Languages & Linguistics
Regional Dialects
Regional dialects refer to variations in language that occur within a specific geographic area. These variations can include differences in pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar. Regional dialects are influenced by factors such as historical settlement patterns, cultural influences, and isolation from other regions. They contribute to the rich diversity of language and can be a source of regional identity and pride.
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10 Key excerpts on "Regional Dialects"
eBook - PDF- Ronald Wardhaugh, Janet M. Fuller(Authors)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
As you travel throughout a wide geographical area in which a language is spoken, and particularly if that language has been spoken in that area for many hundreds of years, you are almost certain to notice differences in pronuncia- tion, in the choices and forms of words, and in syntax. There may even be a very local character to the language which you notice as you move from one location to another. Such distinctive varieties are usually called Regional Dialects of the language. Dialect geography When a language is recognized as being spoken in different varieties, the issue becomes one of deciding how many varieties and how to classify each variety. Dialect geography is the term used to describe attempts made to map the distributions of various linguistic fea- tures so as to show their geographical provenance. For example, in seeking to determine features of the dialects of English and to show their distributions, dialect geographers try to find answers to questions such as the following. Is this an r-pronouncing area of English, as in words like car and cart, or is it not? What past tense form of drink do speakers prefer? What names do people give to particular objects in the environment, for example, elevator or lift, carousel or roundabout? As discussed in the last chapter, we call such features vari- ables, as there are variable (i.e., varied and changing) ways of realizing them (the variants we discussed in chapter 1). For example, the past tense of drink might be drank or drunk, or the words for the fuel you put in an automobile could be petrol or gas. Sometimes maps are drawn to show actual boundaries around such variables, bounda- ries called isoglosses, so as to distinguish an area in which a certain feature is found from areas in which it is absent. When several such isoglosses coincide, the result is sometimes Languages, Dialects, and Varieties 35 called a dialect boundary.
eBook - PDFSpace in Language and Linguistics
Geographical, Interactional, and Cognitive Perspectives
- Peter Auer, Martin Hilpert, Anja Stukenbrock, Benedikt Szmrecsanyi, Peter Auer, Martin Hilpert, Anja Stukenbrock, Benedikt Szmrecsanyi(Authors)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter(Publisher)
The term appears in text-books: Ronald Wardhaugh’s An Introduction to Sociolinguistics (2006) and Janet Holmes’ Introduction to Sociolinguistics (2008) both have sections or chapters on “Regional Dialects” as well as “social dialects”. And it appears in research ar- Ideology and discourse in the enregisterment of regional variation 111 ticles. A search for dialect in the journal Language in Society , founded well after the heyday of the large-scale regional dialectology projects, yields 820 hits, at least 16 of which are articles with dialect in the title. Some of these are very recent. Edinburgh University Press published a series of books about place-defined ways of speaking called “Dialects of English”; the series’ first volume appeared in 2007. The term dialect appears 18 times in the program for the 2009 New Ways of Analyzing Variation conference, the North American gathering of sociolinguists which was founded specifically to move the field beyond the kind of theoretically naïve dialectology that was seen as the old way of analyzing variation. Even though sociolinguists are in theory more interested in patterns of variation and change within commu-nities than in differences between them, and despite our well-founded skep-ticism about the ontological status of language varieties and dialects (not to mention languages), our results are often used to make claims about areal varieties like the Ocracoke brogue or Southern speech. In doing this, we im-plicitly adopt a different view of language and of the reasons for variation, a view much more like that of laypeople. 3. Regional varieties are social constructs Although linguistic variation may be audible to someone listening for it, a variety is not. What linguists and laypeople alike encounter in lived experi-ence are particular speakers, writers, or signers, saying particular things in particular ways.
