What is a dialect?

We often hear people saying: “He speaks a terrible dialect” or “She's got this strange Southern accent” or “I wish I could speak without any dialect at all”. It follows that everybody is aware of existence of different forms of speech and always notices these differences in the process of communication. These differences help us to orientate in society. Hearing a person speaking we can place him or her rather definitely. Naturally we judge our interlocutors by the way they speak and it is as important for our opinion as the way a person dresses, associates with us and behaves in general as “language is a form of social behaviour and we react to a person's speech patterns as we would react to any of his actions If his speech differs from our own, we may consider him quaint(kueint), naive, stupid, suave (swo:v), cultivated, conceited, alien, or any number of other things”. (Roger W. Shuy 1967). So people's dialects and their perception is one of the most important components in the process of communication and one of the main possibilities for a person to express himself in a verbal form, which makes speech a part of his personality.

According to Roger W. Shuy from Michigan State University two different types of dialects are recognized, regional and social. Dialectology is concerned with the two aspects. They are linked very closely. For example, in a speech of a particular person we can find the influence of the region he lives in and the social group he belongs to. We are all aware of the fact that relatively uneducated people tend to use certain pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary which easily identify them as uneducated. We also know that people from certain areas speak in such a way that we can make a good general guess as to where they are from. The speech of any such person, then, is a mixture of social and geographical features. The educated person will undoubtedly share some of the geographical features found in the speech of his uneducated townsman, but he will probably not share the speech features which label the other man uneducated.

“The word 'dialect' is associated with speech communities, group of people who are in constant internal communication. Such a group speaks its own dialect; that is, the members of the group have certain language habits in common. For example, a family is a speech community; the members of the family talk together constantly, and certain words have certain special meanings within the family group. The people who belong to your class in school form a speech community, sharing certain special ways of talking together — the latest slang, for instance. The people who work together in a single office are a speech community. Larger speech communities may be the members of a single occupation or profession. Carpenters share certain typical carpentry terms; lawyers use special legal terms”. (Roger W. Shuy 1967). Any linguist will definitely say that people are divided according to their language peculiarities.

A dialect is a variety of a language. It differs from other varieties in certain features of pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar… It may reveal something about the social or regional background of its speakers, and it will be generally understood by speakers of other dialects of the same language.” (Roger W. Shuy 1985). “Although this term is popularly applied to speech that is heard as odd or 'nonstandard', most scholars use it to refer to any defined variety of speech, social or regional. From this point of view, every speaker has a dialect, one that reflects social and regional characteristics. (James Hartman, “Guide to pronunciation.")

The customary name for the discipline that studies the phonetic and phonological patterns of accents and dialects of languages, and their geographical distribution in space and time, is dialectology (Chambers and Trudgill 1980).