe all the pernicious stereotypes. If you are a member of the same group, you
should respond to them in kind, showing acceptance of the friendliness, underlining your
common group membership. If you meet their use of dialect with a very standard variety, they
will feel rejected and you will seem like a snob. If you are not a member of the same dialect
group, you should not attempt to borrow the other persons dialect features as this may be seen
as mocking them (particularly if you do it badly). You should, however, respond with equal
informality.

Someone who speaks to you with an annoyed or angry tone, using dialect features that you dont
share, is warning you to back off. In this case, the use of the dialect clearly signals a lack of
solidarity, a sign that you dont belong. The speaker signals their contempt for you by showing
that they dont care what you think of them!

The Reality of Dialects-Dialects are an unavoidable reality, and our judgments about them are never neutral. We make
judgments about social class, ethnicity, regional background, education and a host of other social
characteristics based simply on the kind of language people are using. In fact, many people
believe that language differences are the single most reliable indicator
of social position in our society. When we live a certain way or belong to a certain group, we are
expected to match that lifestyle with our talk, and when we do not, people notice.
Language differences seem to be unavoidable in a society composed of a variety of social
groups, but such differences are not unique to America. Any civilization (past or present) with
social and geographical dispersion can be expected to possess language diversity or dialect
differences.
Defining Dialects-Almost everyone has some notion of what the term dialect refers to. However, the formal or
technical definition of the term in linguistics is different from its popular definition in some
important but subtle ways:
1. Most importantly, dialect is a neutral label used to refer to any variety of a language shared by
a group of speakers.
2. Languages are always made up of various dialects or varieties, and to speak a language is to
speak some dialect of that language.
3. There are no particular social or attitudinal evaluations of the term (no "good" or "bad"); it is
simply how we refer to any language variety that typifies a group of speakers within a language.
4. Finally, socially privileged or "standard" varieties are every bit as much a dialect as those
varieties spoken by isolated, socially marginalized groups whose language differences are
socially stigmatized.
Dialects: The Popular Viewpoint

Judgments (often negative) about a dialect typically characterize these popular viewpoints.
Typically, they exist on a continuum:
1. Dialect refers to people whose speech is noticeably different from our own. This is typically
an individual perception.
2. Dialect refers to varieties of English whose features have become widely recognized
throughout American society.
3. In the most extreme case, dialect refers to a kind of deficient or corrupted English. In these
instances, dialect is perceived as an imperfect attempt to speak correct or standard English.
These popular, and often negative, misconceptions about dialects have often been described in
terms of the Difference-Deficit Controversy or the Linguistic Inferiority Principle. Language
scholars have attempted to educate people about why these perceptions are wrong.
REMEMBER! Dialects are NOT deviant or corrupt forms of a language but different language
systems that operate according to their own rules and patterns. See the Exercise on A-Prefixing
as an example of this.
Dialect Myths and Realities-Myth: A dialect is something that someone else speaks.
Reality: Everyone who speaks a language speaks some dialect of the language; it is not possible
to speak a language without speaking a dialect of the language.
Myth: Dialects always have highly noticeable features that set them apart.
Reality: Some dialects get much more attention than others; the status of speaking a dialect,
however, is unrelated to public commentary about its special characteristics.
Myth: Only varieties of a language spoken by socially disfavored groups are dialects.
Reality: The notion of dialect exists apart from the social status of the language variety; there are
socially favored as well as socially disfavored dialects.

