Join us for our General Meeting at 7 pm on Wednesday April 6th in CAS B20, where we’ll be doing Officer Selection for the coming academic year. After the meeting, we’ll have our monthly discussion group. This month’s theme is “Dialects of English.” RSVP on Facebook
Mar 29
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The term dialect is used in two distinct ways, even by linguists. One usage refers to a variety of a language that is a characteristic of a particular group of the language’s speakers. The term is applied most often to regional speech patterns, but a dialect may also be defined by other factors, such as social class.
A dialect that is associated with a particular social class can be termed a sociolect; a regional dialect may be termed a regiolect or topolect. The other usage refers to a language socially subordinate to a regional or national standard language, often historically cognate to the standard, but not a variety of it or in any other sense derived from it.
This more precise usage enables distinguishing between varieties of a language, such as the French spoken in Nice, France, and local languages distinct from the superordinate language, e.g. Nissart, the traditional native Romance language of Nice, known in French as Niçard.
A dialect is distinguished by its vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation (phonology, including prosody). Where a distinction can be made only in terms of pronunciation, the term accent is appropriate, not dialect. Other speech varieties include: standard languages, which are standardized for public performance (for example, a written standard); jargons, which are characterized by differences in lexicon (vocabulary); slang; patois; pidgins or argots.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dialects_of_the_English_language
http://www.neutralaccent.com/dialect.php