Language vs Dialect
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Regional & social dialects
A dialect (also sometimes known as a social register) is speech, pronunciation, and vocabulary used to communicate in the language with a specific social class or group within the greater society. For example, Standard English is the national language of Singapore and Jamaica, which is used by speakers as the highest social register of the language among elite circles or in formal circumstances, but the English spoken in both countries has lower registers than span from Standard English all the way to the bottom register, which is a creole often incomprehensible by native English speakers from elsewhere in the world. A regional dialect on the other hand is one that is strictly defined by geography, and as such, is used among all people of all social classes/groups within that geography. |
Standard vs non-standard English
Accent, dialect, RP (received pronunciation ... or talking posh) & speech community
An accent refers to the Phonology and Phonetics of speech, that is, the sounds and sound patterns, whereas a dialect refers to the entire linguistic system. For example, a Southern US accent might refer to the pronunciation of the vowels (e.g. fire vs fahr) or stress shift (e.g. 'po.lice versus po.'lice). When discussion a Southern UD dialect, you would not only include the accent, but also things like double modals (e.g., I might could go to the store later) or anything else about the language. A dialect also involves some notion of a speech community. For example, if someone from Cockney London were to move to Dallas and start speaking English, we'd refer to that speech as foreign accented speech. That is not, alone, a dialect of English. However, as an entire speech community develops, this foreign-accentedness can be a full-fledged dialect. This idea of a speech community also encompasses many specific aspects of a dialect, including native-speakers and social signaling (many people are bi-dialectal and signal certain social concepts in the dialect they chose to use). |
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