Myth: Dialects result from unsuccessful attempts to speak the "correct" form of a language.
Reality: Dialect speakers learn their language by imitating members of their speech community
who speak the same variety, not by failing to mimic speakers of the standard variety.
Myth: Dialects inherently carry negative social connotations.
Reality: Dialects are not necessarily positively or negatively valued; their social values are
derived strictly from the social position of their speech community.
Problems with Terminology-Many linguists now believe that because of the pervasive, popular misconceptions about dialects,
the term "dialect" itself is problematic because it carries negative connotations. Many linguists
use one or more of these neutral terms in place of the term "dialect": 1) language difference; 2)
language variety; 3) language variation; 4) speech differences. We will use all of these terms
interchangeably in this course (including
the term "dialect" in its neutral sense).
Standard English and Vernaculars-Although every variety constitutes a dialect of that language, one particular variety or dialect
usually is regarded as the standard. In our language, we call this variety Standard English.
Language Academies-- In some countries (most notably, France and Spain) language academies
have been established that are responsible for determining what forms (spoken and written) are
considered acceptable for the normative "standard." They determine, for example, what new
words are allowed to be included in official dictionaries, and what grammatical forms and
pronunciations are standard. In the United States, we do not have such an institution, and
attempts to establish one have failed. However, the reality of a Standard American English still
exists. Whether or not there is an institution to regulate language, language standardization to
some degree is usually inevitable. Ultimately we can attribute this to underlying principles of
behavior in which certain social codes (fashion or morality, for example) are established as
normative for society.

When we consider Standard English, we need to distinguish between two different aspects or
levels of operation:
1. Formal Standard English or Prescriptive Standard English
Although we do not have a language academy, the norms of our language are prescribed by
recognized sources of authority such as grammar and usage books, dictionaries, teachers, and
educational institutions. Typically, Formal Standard English (FSE) is based on the written, rather
than the spoken, language and is codified by the sources of authority listed above. As a variety of
English, it tends to be very conservative, so that it is the last language style or variety to be
affected by any changes going on in the language. FSE is likely to be found in formal kinds of
written language and in formal kinds of spoken language, such as speeches and ceremonies. In
everyday conversational speech, there are very few people who consistently speak FSE.
2. Informal Standard English (ISE)
This spoken variety represents the attempts by speakers to conform their speech to FSE and is
determined by the actual usage patterns of speakers. While FSE relies on outside, prescriptive
authorities, ISE is based on the actual kinds of assessments that different members of American
society make as they judge the speech of others. In other words, listener judgment is essential in
determining socially acceptable norms for ISE (ie, judgments about ISE can be fairly subjective).
Consequently, ISE always exists on a linguistic continuum between standard and nonstandard
poles. Different judgments will be made based on multiple norms of acceptability, including
regional and social considerations. However, ISE seems to be determined more by what it is not
than by what it is. For example, if speakers with strong regional pronunciations avoid the use of
socially stigmatized grammatical structures (eg., double negatives; irregular verb
forms), they often will be considered as speakers of Standard English. In this way, ISE is defined
negatively. If a person's speech is free of structures that are considered "nonstandard," then they
may be considered standard. This also suggests that there may well be more than one uniform
"standard" in America.
Vernacular Dialects

At the other end of the continuum of standardness are varieties that are often referred to as
nonstandard English dialects or vernacular dialects. This includes any variety of the language
that is outside of ISE. Like ISE there are a number of different social and regional factors that
contribute to the making of a vernacular dialect. However, unlike ISE (which is largely defined
by the absence of socially stigmatized features) vernacular varieties seem to be characterized by
the presence of socially noticeable or obtrusive features (something that marks them as
nonstandard). While vernacular dialects are determined by actual usage patterns of speakers, the
judgment of listeners is essential in determining social unacceptability.

Definition:
In sociolinguistics, a variety of speech associated with a particular social class or occupational
group within a society. Also known as sociolect.
Douglas Biber distinguishes two main kinds of dialects in linguistics: "geographic dialects are
varieties associated with speakers living in a particular location, while social dialects are
varieties associated with speakers belonging to a given demographic group (e.g., women versus
men, or different social classes)" (Dimensions of Register Variation, 1995).

