The Difference between Language and Dialect

This analytical and evaluative essay aims to answer this question from multiple dimensions. It will first investigate the social background in which the speech was situated and then examine the organization and structure of the speech text. After that, it will

Do you ever think about the way you speak and why? Well, Paul Robert does an excellent job explaining why people use the dialect they use in Speech Communities. He discusses that people change their use of language throughout their lives to conform to either society or to what kind of person they want to be, or to just conform to who they need to be at a particular moment, in which I agree. People’s choice of language, including myself, are affected by many of their surroundings, such as where they live and grow up at, their peers, and a person’s work place.

Sociolect is defined as the variation in language depending on the social status of different people. In each city of the world, big or small, there lies a separation in the class of people depending on their economic status. In Australia too we have people who are economically very strong and people who are economically very weak. People who are rich often speak the English which reflects their good education and the social status. On the other hand people of the low economic status often don’t share the same standard of English.

Take a look at dialects anywhere int he world. It clearly shows different customs, not just in language or communication. There a lots of dialects in South-America, for instance. Spanish in Latinamerica differs a lot from nations to nations, or we can also say, from culture to culture. There are dialects also in our country, Hungary. And people on the north of the country speak in a different way, like pronounce sounds so much different. Use words and expressions that we do not use at all. They also have differently built, constructed and decorated houses, songs, tales and wear different clothes as their costume.

Dialect is when people use different words for everyday objects or feelings depending on the area of a country they come from. In some areas of England people say “Innit” instead of “Isn’t it” or “summit” instead of “something”. It may cause confusion if someone says “ave got a pain in my head” instead of, “I’ve got a headache”.

The great characteristics of Maine’s dialects had been clearly discussed in the Dialect Project 1 such as rich vocabularies, various syntaxes, different morphologies, and unique lexicon. However, the main goal of this project is to explore those previously explained concepts to see how Maine’s dialects are received such as negative or positive, inaccurate or not, too exaggerate or too simple, and how various ways of linguistics are presented in real life situations. Speaking of phonology, the descriptions of words are exactly what explained in the Dialect Project 1, which is there are many words are being pronounced with the Ah sound like the pronunciation of the word “father.” Moreover, there are different words but have the same pronunciations in Maine’s dialects. Beyond this similarity, the other thing seems inaccurate is the pronunciation of the letter R. The demonstration of this project will demonstrate that the word R is pronounced very soft and less stressed. Syntactically, the word order, phrases or idioms in Maine’s dialects are very broad, rich, and its ridiculous meaning might make people confuse sometimes. Last but not least is the variation lexicon that some words are written in SAE, but the meaning is slightly different overall.

On October 22, 2014, Raffaella Zanuttini’s essay, “Our Language Prejudices Don’t Make No Sense,” was published in Pacific Standard magazine. This work was written to draw attention to the false assumptions made about different varieties of the English language. Zanuttini starts her essay by considering, “There are some things you just don’t say in a polite society” (173). With this statement, she is referring to the ridicule made on different varieties of language. Zanuttini offers a few examples of judgements people often make, negative concord demonstrating one of them. Negative concord is a part of the Russian language and many others, but in today’s English, those who speak with negative concord occupy a low position on the socioeconomic scale. Zanuttini then introduces an argument in which people believe the language they speak is inferior. The English language has many recipes and according to Zanuttini, these different variations can be associated with age, ethnic or social identity, and geographical location. Although, there is a prestige language that should be used for business matters. As a final remark, she describes how different varieties of the same language should be viewed. Zanuttini indicates different dialects are like bread. No bread is better than any other, but for certain purposes, different breads should be used. Just like bread, no variation of language should be judged.

Therefore, I love that Harmon and Wilson states that “No dialect limits its speakers’ ability to express complex thoughts, to think critically, or to use a full range of linguistic functions and purpose” (154-55). As a society and as future teachers, we need to teach our students that people have different dialects, and the differences do not make anyone less smart, or less of a person just like Harmon and Wilson explain that, “Dialects are different not deficient systems” (155). Everyone wants to be treated equal and have equal opportunities; therefore, everyone needs to be more open minded and realize that everyone has their own dialect, which does not make them any less of an intellectual person than anyone else.

Right now, the United States has no assigned authority dialect. In spite of the fact that it is seen as an English talking country, there has been a running open deliberation among the voting open in respect to whether English should be the official dialect. While there are many people that communicate in English or Spanish, there have been calls for multilingualism. This open deliberation has produced contention and political changes among both English and non-English talking groups. While English-talking groups have been in a backing of a brought together method for correspondence, the non-English talking groups have provoked this recommendation as a method for isolating minority bunches. This later gathering feels that in an area termed as free and reasonable and where all fantasies materialize, no specific dialect should be received to the detriment of different dialects. In this paper, I will contend out that English should be the official dialect of the United States.

Following Eckert (1989, 2000), I define linguistic style as a combination of a particular set of linguistic features distinguishing social groups. In explaining how styles are created, I draw on Kallmeyer and Keim (2003:30) who suggest “the construction of a communicative social style is connected with the formation of specific linguistic and communicative patterns and rules on different linguistic levels. Elements from all expressive levels are combined to form a unique expression

Language attitudes, which include people’s perception about the language variety in their own community and language varieties in other communities, has been one of the crucial topics in sociolinguistics since 1960s.

A professor from a well-known college is not expected to speak like a person who works in a garment factory. A businessman can never use a beggar's accent while talking with his partner. We can easily identify who belongs to which level. From their professions, we can infer their economic conditions and thus their belonging social classes can be identified. Therefore, a clear distinction of using semantics, syntax, phonology, phonetics, vocabulary or style helps us to distinguish any particular person and his\her position in the society.

Among the most important concepts to emerge are those relating to dialects and language standards. Sociolinguists have documented the presence of dialects in every language. These dialects, all of which are legitimate, are associated with educational, economic, social and historical conditions. Hence, even if an individual scrupulously studies all the possible dictionaries of a random language, he would still be somewhat of a stranger to that language since he is unaware of all the dialectal changes.

Talking about “dialects”, a term often mentioned along is “standard language”. When being brought into comparison with “dialect”, “standard language” usually serves as a legitimate variant with the highest level of excellence (Bex & Watts, 1999). Though positive in nature, standardization - the procedure of standardizing a language – often raises heated controversy because of its consequences on not only linguistics field but also the society. In the second part of the essay, I will focus on the disadvantages of language standardization.

This term paper aims at reviewing various stages of language development in human being early life in regards to language development. The paper also analyzes various theoretical issues and hypothesis that contributes to change of speech and how human beings corporate the changes in their daily development as far as language is concerned. Adult language and child language are quite different especially because adults have more exposure to the society norms than the children. It will also take in to consideration various processes of learning, how children acquire linguistic inputs such as forms meanings and word use during their talking processes. This term paper will focus on the child development in terms of language and gender. It is a paper on how children under the age of 10, learn language adaptation to their first language during their early developmental stages. It will identify theories for learning of a language, childhood development as well as look into the societal norms of gender socialization.