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By the definition most commonly used by linguists, any linguistic variety can be considered a "dialect" of some language—"everybody speaks a dialect". According to that interpretation, the criteria above merely serve to distinguish whether two varieties are dialects of the same language or dialects of different languages.
There is no clear distinction between a language and a dialect, notwithstanding a famous aphorism attributed to linguist Max Weinreich that "a language is a dialect with an army and navy". [133] For example, national boundaries frequently override linguistic difference in determining whether two linguistic varieties are languages or dialects.
Dialects can be classified at broader or narrower levels: within a broad national or regional dialect, various more localised sub-dialects can be identified, and so on. The combination of differences in pronunciation and use of local words may make some English dialects almost unintelligible to speakers from other regions without any prior ...
Dialectology (from Greek διάλεκτος, dialektos, "talk, dialect"; and -λογία, -logia) is the scientific study of dialects: subsets of languages.Though in the 19th century a branch of historical linguistics, dialectology is often now considered a sub-field of, or subsumed by, sociolinguistics. [1]
Many of the labels in a dialect mapping task focused on slang terms when studying perceptual dialectology of English spoken in California. University of California, Santa Barbara students were asked to label a map of California according to subjects, particularly Southern Californians, used " hella " to identify the Northern California region.
A written language is the representation of a language by means of writing. This involves the use of visual symbols, known as graphemes, to represent linguistic units such as phonemes, syllables, morphemes, or words. However, written language is not merely spoken or signed language written down, though it can approximate that. Instead, it is a ...
This may include languages, dialects, registers, styles, or other forms of language, as well as a standard variety. [2] The use of the word variety to refer to the different forms avoids the use of the term language , which many people associate only with the standard language, and the term dialect , which is often associated with non-standard ...
North American English (NAmE) encompasses the English language as spoken in both the United States and Canada.Because of their related histories and cultures, [2] plus the similarities between the pronunciations (accents), vocabulary, and grammar of U.S. English and Canadian English, linguists often group the two together.