"Even though we use the term 'social dialect' or 'sociolect' as a label for the alignment of a set of
language structures with the social position of a group in a status hierarchy, the social
demarcation of language does not exist in a vacuum. Speakers are simultaneously affiliated with
a number of different groups that include region, age, gender, and ethnicity, and some of these
other factors may weigh heavily in the determination of the social stratification of language
variation. For example, among older European-American speakers in Charleston, South
Carolina, the absence of r in words such as bear and court is associated with aristocratic, highstatus groups (McDavid 1948) whereas in New York City the same pattern of r-lessness is
associated with working-class, low-status groups (Labov 1966). Such opposite social
interpretations of the same linguistic trait over time and space point to the arbitrariness of the
linguistic symbols that carry social meaning. In other words, it is not really the meaning of what
you say that counts socially, but who you are when you say it."
(Walt Wolfram, "Social Varieties of American English." Language in the USA, ed. by E. Finegan.
Cambridge University Press, 2004)

Language and Gender

"Across all social groups in Western societies, women generally use more standard grammatical
forms than men and so, correspondingly, men use more vernacular forms than women. . . .

"[I]t is worth noting that although gender generally interacts with other social factors, such as
status, class, the role of the speaker in an interaction, and the (in)formality of the context, there
are cases where the gender of the speaker seems to be the most influential factor accounting for
speech patterns. In some communities, a woman's social status and her gender interact to
reinforce differential speech patterns between women and men. In others, different factors
modify one another to produce more complex patterns. But in a number of communities, for
some linguistic forms, gender identity seems to be a primary factor accounting for speech
variation. The gender of the speaker can override social class differences, for instance, in
accounting for speech patterns. In these communities, expressing masculine or feminine identity
seems to be very important."
(Janet Holmes, An Introduction to Sociolinguistics, 4th ed. Routledge, 2013)
Standard British English as a Sociolect
"The standard variety of a given language, e.g. British English, tends to be the upper class
sociolect of a given central area or regiolect. Thus Standard British English used to be the
English of the upper classes (also called the Queen's English or Public School English) of the
Southern, more particularly, London area."
(Ren Dirven and Marjolyn Verspoor, Cognitive Exploration of Language and Linguistics. John
Benjamins, 2004)

LOL-SPEAK
"When two friends created the site I Can Has Cheezburger?, in 2007, to share cat photos with
funny, misspelled captions, it was a way of cheering themselves up. They probably werent
thinking about long-term sociolinguistic implications. But seven years later, the 'cheezpeep'
community is still active online, chattering away in LOLspeak, its own distinctive variety of
English. LOLspeak was meant to sound like the twisted language inside a cats brain, and has
ended up resembling a down-South baby talk with some very strange characteristics, including
deliberate misspellings (teh, ennyfing), unique verb forms (gotted, can haz), and word
reduplication (fastfastfast). It can be difficult to master. One user writes that it used to take at
least 10 minutes to read adn unnerstand a paragraph. (Nao, itz almost like a sekund
lanjuaje.)

"To a linguist, all of this sounds a lot like a sociolect: a language variety thats spoken within a
social group, like Valley Girlinfluenced ValTalk or African American Vernacular English. (The
word dialect, by contrast, commonly refers to a variety spoken by a geographic groupthink
Appalachian or Lumbee.) Over the past 20 years, online sociolects have been springing up
around the world, from Jejenese in the Philippines to Ali G Language, a British lingo inspired by
the Sacha Baron Cohen character."
(Britt Peterson, "The Linguistics of LOL." The Atlantic, October 2014)
Slang as a Social Dialect
"If your kids are unable to differentiate among a nerd ('social outcast'), a dork ('clumsy oaf') and
a geek ('a real slimeball'), you might want to establish your expertise by trying these more recent
(and in the process of being replaced) examples of kiduage: thicko (nice play on sicko), knob,
spasmo (playground life is cruel), burgerbrain and dappo.
"Professor Danesi, who is author of Cool: The Signs and Meanings of Adolescence, treats kids'
slang as a social dialect that he calls 'pubilect.' He reports that one 13-year-old informed him
about 'a particular kind of geek known specifically as a leem in her school who was to be viewed
as particularly odious. He was someone "who just wastes oxygen."'"
(William Safire, "On Language: Kiduage." The New York Times Magazine, Oct. 8, 1995)

