Dialect
A dialect refers to a specific form of a language spoken by a particular group of people within a region or community. It encompasses variations in vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation that distinguish it from other dialects of the same language. Dialects often reflect the cultural and social identity of the speakers and can contribute to linguistic diversity within a language.
8 Key excerpts on "Dialect"
eBook - ePubIdentity and Dialect Performance
A Study of Communities and Dialects
- Reem Bassiouney, Reem Bassiouney(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...It firstly describes what we generally know about Dialects. The distinction between ‘Dialect’ and ‘language’ is explored, as is the geographical and social distribution of Dialects and the differences between rural and urban Dialects. After that, ten ways to delineate Dialects are discussed, particularly the distinction between linguistic and perceived boundaries. Dialect Definition Various definitions of Dialect exist. The European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages (CoE, 1992) referred to ‘regional or minority languages’ as languages that ‘are traditionally used within a given territory of a State by nationals of that State who form a group numerically smaller than the rest of the State’s population; and [which are] different from the official language(s) of that State’ (1–2). This agrees with the general definition of Dialect. For Ethnologue (Lewis, Simons, & Fennig, 2014), Dialects are the result of the interplay between linguistic characteristics, shared history, and ethnic identity. Dictionary definitions often refer to geographical and linguistic features (deviation from the language norm) to define and distinguish Dialects, as is the case for Italian (Gabrielli, 2015) and, for instance, Albanian (Cipo, Çabej, Domi, Krajni, & Myderrizi, 2005). Whether a language variety should be referred to as ‘language’ or ‘Dialect’ is not always straightforward. For example, while Abruzzese is often considered to be a Dialect of Italian, from a historical perspective it stems from a different branch of the Romance family, making it a sister language of Italian rather than a Dialect. Cantonese is another language variety that is officially a Dialect, but its codification as well as its broad usage and functions would make it seem to be a language. The definition of ‘Dialect’ adhered to in this chapter is that a Dialect is a language variety that is in some way distinct from the standard language and that has developed relatively freely from prescriptive codification...
eBook - ePubLanguage, Culture, and Society
An Introduction to Linguistic Anthropology
- James Stanlaw, Nobuko Adachi, Zdenek Salzmann(Authors)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Almost all speakers make use of several idiolects, depending on the circumstances of communication. For example, when family members talk to each other, their speech habits typically differ from those any one of them would use in, say, an interview with a prospective employer. The concept of idiolect therefore refers to a very specific phenomenon—the speech variety used by a particular individual. DialectS Often, people who live in the same geographic area, have similar occupations, or have the same education or economic status speak relatively similar idiolects compared to those from other groups. These shared characteristics may entail similarities in vocabulary, pronunciation, or grammatical features. When all the idiolects of a group of speakers have enough in common to appear at least superficially alike, we say they belong to the same Dialect. The term Dialect, then, is an abstraction: It refers to a form of language or speech used by members of a regional, ethnic, or social group. Dialects that are mutually intelligible belong to the same language. All languages spoken by more than one small homogeneous community are found to consist of two or more Dialects. Mutual intelligibility, of course, can vary in degree. In the early 1950s, a number of men and women from eight reservations in New York and Ontario were tested in an experiment designed to determine which of their local Dialects were mutually intelligible and therefore Dialects of one language, and which were not and therefore could be classified as individual languages of the Iroquoian language family. Even though the investigators arrived at percentages of intelligibility between any two of the Iroquoian speech communities, the question of where the boundaries lay between intelligibility and unintelligibility remained unresolved...
