Accent, dialect & language.

To sum up everything mentioned above I would like to cite D Crystal's definitions of the main linguistic notions from his “First Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics” (1980).

“Accent is the auditory effect of those features of a person's pronunciation which identify where he is from, regionally or socially. The linguistics literature emphasises that the term refers to pronunciation only, and is thus distinct from dialect, which refers to grammar and vocabulary as well. Regional accents can relate to any locale, including both rural and urban communities within a country (e. g. 'West Country', Liverpool1) as well as national groups speaking the same language (e. g. 'American', 'Australian'), and our impression of other languages (foreign accent', 'Slavic accent').

Social accents relate to the cultural and educational background of the speaker. Countries with a well-defined traditional social class system, such as India and Japan, reflect these divisions in language, and accent is often a marker of class. In Britain, the best example is the regionally neutral accent associated with a public school education, and of the related professional domains, such as the Civil Service, the law courts, the Court and the BBC — hence the labels 'Queen's English’, “BBC English', and Received pronunciation (RP).

Dialect is a regionally or socially distinctive variety of a language, identified by a particular set of words and grammatical structures. Spoken dialects are usually also associated with a distinctive pronunciation, or accent. Any language with a reasonably large number of speakers will develop dialects, especially if there are geographical barriers separating groups of people from each other, or if there are divisions of social class. One dialect may predominate as the official or standard form of the language, and this is the variety which may come to be written down.

The distinction between «dialect» and «language» seems obvious: dialects are subdivisions of languages.

Dialects which identify where a person is from are called regional dialects, though other terms are used, as ‘local', 'territorial', 'geographical'. Urban dialects are becoming more evident. Within cities such as New York and London, it is possible to isolate local dialect areas, such as Brooklyn or the East End.

Dialects which identify where a person is in terms of a social scale are called social dialects or class dialects. More recently, the term sociolect has been used. Some languages are highly stratified in terms of social divisions, such as class, professional status, age and sex, and here major differences in social dialect are apparent. In English, the differences are not so basic, but it is possible to point to usages in vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation which are socially based, e. g. ain't, which has in its time identified both working class and upper class (e. g. Lord Peter Wimsey) types. Such variants were generally ignored in regional dialectology, and would these days tend to be studied under the heading of sociolinguistics,

‘Dialect' is also sometimes applied to the linguistically distinct historical stages through which a language has passed, and here the term ‘historical' or 'temporal dialect’ might be used, e. g. Elisabethan English, 17* century British English. 'Dialect' has further been used to refer to the distinctive language of a particular professional group ('occupational dialect').

Differences in pronunciation.

At the segmental level of consonants and vowels, the overall 'inventory of consonant phonemes of a given accent makes up its consonant system, and the vowel phonemes its vowel system.

RP has 24 consonants in its consonant system, and 20 vowel in its vowel system. General American, which is less homogeneous than RP, has 24 consonants and 15 or 16 vowels, depending on which sub-type of the General American accent is being considered (Kreidler 1989). Most Scots accents have 25 or 26 consonants and 13 or 14 vowels.

A structural difference between accents is a matter of the different rules governing the permissible sequences of phonemes in the phonemic make-up of word-shapes (Laver and TrudgUl 1979: 18). A major structural feature of RP is that {r} is never pronounced before another consonant, whereas in very many other accents of English around the world, [r] can be pronounced in this position. The type of accent where [r] can be pronounced before consonants is called a rhotic accent, and the accents which do not allow this are called non-rhotic accents. Rhotic accents include all accents of Scotland, and all of the accents of the Mid-West and West of the United States. In addition to RP, many accents of England, the accents of Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, and many accents of the east and south of the United States are non-rhotic.

An example of a difference concerning consonants, taken from RP and General American, is the difference in lexical distribution of the /h/ phoneme. General American has preserved the older (seventeenth-century) pronunciation [ə:b] (or / ə:rb /) of the word herb without an /h/, whereas RP invariably uses the newer form / hə:b /. Another consonantal example is the RP pronunciation of suggest, where some American accents have /sag'djest]