In chapter 22 of The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-44), Charles Dickens
amusingly illustrates one of the misconceptions attached to the concept of dialect .
One common myth about language is that a dialect is always somebody else's peculiar way of
speaking, never our own.
But the truth is, everybody speaks a dialect (or a lect, as some linguists would have it). It may be
standard or nonstandard, urban or rural, but it's a distinctive form of the language all the same--a
variety of the mother tongue that most of us learned in early childhood. To a linguist, no dialect
is inherently better or worse than any other.
The same goes for accents--though accents and dialects aren't quite the same. Your accent is
simply the way you pronounce words.
A dialect involves vocabulary and grammar as well as pronunciation. And dialects come in
various overlapping shapes and sizes.
There are national dialects, such as American English, Irish English, and Philippine English.
There are also regional dialects, spoken in specific areas of a country; social dialects (or
sociolects), associated with certain classes or occupational groups; and ethnic dialects,
commonly used by members of a particular ethnic group.
Finally, there's the language variety unique to each individual speaker. That's called an idiolect.
So in that sense, it's true that we all speak different dialects of the same language. What's
remarkable is that we understand one another as well as we do (a convenient phenomenon
called mutual intelligibility).
Of course, sometimes--as with the legendary Englishman, Scotsman, and Irishman at the bar--it
may take a few libations to facilitate communication.

What I understand about dialects

What is a dialect?
Dialect is one of those words that almost everybody thinks they understand, but which is in fact a
bit more problematic than at first seems to be the case. A simple, straightforward definition is
that a dialect is any variety of English that is marked off from others by distinctive linguistic
features. Such a variety could be associated with a particular place or region or, rather more
surprisingly, it might also be associated with a certain social groupmale or female, young or
old, and so on.
But whether the focus is regional or social, there are two important matters that need to be
considered when defining dialect. We have to decide what the building blocks of a dialect
might be. And even before this, we could usefully confront the most common mistakes that
people make when referring to dialect.
A common mistake is to confuse a dialect with an accent, muddling up the difference between
words people use and the sounds they make, their pronunciation. If vocabulary and grammar are
being considered alongside pronunciation, then dialect is a reasonable term to use. But often,
when claiming to discuss a dialect, someone will concentrate just on pronunciations. If what is
being spoken about are sounds alonethat is, accentthen the area of language study is rather
pronunciation, or phonology.
It will be obvious from this that accent, or pronunciation, is a special element of a dialect that
needs separate attention to be properly understood. Arguably the best-known phonological
distinction in England is the so-called BATH vowel, the quality of the a sound differing
between north and south. Another, still more significant on the world stage, concerns the issue of
rhoticity, relating to whether or not written r is sounded when it follows a vowel. Whilst most
people in England and Wales do not pronounce the r (and are therefore non-rhotic), those in the
English West Country and parts of Lancashire do. In this they are joined by most Scots and Irish
speakers of English, and by the majority of North Americans. Although the English tend to
regard rhoticity as an exotic aberration, it is in fact numerically and geographically the dominant
form in world terms.

Where do dialects begin and end?

