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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.
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]
For scholars who view language from the perspective of linguistic competence, essentially the knowledge of language and grammar that exists in the mind of an individual language user, the idiolect, is a way of referring to the specific knowledge. For scholars who regard language as a shared social practice, the idiolect is more like a dialect ...
Linguistics is the scientific study of language. [1] [2] [3] The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds and equivalent gestures in sign languages), phonology (the abstract sound system of a particular language, and analogous systems of sign languages), and pragmatics ...
[20] [21] In contemporary linguistic usage, the terms standard dialect and standard variety are neutral synonyms for the term standard language, usages which indicate that the standard language is one of many dialects and varieties of a language, rather than the totality of the language, whilst minimizing the negative implication of social ...
Part of map 72 of the Atlas linguistique de la France, recording local forms meaning "today". Dialectologists record variation across a dialect continuum using maps of various features collected in a linguistic atlas, beginning with an atlas of German dialects by Georg Wenker (from 1888), based on a postal survey of schoolmasters.
Dialects can be defined as "sub-forms of languages which are, in general, mutually comprehensible." [1] English speakers from different countries and regions use a variety of different accents (systems of pronunciation) as well as various localized words and grammatical constructions. Many different dialects can be identified based on these ...
Dialect levelling has been defined as the process by which structural variation in dialects is reduced, [3] "the process of eliminating prominent stereotypical features of differences between dialects", [4] "a social process [that] consists in negotiation between speakers of different dialects aimed at setting the properties of, for example, a lexical entry", [5] "the reduction of variation ...