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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 language forms thought of as less prestigious or "proper" than the standard. [3]
The colloquial meaning of dialect can be understood by example, e.g. in Italy [8] (see dialetto [9]), France (see patois) and the Philippines, [11] [12] carries a pejorative undertone and underlines the politically and socially subordinated status of a non-national language to the country's single official language.
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.
A standard variety together with its dependent varieties is commonly considered a "language", with the dependent varieties called "dialects" of the language, even if the standard is mutually intelligible with another standard from the same continuum. [13] [14] The Scandinavian languages, Danish, Norwegian and Swedish, are often cited as ...
A pluricentric language is a language that has two or more standard forms. An example is Hindustani, which encompasses two standard varieties, Urdu and Hindi. Another example is Norwegian, with Bokmål having developed closely with Danish and Swedish, and Nynorsk as a partly reconstructed language based on old dialects. Both are recognized as ...
Spanish is a language with a "T–V distinction" in the second person, meaning that there are different pronouns corresponding to "you" which express different degrees of formality. In most varieties, there are two degrees, namely "formal" and "familiar" (the latter is also called "informal").
Variation is a characteristic of language: there is more than one way of saying the same thing in a given language. Variation can exist in domains such as pronunciation (e.g., more than one way of pronouncing the same phoneme or the same word), lexicon (e.g., multiple words with the same meaning), grammar (e.g., different syntactic constructions expressing the same grammatical function), and ...
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 ...