REGIONAL and SOCIAL
DIALECTS
·
Introduction
Telephone rings
Pat :
Hello
Caller :
Hello, is Mark there?
Pat :
Yes. Just hold on a minute
Pat (to Mark) : There’s a rather well-educated young lady from Scotland on the
phone for you
Explanation
Even though the caller had said nothing
about herself, Pat was able to deduce quite a lot about Mark’s Caller. Why?
As Pat thought:
-
When the caller is an adult, it’s easy to tell
whether a speaker is male or female.
-
If the caller has a distinctive accent, the
regional will be evident, even from a short utterance.
-
It may be possible to make a reasonable guess
about the caller’s socio-economic or
educational background
·
Regional Variation
In different regions of a country, there
can be some variations in the language used.
These variations can be in the pronunciation, the vocabulary,
or even grammar.
·
International Varieties
Some well-known varieties:
o
American English
o
British English
o
Singapore English
o
New Zealand English
o
Australian English
o
South African English
o
Indian English
o
etc
Some mistakes based on regional accent
differences
New Zealanders British
Dad Dead
Bad Bed
American British
God Guard
Latter Ladder
There are vocabulary differences
Australians New
Zealanders British
Sole Parents Solo Parents Single
Parents
Dialect
Differences
American British
Do you
have …? Have
you got …?
She has
gotten …? She’s
got …?
He dove
… He
dived …
Did you
eat yet? Have
you eaten?
·
Intra-National or Intra-Continental Variation
Intra-national à within the same country
o
Example: Yorkshire, Lancashire, in England.
Intra continental à within the same continent
o
E.g. in the United States of America, the
Southerners are easily identified from the Northerners.
The differences conversation can be
occurred in intra-national or intercontinental.
Example:
Rob: “This
wheel’s completely disjaskit.”
Alan: “I
might could get it changed.”
Rob: “You
couldn’t do nothing of the sort. It needs dumped.”
à
Features of Tyneside dialect (North-Eastern England):
Double modals, double negatives, ‘need’ + ‘-ed’ (instead of ‘-ing’)
+
Lexical borrowing from Scottish:
‘disjaskit’ = ‘worn out’ / ‘completely ruined’
à
Different dialects à
differences in pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar
·
Cross-Continental variation : Dialect Chains
Dialect chains are very common across the
whole of Europe.
Varieties of Dialect chains:
-
Austria and Germany
-
Dutch and Flemish (Switzerland)
-
Netherlands and Belgium
-
Portuguese and Spanish / Catalan
-
French and Italian
They illustrate very clearly the
arbitrariness of the distinction between language and dialect.
Language: the method of human
communication, either spoken or written, consisting of the use of words in a
structured and conventional way.
Dialect: a form of language which is
peculiar to a specific region or social group.
There are two kinds of dialects:
o
Regional
o
Social
Regional Dialects are
distinguishable from their pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar
Accents are differed by pronunciation
alone
(You
can notice some differences in the Javanese used by people from different areas
of Java.)
Languages are not purely entities. They serve social
functions. In order to define a language, it is important to look to its social
and political functions. So a language can be thought of as a collections of
dialects that are usually linguistically similar, used by different social
groups who choose to say that they are speakers of one language.
thank you for explanation..this brief explanation i took for my refferences..once more thanks you
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