Dialects
A language is a dialet that bas an army anda nary. MAX WEINREICH
All speakers of English can talk to each other and pretty much
understand each other. Yet, no two of us speak exactly alike. Some
differences are the result of age, sex, social situation, and where
and when the language was learned. These differences
reflected in word choices, the pronunciation of words, and
grammatical rules.
The language of an individual speaker with its unique
characteristics is referred to as the speaker's idiolect. English
may then be said to consist of anywhere from 450 million to
850 million idiolects, or the number of speakers of English
(which seems to be growing every day and is difficult to
estimate).
Like individuals, different groups of people who speak the same
language speak it differently. Bostonians, New Yorkers, Texans,
blacks in Chicago, whites in Denver, and Hispanics in
Albuquerque all exhibit variation in the way they speak English.
When there are systematic differences in the way groups speak
a language, we say that each group speaks a dialect of that
language.
Dialects are mutnally intelligible forms of a language that differ in
systematic nways. Erery speaker, whether rich or poor, regardless
of region or racial origin, speaks at least one dialect, just as
each individual speaks an idiolect. A dialect is not an
inferior or degraded form ofa language, and logically could
not be so because a language is a collection of dialects.
It is not always easy to decide whether the differences
between two speech communities reflect two dialects
or two languages. Sometimes this rule-of thumb
definition is used: When dialects become mutually
unintelligiblewhen the speakers of one dialect group
can no longer understand the speakers of another
dialect groupthese dialects become different
languages.
However, this rule of thumb does not always match with how
languages are officially recognized, which is determined by
political and social considerations. For example, Danes
speaking Danish and Norwegians speaking Norwegian and
Swedes speaking Swedish can converse with each other.
Nevertheless, Danish and Norwegian and Swedish are
considered separate languages because they are spoken in
separate countries in addition to the regular differences in
their grammars.
Similarly, Hindi and Urdu are mutually intelligible "languages"
spoken in Pakistan and India, although the differences
between them are not much greater than those between the
English spoken in America and the English spoken in Australia.
The fact that they use different writing systems contributes to
the impression of utterly different languages.
The recent history of Serbo-Croatian, the language of most of
the former nation of Yugoslavia, illustrates the factors that
can determine whether a particular way of speaking is
considered to be a dialect or a language. From a linguistic
point of view, Serbo-Croatian is a single Slavic language: Even
though Croats use Roman script (as do English speakers)
while Serbs use Cyrillic script (as do Russian speakers), in
speech the varieties are mutually intelligible, differing slightly
in vocabulary just as the British and American English
dialects do.
But froma sociopolitical point of view, following the breakup
of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, the Serbo-Croatian language
"broke up" as well. After years of conflict, the two noW-
independent nations declare that they speak not just
different dialects but different languages.
On the other hand, linguistically distinct languages in China,
such as Mandarin and Cantonese, although mutually
unintelligible when spoken, are nevertheless referred to as
dialects of Chinese in the media and elsewhere because
they have a common writing system that can be read by all
speakers (because it's ideographicsee chapter 12), and
because they are spoken in a single country.
It is also not easy to draw a distinction between dialects and
languages on strictly linguistic grounds. Dialects and languages
reflect the underlying grammars and lexicons of their speakers. It
would be completely arbitrary to say, for example, that grammars
that differ from one another by, say, twenty rules represent
different languages whereas grammars that differ by fewer than
twenty rules are dialects. Why not ten rules or thirty rules? In
reality, what one finds is that there is no sudden major break
between dialects. Rather, dialects merge into each other, forming
a dialect continuum.
Imagine, for example, a traveller journeying from Vienna to
Amsterdam by bicycle. She would notice small changes in
the German spoken as she bicycled from village to village,
and the people in adjacent villages would have no trouble
communicating with one another. Yet by the time our traveller
reached Dutch-speaking Amsterdam, she would realize that
the accumulated differences made the German of Vienna
and the Dutch of Amsterdam nearly mutually unintelligible.
Because neither mutual intelligibility, nor degree of
grammatical difference, nor the existence of politicalor social
boundaries is decisive, it is not possible to precisely define the
difference between a language and a dialect. We shall,
however, use the rule-of-thumb definition and refer to dialects
of one language as mutually intelligible linguistic systems, with
systematic differences among them.
