| Kenneth G. Wilson (1923–). The Columbia Guide to Standard American English. 1993. |
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| DIALECT |
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| Our language practices vary regionally and socially. The dominant community, the chief constituency of speakers to which we belong, provides us with our regional dialect (or with a mixture of regional dialects) and with the features of our social dialect (or a mixture of social or class dialects). We learn these dialects from parents, siblings, playmates, and a great many others who influence us during our most formative years, and we further modify our personal idiolects as we later encounter new influences. Like our clothes and our other manners, our dialects tell others where we are from and give strong evidence of our formal education or lack of it, of our economic status, and of our social class. | 1 |
| Dialects differ from languages, generally speaking, in that different dialects of a given language are usually mutually intelligible, albeit occasionally with some difficulty at first. For example, Americans and Australians each speak a dialect of the English language and usually have little trouble understanding one another. An accent—whether an American Southern accent or a German or other foreign accent in English—is often just another label for a dialect different from one’s own. In a technical sense, however, accent involves only sound, whereas dialect can involve sound, spelling, grammar, and vocabulary. | 2 |
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| | | The Columbia Guide to Standard American English. Copyright © 1993 Columbia University Press. |
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