Dialect and accent: what's the difference

Q. What is a dialect
A. Dialect is the term used for the distinct form of a language spoken by people in a particular geographical area or social class.

Q. Is that not the same as an accent
A. No. Accent is the term used to describe the way in which words are pronounced; it is the way people sound when they speak. Most accents are associated with a specific area of a country, and are thus known as 'regional accents'. Accent does derive from dialect in that, when someone adopts a 'standard' or different regional form of the same language to that which is peculiar to their own locale, there will be vestiges of their original speech in intonation, vocabulary and syntax.

Accents can also be associated with a particular social class. In English, Received Pronunciation (RP), while it developed from the accent of an area within the triangle formed by London, Oxford and Cambridge, became the preferred method of speech, with some regional differences, of middle- and upper-middle-class educated types throughout England. This is true also, though to a lesser extent, in Scotland, Ireland and Wales. The BBC was, for a long time, staffed exclusively with speakers of RP - trained or natural - for its continuity and newsreading.

In short
A. In short dialect refers to WHAT we say, accent refers to HOW we say it.

Q. Do dialects still exist in English
A. In the British Isles they have almost died out. This process has been going on for many centuries but it has accelerated in the last 125 years. There are few places where dialect as opposed to accent with some vestigial dialect words still flourish. Strong or - to RP ears, anyway - unintelligible accents do not necessarily denote dialect, just strong regional variations in pronunciation. Dialect, often in watered-down forms and only used by older people, tend now only to be remain in deeply rural areas of England. In the Celtic countries of the British Isles, more dialect and non-English words do remain in everyday use.

However, with the London-centric media culture seeming unstoppable, the blanding out of regional differences seems to be accelerating. There was a recent study which showed that some Glasgow teenagers are adopting 'Esturine' - a broad term covering the various forms of urban English used in London and the South-East of England - glottal stops, possibly from watching Eastenders. 'Awight, hen '

Beyond the UK and Ireland dialects are alive and well - though even so they are diminishing as US English takes over the world - particularly in the English-speaking Caribbean countries and parts of Africa and the Far East. Indian English is actually moving away from standard English (both UK and US) and some linguists feel that it may develop beyond dialect and a new language may be created. The pidgin dialects of Papua New Guinea and Melanesia are so well developed that, although based on English, they are completely unintelligible to other English speakers, even when written down, despite the fact that the vocabulary and basic structure are based on simplified English. English pidgins throughout the world have been found to share the same underlying characteristics as Melanesian.

When a pidgin becomes the first language of a people it is called a 'creole'. A number of English creoles survive, such as Gullah, spoken in the Sea Islands off the South Carolina and Georgia coasts in the US and the adjacent mainland coastal areas. It based the English characteristic of 17th- and 18th-century British colonists' speech with additional vocabulary and some grammatical forms derived from various West African languages, which influence the syntax, intonation, grammar and vocabulary.

Q. Does accent matter
A. As linguist John Honey, author of Does Accent Matter , has said, 'the subject is virtually taboo in our schools'. Officially we should not think that one particular accent, specifically RP, is any 'better' than others.

Proud of their accents:

• Sir Walter Raleigh John Aubrey was told by an old man who had once known him that 'notwithstanding so great mastership in style, and his conversation with the learnedest and politest persons, yet he spake broad Devonshire to his dying day'.
• Sir Robert Walpole Britain's first and longest serving prime minister had the accent of a Norfolk squire - but then he was constantly mocked for this and other failures of refinement by 'better-spoken' contemporaries.
• William Wordsworth A Cumbrian lad who did not let Cambridge rob him of his northern vowels.
• Lord Denning A draper's son from Whitchurch, Hampshire, who returned (accent intact) to live in his birthplace in his 60s - this time in the nicest house in the village.
• Harold Wilson His Huddersfield accent was disappearing during the 1940s and 50s, but mysteriously returned after he became Labour leader in 1963 - a useful contrast to Alec Douglas Home's strangled upper-class drawl.
  

... and not so proud:

• William Shakespeare It has been suggested by William Honey that the Bard 'grew up speaking the Stratford-upon-Avon variant of the Warwickshire dialect' - but found he had to soften it to get on in London.
• Margaret Thatcher Though not mentioned in her autobiography, the Grantham girl's grocer father forked out for elocution lessons for her.
• Joe Orton In the early 1950s he took lessons to rid himself of his Leicester accent. So successful were they that he won the elocution prize at RADA.

and for a bit of fun
http://rinkworks.com/dialect/

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To find out more about Phrases & Sayings click here

By Simon Smith