Languages change continually but these changes occur
gradually. They may originate in one geographic region or in
one social group and spread slowly to others, and often over
the life spans of several generations of speakers. Dialect
diversity develops when the changes that occur in one region
or group do not spread. When speakers are in regular contact
with one another, linguistic properties spread and are
acquired by children.
However, when some communication barrier separates
groups of speakersbe it a physical barrier such as an
ocean or a mountain range, or social barriers of a political,
racial, class, educational, or religious kindinguistic
changes do not spread so readily, and the differences
between groups are reinforced and grow in number.
Dialect levelling is movement toward greater uniformity and
less variation among dialects. Though one might expect dialect
levelling to occur as a result of the ease of travel and mass
media, this is not generally the case. Dialect variation in the
United Kingdom is maintained although a few major dialects
are spoken on national radio and television. There may actually
be an increase in dialects in urban areas, where different
groups attempt to maintain their distinctness and group
identity.
Regional Dialects
The educated Sontherner bas no use for an r exvept at the beginning of a nword.
MARK TWAIN, Life on the Mississippi, 1883
When various linguistic differences accumulate in a particular
geographic region (e.g., the city of Boston or the southern area of
the United States), the language spoken has its own character.
Each version of the language is referred to as a regional dialect.
The hypothetical journey from Vienna to Amsterdam discussed
previously crossed regional dialects. In the United States, most
dialectal differences are based on geographic region.
The origins of many regional dialects of American English can
be traced to the people who settled in North America in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Because they came
from different parts of England, these early settlers already
spoke different dialects of English, and these differences were
carried to the original thirteen American colonies.
By the time of the American Revolution, there were three major
dialect regions in the British colonies: the Northern dialect
spoken in New England and around the Hudson River, the
Midland dialect spoken in Pennsylvania, and the Southern
dialect. These dialects differed from one another and from the
English spoken in England in systematic ways. Some of the
changes that occurred in British English spread to the colonies;
others did not.
How dialects develop is illustrated by the pronunciation of
words with an rin different parts of United States. As early as
the eighteenth century, the British in southern England were
dropping their r's before consonants and at the ends of words.
Words such as far m, far ther, and fatbe rwere pronounced as
[fa.m], [fa: ôe], and [fa.ðə], respectively. By the end of the
eighteenth century, rdrop was a general rule among many of
the early settlers in New England and the southern Atlantic
seaboard. The r-less dialect still spoken today in Boston, New
York, and Savannah maintains this characteristic.
Later settlers, however, came from northern England, where
the r had been retained; as the frontier moved westward, so
did the r. Pioneers from all three dialect areas spread
westward. The mingling of their dialects leveled many of their
dialect differences, which is why the English used in large
sections of the Midwest and the West is similar.
Regional phonological or phonetic distinctions are often
referred to as different accents. A person is said to have a
Boston or Brooklyn or Midwestern accent, a Southern drawl,
an Irish brogue, and so on. Thus, accent refers to the
characteristics of speech that convey information about the
speaker's dialect, which may reveal in what country or in what
part of the country the speaker grew up, or to which
sociolinguistic group the speaker belongs-a British accent/
an Australian accent/an American accent.
The term accent is also used to refer to the speech of non-
native speakers, who have learned a language as a second
language. For example, a native French speaker's English is
described as having a French accent. In this sense, accent
refers to phonological differences caused by one's native
language. Unlike regional dialect accents, such foreign
accents do not reflect differences in the speech of
community where the language was learned.
Phonological Differences
I bave noticed in traveling about the conntry a good many diflerences in the
pronunciation of common words. ... Now what I vant to know is whether there is
any right or wrong about this matter. ... If one way is rigbi, mhy don't we all
prononnce that way and conmpel the otber fellow to do the same? If there isn't any right
or wrong, wly do some persons make so much fuss abont it?
LETTER QUOTED IN "THE STANDARD AMERICAN," in J. V.
