REGIONAL and SOCIAL DIALECTS

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.