Another fundamental mistake is to think of the standard variety of a language as the language,
with dialects relegated to substandard status. By subscribing to the definition of dialect as a
distinct variety, we are agreeing that the standard variety itself is a dialect. Of course, that variety
is special in that, for a space of time at least, it is regarded as a model for purposes that include
language teaching and the general transmission of day-to-day information. But structurally there
is nothing inherently superior in the make-up of a standard dialect: non-standard dialects have
vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation which are equally detailed in structure, and indeed are
often imbued with pedigrees far older than those of the standard variety of the day.
A good case of pedigree is that of while, which in West Yorkshire usage today (and well into the
twentieth century in usage much further south) can mean until in such expressions as wait
while five oclock. It would be easy to dismiss this as quaint or even wrong, but its documented
history goes back at least to the fourteenth century, and it was doubtless in spoken use well
before then. At the level of social dialect, young men are often vilified, not least by their female
friends, for calling young women birds. That this is too easy a judgment becomes apparent when
one notes that burd has a long history, and is defined as a poetic word for woman, lady.
Place and upbringing
Undoubtedly the most accessible part of a language that we can study is its vocabulary, or lexis.
As we move from one part of a country to another we hear words that are entirely strange to us.
Or the words might be ones we understand but do not use, i.e. words that are in our passive
rather than active vocabulary. Depending on where a person comes from in England, they might
use the word gully or entry, ten-foot or ginnel, snicket or twitten, or some other word, to refer to
a narrow path between buildings. In parts of the Midlands and north of England people use
pikelet to describe what most people, and all the supermarket retailers, call a crumpet. People
might be criticized for getting it wrong with this usage, but it is not in fact a mistake. Rather,
its a good example of distinctively regional vocabulary, and most of us who have roots in one
particular area have special words, or use well-known words in a special way, that we only
discover are strange to others when we travel away from home.

But distinctive vocabulary does not only mark us out as local to particular places. No matter
where one comes from, one might eat pudding or dessert or sweet or afters, depending on a
whole range of social factors, such as family, education and career, that influence the way a
person talks. This brings us to another aspect of dialect that is sometimes forgotten. People with
different upbringings or social backgrounds or aspirations often speak differently from one
another, even though they live in the same community. So do people of different ages, with
young people perhaps using words or phrases or pronunciations which older people do not, and
which older people may disapprove of: minger used to describe a person judged to be
unattractive is an excellent example. On occasions men may also speak differently from women,
though this has less to do with their sex than with the roles that they play in society and the
expectations placed on them. Differences like these are most definitely what we can call dialect,
but it is social rather than regional dialect.
Dialects and grammar
Another area of language difference, besides phonology and lexis, has to do with the way in
which words can be changed to slightly alter their meaning, making them plural for example, and
the way in which they are linked together in longer units to create messages. This is all the area
of grammar.
To take the first of these elements of grammarthe alteration of wordsdo you refer to two or
more swimming creatures as fish, or fishes? Do you say I came to town yesterday, or I come
to town yesterday?; I was or I were?; Themselves or theirselves? In each example, the
differences are caused by our selecting respectively from various ways of making individual
words: the plural of nouns, the past tense of verbs, and reflexive pronouns. Many categories of
words undergo change like this, involving word endings or other alterations (or non-alterations)
of form. This feature of grammar, word-grammar, is morphology. The second aspect of
grammar, when words come together in various combinations so that they have collective
meaning, is syntax. When asking for something to be given to them, most English speakers say
give me it. But several million speakers of British English, largely but not only in the English
West Midlands, are more likely to say give it me, which does not sound at all strange to them
although it does sound strange, and even confusing, to many others. (There is, of course, the

