Page 79 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

DIALECT

DIALECT

A socially or regionally marked version of a language made up of
distinctive patterns of sentence construction, vocabulary and pronun-
ciation. The use of one dialect rather than another depends basically
upon the social class and regional origins of the speaker. Examples of
dialect differences in English cover a wide range of phenomena and
include matters such as: the use of multiple negation (‘I hadn’t got
nothing to fall back on’), which is common in some English dialects
but not in others; variation in vocabulary (the same object – a sports
shoe, for instance, may be designated differently, as plimsoll, dap, sandy
pump, etc., in different dialects in different parts of the UK); and
distinctive patterns of pronunciation (such as using a glottal stop
instead of ‘it/’ in words such as bitter, Luton, letter, bottle, butter, which is
common in parts of London).
The latter kind of variation, purely in terms of sound, is also known
as accent. Accent, however, refers only to pronunciation, and is thus
not as inclusive a term as dialect, which embraces a wider range of
linguistic variation. Indeed, in the UK it is possible to find the standard
dialect being spoken in a range of regional accents.
Everyone speaks a dialect, whether it be a non-standard regional
dialect or the standard dialect. The standard UK dialect itself evolved
out of a particular regional dialect of the south-east English Midlands
and gained pre-eminence not because of any intrinsic linguistic
superiority, but simply because it was the dialect spoken in that part of
the country that was particularly influential in the emergence of the
modern UK nation-state. It was the dialect spoken at the universities
of Oxford and Cambridge, and by important sections of the
mercantile class. Thus, its growing adoption from the fifteenth
century onwards as the preferred dialect in education, in certain key
professions such as the law, and indeed for written communication in
general, is more a question of historical contingency than any special
linguistic qualities.
Its adoption as a standard dialect, particularly for written
communication, leads to nominative pressure on other less socially
prestigious dialects. This in turn gives rise to the mistaken viewthat
the norms of the standard are inherently more correct than those of
other dialects – a judgement which is unconsciously based on social
factors rather than a linguistic consideration. From a linguistic
viewpoint all dialects are equal in their ability to communicate the

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