eBook - PDFLanguage in Education
Social Implications
- Rita Elaine Silver, Soe Marlar Lwin(Authors)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Bloomsbury Academic(Publisher)
Others use it to refer only to regional differences in accent, grammar or vocabulary. Others use it to refer only to regional varieties that have differences in grammar and vocabulary as well as in accent. Some use dialect to mean ‘non-standard dialect’. You need to be aware of the differences in definition when reading about dialects. Some of the oldest surviving written texts comment on differences in the way people from one region speak compared to people from other regions. Philosophers and creative writers have long had an interest in identifying and explaining the ways in which people from different regions speak the same language. Two thousand years ago, the Chinese philosopher Yang Xiong compiled a substantial list of words that varied from one area of China to another: He can be regarded as the world’s first dialectologist , as he was the first person (to the best of our knowledge) who did an organized study of regional variation within a language. Dialectologists concentrate on regional variation. During the period 1870– 1960, dialectology developed into its modern form. There were several large-scale dialectological surveys in many places, including many parts of Europe, China and India. Traditional dialectology seeks out speakers whose speech is likely to be the most local. The large-scale study in England, the Survey of English Dialects, has been published in a number of forms, including as raw data, as an atlas (Orton et al., 1978), as a dictionary and, most recently, as part of the Accents and Dialects website hosted by the British Library. Often, researchers interview older rural men (less often women) who have always worked in agriculture in their home region, who have travelled little and who have not been educated to a high level. The questionnaire, such as the one used by the Survey of English Dialects, typically asks the respondents what words they use for particular concepts that are known to show variation in that particular language.
eBook - PDF- William Bright(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
DIALECT STUDIES, REGIONAL AND SOCIAL FREDERIC G. CASSIDY PRELIMINARY The field of dialectology, in the United States or anywhere else, is a peculiar one at best. The fact that a dialect does not differ in kind from a language, that languages can sometimes be seen as dialects, makes definition difficult and even arbitrary. 1 A dialect is always a subtype, but how different it may or must be from other subtypes (except idiolects), or in what respects, has no established limits. To recognize the existence of a dialect, its differences must be emphasized; hence a dialect is seldom seen in and as itself. Strictly speaking, no dialect can be fully described unless its fellow dialects are described too, setting out their common elements and those in which they differ. In practice this has seldom been done; usually (and for good practical reasons) the variant forms are thrown into contrast with the 'standard' or officially accepted dialect. This emphasis on variance from the 'right' form of the language is responsible for making dialect seem queer or quaint to the public and for leading even some scholars to treat it unsystematically. Before the rise of scientific language study, interest in dialect was chiefly anti-quarian. But the attempt in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to recover lost stages of languages and to work out their interrelationships brought wider scholarly attention to dialects at last. Though the fact is now nearly forgotten, the proposal and elaboration of the Indo-European hypothesis was one of the most exciting intellectual developments of the century. Not surprisingly, language models of the time were Darwinian: languages are the genera, dialects the species; languages form trees of descent, like living creatures, and so on. Dialects were thought of as individually distinct units, anchored areally and limited to the lower strata of society.
