Dialect and Accent

Sociolinguistics: Language, Dialect and Society

Course 1 · Chapter 2 · Dialect and Accent

Everyone uses the words language, dialect and accent, and most people assume the difference is obvious. It is not. This chapter sorts the three terms out and then shows why the line between a language and a dialect is drawn by society as much as by linguistics.

The idea in a box

A dialect is a variety of a language spoken by a particular group. An accent is how a variety sounds. There is "no universally accepted criterion" for telling languages from dialects (Wikipedia, Dialect), so the distinction is partly a matter of status and politics.

Dialect, Accent, Idiolect

Term	Meaning
Dialect	a variety of a language spoken by a particular group; most often a regional dialect, while social or ethnic varieties may be called sociolects or ethnolects
Idiolect	one individual's variety
Accent	in general, pronunciation; dialect also covers grammar and vocabulary

Dialects of the same language differ in phonology, morphology, syntax and vocabulary. John Lyons notes that many linguists treat accent differences as part of dialect differences. When Phonetics and the IPA 7 compared Received Pronunciation, General American and Scottish English, it was comparing accents; if it had also compared vocabulary and grammar, it would have been comparing dialects.

Standard and Nonstandard

A standard language is a variety that has "undergone substantial codification" in its grammar, lexicon, writing system or other features. It has the highest status or prestige among related varieties, especially in formal public and academic settings. Often it is the prestige variety of a whole country.

How standardisation happens

A variety is selected, often to promote uniformity, and accepted by influential people.
It spreads socially and culturally, gains status by being linked to successful people, and is used in more contexts.
Efforts include stabilising spelling, codifying usage and meanings in grammars and dictionaries, and encouraging people to see these codifications as correct.
Some standards are created by institutions; the page cites the Académie Française and the Royal Spanish Academy. English standardised more informally, without government intervention.
The standard is usually used in broadcasting, official communication and education.
Standardisation is ongoing, because language keeps changing; codification slows that change.

A standard dialect is backed by institutions such as government recognition, schooling, and published grammars and dictionaries. Nonstandard dialects usually lack this support and have little codification. The line between the two is often arbitrary and rests on social, political or historical factors.

Watch out: the standard is not "better"

The standard-language page says many speakers believe the standard is inherently superior, but this belief comes from social perceptions, not objective evaluation. It also notes that the standard is an idealised abstraction, and actual speech is neither uniform nor fully stable. In the UK, for example, Standard English is based on the language of the medieval court of Chancery and became the upper-class norm in the late 1600s and early 1700s. It is usually linked with Received Pronunciation, but other accents can be used.

Many standards for one language

Pluricentric languages have several interacting standard varieties; the page names English, German and Portuguese. Monocentric languages, such as Russian and Japanese, have one standardised form.

Language or Dialect?

Mutual intelligibility is one proposed test, but it is criticised, especially for dialect continua. The source gives several cases where intelligibility and the label disagree:

Case	What the source says
Danish and Norwegian	separate languages by the sociolinguistic test of shared linguistic authority, despite high mutual intelligibility
Yiddish	its own language despite some intelligibility with German
Mandarin and Cantonese	often called dialects in China despite their mutual unintelligibility; the page says "hundreds of mutually unintelligible Chinese languages contain thousands of dialects"
Romansh	counts as a language because it became a written language, even though it is close to Lombardic alpine dialects and classical Latin
Bhojpuri	classed as a Hindi dialect for social reasons, though the page calls it objectively a distinct language
Italy	regional languages are often called dialetti colloquially, a usage that carries a pejorative tone
Serbo-Croatian and Macedonian	classification is disputed; the Macedonian case is described as political

Why the labels follow status

The label "dialect" often reflects status: it tends to be applied to varieties that are low-prestige, unwritten, lack a state, or lack a standard form.
Max Weinreich's Yiddish saying is rendered in English as "A language is a dialect with an army and navy."
Einar Haugen described four steps by which a dialect can be promoted to an independent language: selection, codification, elaboration and acceptance.
Linguistic distance is also used: dialects are close to their parent language, while languages in the same family can be more or less distant (Historical Linguistics and Language Families 5).
Some linguists call any variety a dialect of some language, so "everybody speaks a dialect."

Dialect Continua

A dialect continuum (or dialect chain) is a series of language varieties across a geographic area in which "neighboring varieties are mutually intelligible". Differences accumulate with distance, so widely separated varieties may not be. Dialectologists map features with isoglosses (Historical Linguistics and Language Families 6) rather than drawing hierarchical classifications.

Continuum	What the source says
West Germanic	Dutch, Frisian, Low Saxon and High German dialects once formed a continuum, but it has largely broken apart; standard Dutch and standard German show limited mutual intelligibility
Romance	a western continuum runs from Portuguese through Spanish, Catalan, Occitan, French and Italian varieties to Romansh
Arabic	adjacent dialects are largely mutually understandable, while those from distant regions are harder to understand; Modern Standard Arabic is the prestige variety for writing
Indo-Aryan	most Indo-Aryan languages of the Indian subcontinent form a continuum; Punjabi and Bengali have their own continua

Two further points from the continuum page are central to this chapter. A standard variety can be codified within a continuum and then serve as the authority for local dialects, which local speakers often treat as their standard, making their dialects dependent on it. And political boundaries often cut across continua: speakers on either side may use nearly identical varieties but depend on different standards, so they are counted as different languages. Nation-states and their standard languages have increasingly eroded nonstandard dialects since the early 20th century, making boundaries sharper.

Note on sources

The definitions, the language-or-dialect cases, the standardisation points and the continuum examples come from Wikipedia's articles on dialect (read to its first 100,000 characters), dialect continuum and standard language. The Standard German detail was not on the standard-language page beyond a mention as a pluricentric example, so it is not described. The page says Swiss German is the everyday default and Low German is often counted among German dialects, but I have not used these. The link between accent and the earlier Phonetics and the IPA chapter, and the remark that the "Danish and Norwegian" row is an illustration of the language-or-dialect problem, are mine.

Try It Yourself

Exercise 1

Say which of accent, dialect or idiolect each describes: a pronunciation difference only; a difference in grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation shared by a region; the way one person speaks.

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Exercise 2

Danish and Norwegian are largely mutually intelligible; Mandarin and Cantonese are not. Say what a purely intelligibility-based test would conclude for each, and what labels the source actually reports.

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Exercise 3

Explain how a political border can turn two nearly identical varieties in a dialect continuum into "different languages". Name Haugen's four steps.

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Chapter 2 Quick Reference

Dialect = a group's variety (grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation); accent = pronunciation; idiolect = one person
No universal test separates language from dialect; intelligibility, authority, status and politics all play a part
Standard = codified, institutionally backed, high-prestige; "better" is a social perception
Dialect continuum: neighbours understand each other, distant ends may not
Haugen: selection, codification, elaboration, acceptance

Coming next

Sociolinguistics: Language, Dialect and Society 3 looks at the social variables (class, age, gender, ethnicity) and how studies count them.