Language Dialect Accent

A 'language' is a communication system which is particular to a group of people and which can only be understood by those people. If you speak only English, you can’t understand someone who speaks only Italian.

Dialect refers to differences in accent, grammar, and vocabulary among different versions of the same language and is peculiar to a specific region or social group. Therefore, if you don’t know a particular language, you can’t understand its dialect(s) either.

Most aspects of American speech that sound British, Scottish or Irish have been in the US for centuries because most pronunciation features of American dialects originated in the UK or Ireland.

Where you hear a dialect, you hear a different accent and if you speak in the dialect of a particular region, you will likely speak with the accent of that region unless you have emigrated from another area or county or country.

New languages were initially dialects of a language and gradually developed separately. So, the boundary between language and dialect isn't always clear. Some dialects sound like the original language and others sound like a completely different language.

Standard English that developed in the south of England and eventually spread through the entire country stems from Anglo-Saxon and Norman French. Standard English uses a certain type of grammar and vocabulary which is taught the world over so even though English speakers have different accents, their dialect is basically the same. Therefore, BrE and AmE are dialects of English because they differ in some vocabulary and grammar rules. One example regarding vocabulary is small baked breads; depending on where you are in the US or Canada, they are either called buns or rolls.

According to Victoria A. Fromkin (1923-2000), an internationally known linguistics expert; "it is not always easy to understand whether "the systematic differences" between two speech communities reflect two dialects or two languages … when dialects become mutually unintelligible- when the speakers of one dialect group can no longer understand the speaker of another dialect group- these dialects become different "languages".

Accent is all about sound variations in the way a language is spoken and is associated with a country, or an area, or a social class. Accent also refers to how much stress or emphasis is given to syllables, consonants, and vowels. Accent is not a "developed stage" of dialect. They are part of the same thing.

In Louisiana; for example, there are three distinct accents; the 'north Louisiana accent', similar to the typical accent on television minus the slurring, the 'central Louisiana accent', something like the northern accent but with fewer "R's", "ya'll's", and the tendency to use 'coke' when for any carbonated drink etc. The third accent comes from the far south and difficult to understand is the ‘French/Acadian accent’. Most people with this accent travel very little and never very far and are few in relation to the general population of the state.

If two friends have grown up speaking the same dialect, they will have the same accent. However, if one friend starts pronouncing the language with the sound pattern of another, then we call it a foreign accent.