Williamson and V. M. Burke, eds., A Various Language, 1971
(An anthology of various American dialects)
A comparison of the r-drop and other dialects illustrates the
many phonological differences among dialects of American
English. These variations created difficulties for us in writing
chapter5 (phonetics), where we wished to illustrate the
different sounds of English by using key words in which the
sounds occur. As mentioned, some people pronounce canght
[ko:t] with the vowel [o:] and cot [ka:t] with [a:], whereas others
pronounce them both [ka:t].
Some pronounce Mary, merry, and marry the same; others
pronounce the three words differently as [meiri], [meri], and
[mæri]; and still others pronounce just two of them the same.
In the south and northeast pyjamas is pronounced [pəa:məz]
with tense [a] but as [pezêməz] with a lax [æ] in the Midlands.
Many speakers of American English pronounce pin and pen
identically, whereas others pronounce the first [pin] and the
second [pēn].
The pronunciation of British English (or many dialects of it)
differs in systematic ways from pronunciations in many
dialects of American English. In a survey of hundreds of
American and British speakers conducted via the Internet, 48
percent of the Americans pronounced the midconsonants in
luxury as voiceless [Akſəri], whereas 96 percent of the British
pronounced them as voiced [lAg3eri].
Sixty-four percent of the Americans pronounced the first
vowel in data as [er] and 35 percent as [æ], as opposed to 92
percent of the British pronouncing it with an [er] and only 2
percent with [æ]. The most consistent difference occurred in
the placement of primary stress, with most Americans putting
stress on the first syllable and most British on the second or
third in polysyllabic words like cigarette, applicable,
formidable, and laboratory.
British English: ciga'rette, a'pplicable, formidable, and
la'boratory
The United Kingdom also has many regional dialects. The
British vowels described in the phonetics chapter are used by
speakers of the dialect called RP for "received pronunciation"
because it is "received" (accepted) in the court of the
monarch. In this dialect, b is pronounced at the beginning of
both bead and berb, whereas in most American English dialects
is not pronounced in herb. In some British English dialects the
bis regularly dropped from most words in which it is
pronounced in American, such as house, pronounced [aus],
and bera, pronounced [iro].
As is true of the origin of certain American dialects, many of
the regional dialects of British English, such as the West
Country dialect, the East Anglia dialect, and the Yorkshire
dialect, are not deviations from the "standard" dialect spoken
in London, but are direct descendants of earlier varieties that
existed alongside London English as far back as the eleventh
century. (Watch old Harry Potter movies to hear some of what
we've been discussing vis-à-vis British English.)
Lexical differences
Regional dialects may differ in the words people use for the
same object, as well as in phonology. Hans Kurath, an eminent
dialectologist, in his paper "What Do You Call It?" asked: Do
you call it a pail or a bucket? Do you draw water from a faucet or
from a spigor? Do you pull down the blinds, the shades, or the
curtains when it gets dark? Do you wheel the baby, or do you ride
it or roll it? In a baby carriage, a buggy, a coach, or a cab?
People take a lift to the first floor (second floor) in England,
but an elevator in the United States; they fill up with petrol
(not gas) in London; in Britain a public school is 'private' (you
have to pay), and if a student showed up there wearing pants
('underpants') instead of trousers (ʻpants'), he would be sent
home to get dressed.
If you ask for a tonic in Boston, you will get a drink called soda
or sodapop in Los Angeles; ice cream cones can be covered in
jimmies in Boston and sprinkles in New York; and a freeway in
Los Angeles is a thruway in New York, a parkway in New Jersey,
a motorway in England, and an expressway or turnpike in other
dialect areas.
Syntactic Differences
Dialects can also be distinguished by systematic syntactic differences.
In most American dialects, sentences may be conjoined as follows:
1. Jobn will eat and Mary will eat. → Jobu and Mary will eat.
In the Ozark dialect of southern Missouri, the following conjoining is
also possible:
2. Jobn will eat and Mary will eal. → Jobn will eat and Mary.
In (1) the VP will eat in the first conjunct is deleted, while in (2) the VP in
the second conjunct is deleted. Most dialects of English allow deletion
of only the first conjunct and in those dialects Jobn will eat and Mary is
ungrammatical. The Ozark dialect differs in allowing the second VP to
delete.
