dialect (n.)

A regionally or socially distinctive VARIETY of language, identified by a particular set of WORDS and GRAMMATICAL STRUCTURES. Spoken dialects are usually also associated with a distinctive pronunciation, or ACCENT. Any LANGUAGE with a reasonably large number of speakers will develop dialects, especially if there are geographical barriers separating groups of people from each other, or if there are divisions of social class. One dialect may predominate as the official or STANDARD form of the language, and this is the variety which may come to be written down.

The distinction between ‘dialect’ and ‘language’ seems obvious: dialects are subdivisions of languages. What linguistics (and especially sociolinguistics) has done is to point to the complexity of the relationship between these notions. It is usually said that people speak different languages when they do not understand each other. But the so-called ‘dialects’ of Chinese (Mandarin, Cantonese, etc.) are mutually unintelligible in their spoken form. (They do, however, share the same written language, which is the main reason why one talks of them as ‘dialects of Chinese’.) And the opposite situation occurs: Swedes, Norwegians and Danes are generally able to understand each other, but their separate histories, cultures, literatures and political structures warrant Swedish, Norwegian and Danish being referred to as different languages.

The systematic study of all forms of dialect, but especially regional dialect, is called dialectology, also ‘linguistic geography’ or dialect geography. Traditional dialectology studies commenced in the late nineteenth century, and have taken the form of detailed surveys using questionnaires and (more recently) tape-recorded interviews. Regionally distinctive words (distinct in FORM, SENSE or pronunciation) were the centre of attention, and collections of such words were plotted on maps and compiled in a dialect atlas (or ‘linguistic atlas’). If a number of DISTINCTIVE ITEMS all emerged as belonging to a particular area, then this would be the evidence for saying that a dialect existed. It was often possible to show where one dialect ended and the next began by plotting the use of such items, drawing lines around their limits of use (ISOGLOSSES), and, where a ‘bundle’ of such isoglosses fell together, postulating the existence of a dialect boundary. On one side of the bundle of isoglosses, a large number of word forms, senses and pronunciations would be used which were systematically different from the equivalent items used on the other side. Dialect boundaries are not usually so clear-cut, but the principle works well enough.

Traditional dialectological methods of this kind have more recently been supplemented by the methods of structural dialectology, which tries to show the patterns of relationship which link sets of forms from different dialects. The SYSTEMS of STRUCTURAL correspondence published by this approach are known as ‘DIAsystems’. Dialectometry is a statistical method of dialect analysis, developed in the 1970s, which measures the linguistic ‘distance’ between localities in a dialect region by counting the number of contrasts in a large sample of linguistic features.