eBook - ePub- Gerard Van Herk(Author)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
...Although Dialects usually include distinct accent features, Dialect and accent boundaries don’t have to match. For example, many people speak Standard English (in terms of grammar and lexicon), but with an accent reflecting their social or regional background – think of Martin Luther King, Jr., BBC regional newsreaders, or CBC editorialist Rex Murphy. The reverse situation (standard accent, non-standard grammatical features) is much less common, and often sounds strange to us. This was used to comedic effect a few years back in a popular online video, which featured a Standard English-accented Gilbert and Sullivan version of “Baby Got Back.” Many sociolinguists avoid the naming problem by using the value-neutral term variety for any subset of a language. They’ll talk about the standard variety, as well as regional, class, or ethnic varieties. Others reclaim the term Dialect, and speak of the standard Dialect, as well as regional Dialects, sociolects, or ethnolects. They’ll often say, “Everybody has a Dialect.” Another way that sociolinguists differ from linguists (and many normal people) is that we think of language as existing at the level of the group. Sure, we understand that each human learns language individually and stores it in an individual brain, but we stress that our language gets its meaning through interaction with others, as we negotiate understanding, decide how to present ourselves to others, and express belonging (or not-belonging!). In its strongest form, some sociolinguists lay out our theoretical viewpoint by saying that, linguistically, there’s no such thing as the individual – the way we talk comes from our membership in a group or groups...
eBook - ePubLanguage and Situation
Language Varieties and their Social Contexts
- Michael Gregory, Susanne Carroll(Authors)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Chapter two Dialect Cornwall: What mean’st by this? Kent: To go out of my Dialect, which you discommend so much. King Lear Those characteristic features of language which we relate to different users of a language are categorized as Dialectal. By this term we make no reference to the ‘quality’ of a variety; a Dialect is not necessarily less complete, less logical, less ‘language’ than a language. Ranking varieties in terms of aesthetic or psychological traits has not proved to be productive or enlightening, for the notion of linguistic ‘goodness’ has been shown to be nebulous. There seems to be no objective, culturally non-biased way of measuring it (Martinet, 1965). So it is not the custom in linguistics to use the term Dialect as a pejorative term for ‘lesser’ types of language (cf. Haugen, 1966); we will be using it to refer to the relationships of language habits with the speaker’s place on dimensions of individuality, time, place, social class and speech community. If the non-specialist public have a tendency to think of Dialect as language’s poor country cousin, they also tend to confuse Dialect and accent. Accent normally refers to articulator and acoustic features of language while Dialect refers to the totality of lexical, grammatical and phonological features. Dialect therefore incorporates accent but remains distinct from it. It can be thought of as the user’s macro-linguistic identity defining him in terms of birthplace, class, education and age. So while a person’s accent may initially be the most striking aspect of his language, that of which we are consciously and immediately aware, it comprises only a part of the variation possible. Temporal Dialects The categorization of language into temporal Dialects is a traditional, and seemingly natural, part of linguistic study. When we read Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, or a play by G. B...
eBook - ePub- Kirsten Malmkjaer, Kirsten Malmkjaer(Authors)
- 2009(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...D Dialectology Introduction Dialectology is the study of variation in the lexical and structural components of language. It is usually associated with the study of geographical variation, especially in rural areas, but there is much Dialectological work today which focuses principally on social variation and in urban areas (very often to the exclusion of more holistic spatial considerations; see Britain 2002, 2009b, 2010, in press a). Furthermore, it is usually associated with the consideration of non-standard varieties of language, though again, this is not an essential characteristic, with more and more work considering variation and change in standard varieties (see, for example, Harrington et al. 2000, 2006; Fabricius 2002, for English). And it is often associated with more traditional approaches to studying language variation, such as the study of, especially, lexical variation, among NORMs (Chambers and Trudgill 1998) – non-mobile old rural men – using single word elicitation techniques via questionnaires, but, with the ever-greater diversification of sociolinguistics as a discipline, especially in directions away from areas concerned with core linguistic structure, ‘Dialectology’ is undergoing somewhat of a revival as a term to denote broadly variationist approaches to the study of language with or without an overt focus on social issues. This article provides an overview of the history and motivations of Dialectology; an overview of the evolving methodologies associated with the discipline; a consideration of some of the main spatial dimensions in the subject; and a look at the main research agendas that are occupying Dialectologists today. The history of Dialectology Chambers and Trudgill (1998: 13–15) argue that until the mid- to late nineteenth century there was very little evidence of a coherent and systematic endeavour to formally study Dialects...