possibility of saying give it to me, using an alternative grammatical construction which neatly
avoids this particular problem altogether.) Choices like this are not at all random, but depend a
lot on where someone lives, or at least on where they lived when they learnt the language.
Grammatical differences of syntax like this, and those of morphology, are all dialectal.
Studying dialects: early approaches
Because it is so immediately accessible and, more importantly, because it opens a window on the
past, it is not surprising that vocabulary played a most important part in the early study of dialect.
Undoubtedly the most famous work on dialect lexis is Joseph Wrights six-volume English
Dialect Dictionary (1898-1905) which remains an essential text for all students of the subject.
This pioneering work drew on the collections of the English Dialect Society, set up to gather its
data and disbanded in 1896 when it saw its task to having been completed. But the torch was
carried forward by innumerable independent enthusiasts and, most significantly amongst
scholars, by Frederick Cassidy and the Dictionary of American English (DARE) team in the
United States, and in England by Harold Orton and his Survey of English Dialects (SED).
In view of the scale of these efforts, it would be easy to see the lexicon as the prime focus for
dialectologists. However, the other areas of studyinto phonology and grammarhave not been
neglected, and in recent years interest in lexis has rather faded. Decades before Joseph Wright,
the English gentleman-scholar Alexander Ellis began to investigate regional pronunciation, no
mean feat prior to the invention of the International Phonetic Alphabet and sound recording.
Beginning his attempts at description in 1848, Ellis announced his intention to survey accents in
1871, shortly before his famous contemporary Georg Wenker began a German dialect-accent
survey designed to test the neogrammarian hypothesis that sound changes occur systematically
across communities. Elliss monumental findings were published in his On Early English
Pronunciation Part V, the title of which suggests the historical motivation of dialect studies at this
time. Focus on pronunciation also occupied Joseph Wright, as did concentration on grammatical
morphology (or accidence), both of which are discussed in the English Dialect Grammar
appended to the Dictionary in its final volume dated 1905. And the widening of the scope of
dialectology to encompass all areas of variation continued through the twentieth century: in the
USA under the watchful eye of the American Dialect Society and in the UK with the work of the

SED, and more recently the Survey of Anglo-Welsh Dialects and the Linguistic Survey of
Scotland.
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Social dialectology
The dominance of large-scale geographical dialect surveys was broken in the 1960s with the
advent of social dialectology. Although the focus remained on language change, linguists
interested in variation, led in large measure by the American William Labov, began to look at
differences of the moment (that is, synchronic variations) within communities, as displayed by
speakers with different social profiles. Now the aim was to go beyond the facts of difference over
time to reach some understanding of the causes of change. In addition to social sampling, the
main tool of such linguists is the variable. This is a linguistic feature that is expressed in two or
more ways (variants) and which, collected in bulk, allows their relative prominence to be
statistically analysed. In this kind of study phonology comes to the fore as pronunciation features
constantly recur in any collection of data. Just as importantly, distinctions in the pronunciation of
any variable (the BATH-vowel, for example) are quite minutely observable. By contrast, lexis
more open-ended in scope and harder to collect naturally than either phonology or grammar
was sidelined in the wake of social surveys.
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Dialect studies today
Until recently it seemed as though the two schools of dialectology, regional and the social,
were destined to remain apart, with the latter dominant. Each showed only grudging admiration
of the other, even though some leading practitioners of the social route are skilled historians of
English and admirers of traditionally-gained insights. Now, however, it is becoming apparent that
all areas of variation might usefully be studied. This is made possible by our ability to store and
process data electronically, permitting lexical items to be quantified and evaluated alongside
those of phonology and grammar. Joseph Wrights great Dialect Dictionary has been digitized at
the University of Innsbruck. And the BBCs Voices project of 2004-7 has, as part of its
contribution to dialectology, provided a very large lexical dataset, tagged for location, age, and

gender of speaker. There is thus every reason to suppose that dialect studies can continue to
progress with both strandsthe historically-oriented study of essentially regional variation, and
the socially-focused detailing of differences in speech within particular communitieswith each
contributing to a better understanding of speech differences, and what these tell us about how a
language changes over time.

http://studentsrepo.um.edu.my/3957/2/Full_chapters.pdf

Audio Clips of Dialects

Dictionary of American Regional English. http://dare.wisc.edu/.

The Language Samples Project. (2001). Dialects of the Northeast US. University of
Arizona. http://www.ic.arizona.edu/~lsp/Northeast/NewYorkEnglish/nyphon.html.
IDEA (International Dialects of English Archive) http://www.dialectsarchive.com/united-statesof-america
George Mason Universitys http://accent.gmu.edu/browse_language.php
function=find&language=english
PBS Do You Speak American? http://www.pbs.org/speak/seatosea/americanvarieties/

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