Speakers of some American dialects say Have them come earhy!
where others would say Have them to come early! Many
speakers of the latter dialect also exhibit double modal
auxiliary verbs, so that expressions like He might could do it
or You might shouldgo home are grammatical. Most dialects of
English may contain no more than one modal.
Some of the dialects that permit double modals (e.g.,
Appalachian English) also exhibit double objects (e.g., I canght
me a fisb); and a-prefixing with progressives (He came a-TUnnin).
Several distinguishing syntactic characteristics contribute to
a bundle of syntactic isoglosses that separate these regional
dialects.
In some American English dialects, the pronoun I occurs when mewould be
used in other dialects. This difference is a syntactically conditioned
morphological difference.
Dialect 1
belmreen you and I
Won't be let yon and I swim?
*Won't he let I swimn?
Dialect 2
belnreen yon and me
Won't be let yon and me swim?
The use of I in these structures is only permitted in a conjoined NP, as the
starred (ungrammatical) sentence shows. Won't be let me swim?, however, is
grammatical in both dialects. Dialect 1 is growing, and these forms are
becoming Standard English, spoken by TV announcers, political leaders, and
university professors, although language purists still frown on this usage.
In British English the pronoun i in the sentence I could bae done
it can be deleted. British speakers say I conld have done, which is
not in accordance with the syntactic rules of American
English. American English, however, permits the deletion of
done it, and Americans say I could have, which does not accord
with the British syntactic rules.
About one third of the students reading this textbook will not
accept the sentence Jobn promised Mary to leare as grammatical
while two thirds will, with the meaning 'Jobn promised Mary tbat be,
Jobn, would leave. 'Despite such differences, we are still able to
understand speakers of other English dialects. Although
regional dialects differ in pronunciation, vocabulary, and
syntactic rules, the differences are minor when compared
with the totality of the grammar. Dialects typically share most
rules and vocabulary, which explains why the dialects
language are mutually intelligible.
Social Dialects
Why do these people speak in such a high pitch? Why do their jans barhy open
when they lalk? Why do the ends of their sentences go up as if they're asking a
question? Odd vowels, clipped words, and abvays a biss on the letter s. . . no
wonder it's impossible not to nmimic them.
SUZANNE COLLINS, The Hunger Games, 2008
In many respects, social boundaries and class differences are
as confining as the physical barriers that often define regional
dialects. It is therefore not surprising that different dialects of
a language evolve within social groups. The social boundaries
that give rise to dialect variation are numerous. They may be
based on socioeconomic status, religious, ethnic, and racial
differences, country of origin, and even gender. Middle-class
American and British speakers are often distinguishable from
working-class speakers.
In Baghdad the Christian, Muslim, and Jewish groups all speak
different varieties of Arabic; in India people often use different
dialects of a standard regional language such as Hindi,
Gujarati, or Bengali depending on the social caste they belong
to; in America, many speakers of African descent speak a
different dialect than those of European, Asian, or Hispanic
descent; and, as we shall see, women and men each have
their own distinguishing speech characteristics.
Dialect differences that seem to come about because of social
factors are called social dialects, as opposed to regional
dialects, which are developed by geographical factors.
However, there are regional aspects to social dialects and,
clearly, social aspects to regional dialects, so the distinction is
not entirely cut and dried. Even though every language isa
composite of dialects, many people talk and think about a
language as if it were a well-defined fixed system with various
dialects diverging from this norm.
Language Purists
A noman who utters such depressing and disgusting sounds has no right to
be anynbere- no right to live. Remember that you are a buman being with
sonl and the divine gift of articnlate spech: that your native language is
the language of Shakespear and Milton and the Bible; and don't sit there
crOoning like a bilions pPigeon.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW, Pygmalion, 1912
Prescriptive grammarians, or language purists, usually
consider the dialect used by political leaders and national
newscasters as the correct form of the language. This is the
dialect taught in "English" or "grammar" classes in school,
and it is closer to the written form of the language than many
other dialects, which also lends it an air of superiority.