- David Hornsby(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Teach Yourself(Publisher)
...Exploring variation in language Given that all living languages are subject to variation, it is surprising that the subject was for so long ignored or downplayed by mainstream linguistics. In idealizing the ‘homogeneous speech-community’ for his own purposes, Chomsky (1965: 3), for example, was merely maintaining the prevailing assumption that variation was of little theoretical interest. Studying the relationship between language and society remained something of a taboo until the 1960s, when researchers in the emergent discipline of variationist sociolinguistics argued that no satisfactory account of linguistic change could be achieved without a proper understanding of how variation was structured. Our focus in this chapter is on variation within a language, or microvariation, and we look first at the approach of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Dialectologists. Their methodology and assumptions differed greatly from that of modern-day sociolinguists, whose work we examine later in the chapter. Armed with modern recording equipment and applying sociological concepts and methodology, sociolinguists have shown the close relationship between language and a range of extralinguistic or social factors. Dialectology Dialectology, the study of geographical differences within the same language, has a long tradition that predates modern linguistics. In the nineteenth century in particular, data from the local and regional Dialects of Europe were collected with a view to establishing language families and identifying the branches of family trees (sometimes, it must be said, from nationalistic rather than purely scientific motives). In the absence of reliable recording equipment, obtaining information about how language varied from one place to another was difficult, and researchers were often reliant on impressionistic data collated from non-specialists...
eBook - ePubSpeech Sound Disorders in Children
Articulation & Phonological Disorders
- John E Bernthal, Nicholas W Bankson, Peter Flipsen(Authors)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Brookes Publishing(Publisher)
...Information on variations in speech patterns seen within and across particular speech communities is necessary to conduct least-biased phonological assessments that reflect the characteristics of the child’s speech community. For example, if members of a child’s speech community consist of individuals who are bilingual (e.g., speak Spanish and English) and the variety of English spoken in the child’s community is African American English (AAE), then the child will most likely speak a variety of English that has been influenced by both AAE and Spanish. Assessment of such a child must take into account the influence that AAE and Spanish might have on the child’s phonological patterns. Sensitivity to and knowledge of variation are also required to adequately serve those individuals who elect to modify the language variety that they speak. The following sections examine phonological variation within and across languages and show how this information can be used to conduct least-biased assessments and plan for intervention. Dialect Dialects are mutually intelligible forms of a language associated with a particular region, social class, or ethnic group. GAE, Southern White Standard, Appalachian English, Caribbean English, AAE, Eastern American English, and Spanish-influenced English are just some of the Dialects spoken in the United States. No Dialect of any language is superior to any other because all thoughts can be expressed using any Dialect of any language. This is not to say that all varieties of a language carry the same prestige...
eBook - ePubExperimental Psycholinguistics (PLE: Psycholinguistics)
An Introduction
- Sam Glucksberg, Joseph H. Danks(Authors)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Psychology Press(Publisher)
...6 Dialects and Schooling Individual and Group Differences When we compare people’s speech, we often find differences in vocabulary, in pronunciation, and in “grammar,” as well as differences in style and communicative clarity. Do these differences in linguistic performance reflect differences in linguistic competence? Differences in linguistic competence, that is, a speaker’s “knowledge” of the grammatical rules of a language, could come about in two ways. First, people could differ in terms of how well they had acquired the “correct” rules of their language. Second, people could differ with respect to the particular rules their particular languages have. But, as we noted in Chapter 5, we have not yet been able to specify fully the linguistic competence of young children, let alone that of adults. Our best guess, given what we know about language, is that differences among people in their levels of linguistic competence are either trivial or nonexistent. This conclusion applies to differences among people who speak the same language, as well as to differences among people who speak different languages. Hundreds of languages have been studied, yet no one has found a “primitive” language or a language that could be regarded as less complex or less effective than any other. Languages, of course, do differ from one another. Different languages accomplish the same communicative objectives in quite different ways. For example, Russian has no articles. If we translate the English sentence (1a) The book is on the table. into Russian, it would be, in literal form (1b) Book on table. In French and in German the gender of a noun is always specified. La plûme (feminine) is the pen (gender urspecified); le livre (masculine) is the book (gender unspecified). We cannot refer to any object in French or German without specifying gender. It is an obligatory syntactic marking...