eBook - ePubAmerican English
Dialects and Variation
- Walt Wolfram, Natalie Schilling(Authors)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
The focus on cartographic plotting as opposed to linguistic patterning has led some to the conclusion that regional dialect study is really a branch of geography rather than a kind of linguistic inquiry. Certainly, studies of regional language variation may be informed by models and methods from the fields of cultural and historical geography, but there is no inherent reason why the study of regional variation in language cannot mesh models from geography with the rigorous study of linguistic patterning. In fact, linguists have historically turned to regional dialect diversity in search of answers to fundamental questions about language patterning and language change. By the same token, the study of Regional Dialects benefits from the precise structural description of forms provided by linguistic study. A number of recent studies of language variation have neatly brought together models from these distinct vantage points in insightful and informative ways. In fact, the importance of this integrated view has become so well recognized in recent years that it has led to the founding of an entire journal dedicated to current approaches to linguistically informed dialect geography, The Journal of Linguistic Geography, edited by William Labov and Dennis Preston. In this chapter, we consider various methodologies for studying regional variation, as well as models that apply to the spread of linguistic forms over time and space. 5.1 Eliciting Regional Dialect Forms The traditional approach to charting regional dialect patterns starts with the elicitation of dialect forms from speakers representing communities within broad geographical areas
eBook - PDFRoots
Linguistics in Search of its Evidential Base
- Sam Featherston, Wolfgang Sternefeld, Sam Featherston, Wolfgang Sternefeld(Authors)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
Geographic distributions of linguistic variation reflect dynamics of differentiation John Nerbonne and Wilbert Heeringa 1. Introduction The oldest branch of dialectology is the study of what is today often re-ferred to as “dialect geography”, i.e. the study of the geographical distribu-tion of language varieties, as opposed to the study of many other relations between language varieties and external conditioning factors, such as social class, age, and sex. While it is clear that geography has a massive influence on the distribution of language varieties, and that closer varieties are nor-mally more linguistically alike than more distant ones, still there have been surprisingly few attempts to examine these relationships with an eye toward more general formulations. Trudgill (1974) is an honorable exception to this last generalization. Trudgill proceeds from the very plausible assumptions that closer dialects must influence each other most strongly, and that intensity of social contact is likely to determine the degree of influence. He shows how to tie these ideas together in a model which hypothesizes a gravity-like attraction be-tween dialect varieties, where population is the analog to physical mass, and geographic distance plays its customary role. He adduces evidence in support of this view, relying on selected dialect features. Although we wish to contribute to the understanding of the general prin-ciples underlying the geographic distribution of linguistic variation, we structure our paper as a test of the very specific gravity hypothesis ad-vanced by Trudgill, according it the attention we feel it deserves as an early attempt at a general formulation of the the principles of how geography influences variation. Dialectometry provides the more general tools with which such relation-ships may be studied (Goebl 1982, 1984; Nerbonne & Kretzschmar 2003), and the present paper is an attempt to apply dialectometry to evaluate Trudgill’s ideas more systematically.
eBook - PDF- Ralph W. Fasold, Jeff Connor-Linton(Authors)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
We will also take a look at the intricate bond between dialect variation at any given moment in time and language variation over time, or language change. Finally, we consider the fate of dialect variation in an era of increasing globalization and fi nd some surprising conclusions. Most of our examples of dialect variation are from English; however, nearly all languages are rich with variation. Before we begin, we must take a close look at some common beliefs about the nature of dialect variation which, upon closer inspection of actual data on dialect variation, turn out to be mistaken. GOALS The goals of this chapter are to: • show that dialects that differ from the standard or socially most prestigious variety of a language are not linguistically inferior • describe how languages show systematic patterns of variation based on linguistic and social factors • exemplify how languages vary on all levels of organization – lexical, phonological, morphosyntactic, and pragmatic/discoursal • demonstrate how individual speakers vary their ways of using language based on linguistic factors, situational factors such as formality, and social-psychological factors such as conversational purpose and the type of image speakers wish to project • explain the relation between dialect variation and language change The nature of dialect variation Languages, dialects, and standards Many people equate the term “ language, ” as in “ the English language ” or “ the French language, ” with the standard language – that is, that version of the language held to be correct in pedagogical grammar books and usage guides and used in education, the workplace, and the government. Because the standard is associated with education and sophistication, other varieties of the language are often considered to be lesser versions of the language – perhaps not as fully formed, or maybe “ sloppy ” in comparison with the standard.