Otto Jespersen, the great Danish linguist, ridiculed the view
that a particular dialect is better than any other when he
wrote: "We set up as the best language that which is found in
the best writers, and count as the best writers those that best
write the language. We are therefore no further advanced than
before."
The dominant, or prestige, dialect is often called the
standard dialect. Standard American English (SAE) is a
dialect of English that many Americans nearly speak;
divergences from this “norm" are labelled “Philadelphia
dialect," "Chicago dialect," "African American English," an
SO on.
SAE is an idealization. Nobody speaks this dialect; and if
somebody did, we would not know it, because SAE is not
defined precisely (like most dialects, none of which are
easy to clarify). Teachers and linguists held a conference in
the 1990s that attempted to come up with a precise
definition of SAE. This meeting did not succeed in
satisfying everyone's view of SAE.
SAE was once represented by the language used by national
news broadcasters, but today many of them speak a regional
dialect or a style of English that is not universally accepted
as “standard." For example, the British Broadcasting
Corporation (BBC) once used mostly speakers of RP English,
but today speakers of Irish, Welsh, Scottish, and other
regional dialects of English are commonly heard on BBC
programs. The BBC describes its English as "the speech of
educated professionals."
SAE was once represented by the language used by national
news broadcasters, but today many of them speak a regional
dialect or a style of English that is not universally accepted
as "standard." For example, the British Broadcasting
Corporation (BBC) once used mostly speakers of RP English,
but today speakers of Irish, Welsh, Scottish, and other
regional dialects of English are commonly heard on BBC
programs. The BBC describes its English as "the speech of
educated professionals."
A standard dialect (or prestige dialect) of a particular language
may have social functions. Its use in a group may bind people
together or provide a common written form for multidialectal
speakers. If it is the dialect of the wealthy, influential, and
powerful members of society, this may have important
implications for the entire society. All speakers who aspire to
become successful may be required to speak that dialect
even if it isn't their own.
In 1954 the British scholar Alan Ross published Linguistic
Class-Indicators in Present-Day English, in which he
compared the speech habits of the English upper class,
whom he labelled "U," with the speech habits of "non-U"
speakers. Ross concluded that although the upper class had
words and pronunciations peculiar to it, the main
characteristic of U speech is the avoidance of non-U speech;
and the main characteristic of non-U speech is, ironically, the
effort to sound U.
"They've a lovely home," for example, is pure non-U,
because it is an attempt to be refined. Non-U speakers say
"wealthy" and "ever so";U speakers say"rich" and "very."
Non-U speakers "recall"; U-speakers simply "remember."
Non-U speech habits often include hypercorrections,
deviations from the norm thongbt to be "proper English," such
as pronouncing often with a [t], or saying belween yon and I, while
U speakers, who are generally more secure about their
dialect, say [ofãn] and between yon and me. Ironically, in some
cases non-U speech is so pervasive it eventually becomes
part of the prestige dialect, as we are seeing today with often
and between you and I/ me.
No dialect, however, is more expressive, less corrupt, more
logical, more complex, or more regular than any other dialect
or language. They are simply different. More precisely,
dialects reflect a different set of rules or lexical items
represented in the minds of their speakers. Any judgments,
therefore, as to the superiority or inferiority of a particular
dialect or language are social judgments, which have no
linguistic or scientific basis.
To illustrate the arbitrariness of "standard usage," consider
the English rdrop rule discussed earlier. Britain's
prestigious RP accent omits the rin words such as car, far,
and barn. Thus an rless pronunciation is thought to be
better than the less prestigious rural dialects that maintain
the r.
However, r-drop in the northeast United States is generally
considered substandard, and the more prestigious dialects
preserve the r, though this was not true in the past whenr-
drop was considered more prestigious. This shows that there
is nothing inherently better or worse about one pronunciation
over another, but simply that one variant is perceived as
better or worse depending on a variety of social factors.
Banned Languages
A Wisconsin seventh-grader was suspended from a school's
basketball team for speaking a Native American language.
[The school] is 60 percent Native American, yet when a
teacher heard [a female student], 12, telling a friend how to
say "l love you" in the Menominee tongue, the teacher angrily
objected, saying, "how dol know you're not saying something
bad?"
THE WEEK, 2/24/12, P. 6