eBook - PDF- Rajend Mesthrie(Author)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
6 The geographic boundaries of regions may thus be more inexact than the city limits (like those of the Bible Belt, or of voluntary retirement regions) and still yield a more accurate representation of a speech community than any WILLIAM A. KRETZSCHMAR, JR. 192 political boundary. The idea of regions offers a corrective for oversimpli- fied notions of community. When sociolinguists have tried to address regions, they have generally recapitulated the findings of Zelinsky, although of course they have not set out to do so. I have written in detail elsewhere (Kretzschmar 1995, 1996, 2003) about the correspondence of traditional regions with the dia- lect regions described by George Hempl, Hans Kurath, and most recently William Labov. It is worth pointing out here that Zelinsky cites Kurath’s 1939 Handbook of the Linguistic Geography of New England as “the most use- ful and general guide to the social and cultural characteristics of the region” ( 1992: 120n8), not just as a guide to its language. He also specific- ally mentions Kurath’s ( 1949) map of major US dialect regions as evidence in his own description of traditional US regions (p. 117n7). The point is that Hempl, Kurath, and Labov have all responded to traditional regions in the construction of arguments that some readers may have thought to be derived just from their own linguistic evidence. In doing so they acted very appropriately, because language is a part of the culture of these regions. The only difficulty with these assertions comes from the failure of readers to appreciate the relationship between the linguistic features discussed and the regions in which they were found. As Lee Pederson has written ( 1995:39), The [Linguistic Atlas] method carries analysis through an enumeration of features and records them in lists and/or reports them in maps. Such analytic word geography ends its work at this point in a taxonomy of observed sociolinguistic facts.
eBook - PDF- Michael C. Shapiro, Harold F. Schiffman(Authors)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
9 Languages and dialects are considered to refer not to specific parts of the scale, but to relative positioning on it. There are a number of general observations that need to be made about this model of language and dialect. Virtually all of its applications have been to cases where there has never been any serious debate about whether the speech forms being analyzed are languages or dialects. In the cases of European and American dialectology, the problem has never been to ascertain how many distinct languages are spoken in a given area, but rather to delimit the range and nature of Regional Dialects of a language whose existence is presupposed. 10 The model has, therefore, concentrated on sorting out relations among speech varieties along the end of the scale marking the greatest degrees of linguistic relatedness. The model implies a position about determining language boundaries, but has virtually never 9. It is, of course, impossible to demonstrate total non-relatedness of any two speech varieties. They will necessarily show some linguistic features — be they partial phonolo-gical inventory, a class of grammatical categories, or lexical items fortuitously similar in phonological shape—in common. 10. Thus the most prominent work in dialect geography in the west has been carried out with regard to English, German, Italian, French, Roumanian, etc., all languages whose essential existence qua independent languages is not seriously open to question. 22 LANGUAGE AND SOCIETY IN SOUTH ASIA Figure 6. Speech areas of the eastern states. (Adapted from Hans Kurath, Word Geography of the Eastern United States, and cited in Kurath, 1972:28). been put to the test of determining these boundaries where they were not already known. That such applications have not taken place is not accidental. The features by which non-related languages differ, as well as those that are shared by related language varieties are of numerous sorts.
- Jack Grieve(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
This chronology of American dialect regions is also in line with Bloom- field’s theory concerning the importance of density of communication. Bloomfield argued that regional linguistic variation develops as a result of regional patterns in communication. When interaction is limited across space, regional linguistic variation will emerge over time as language changes, because a consistent variety of language cannot be sustained with- out regular communication between language users. Although physical distance itself limits communication, various external factors, including physical geography and cultural boundaries, provide particularly strong additional regional impediments to communication and therefore cause dialect regions to follow particular patterns. It would therefore seem that regional linguistic change in American English generally follows regional change in communication patterns, especially as defined by changing cul- tural regions, as opposed to physical boundaries such as mountain ranges, which themselves help to define cultural regions but which do not generally change over time. Taking into consideration Bloomfield’s theory of sociolinguistic varia- tion and the chronology of American dialect regions described above, a more complete picture of the history and development of American dialect 216 Sources of regional linguistic variation regions can be formulated. Initially, the British settled America at three main locations on the Atlantic Coast: the New England Colonies, the Middle Colonies, and the Southern Colonies. From these three major cul- tural hearths early settlers moved west across and around the Appalachians to colonize America, constrained in part by physical geography, spreading the English language as they went.
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