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In the Language Survey Reference Guide issued by SIL International, who produce Ethnologue, a dialect cluster is defined as a central variety together with a collection of varieties whose speakers can understand the central variety at a specified threshold level (usually between 70% and 85%) or higher. It is not required that peripheral ...
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 dialect continuum or dialect chain is a series of language varieties spoken across some geographical area such that neighboring varieties are mutually intelligible, but the differences accumulate over distance so that widely separated varieties may not be. [1]
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]
Dialect levelling (or leveling in American English) is an overall reduction in the variation or diversity of a dialect's features when in contact with one or more other dialects. [1] This can come about through assimilation , mixture, and merging of certain dialects , often amidst a process of language codification , which can be a precursor to ...
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 ...
Language is a structured system of communication that consists of grammar and vocabulary.It is the primary means by which humans convey meaning, both in spoken and signed forms, and may also be conveyed through writing.
The standardization of a language is a continual process, because language is always changing and a language-in-use cannot be permanently standardized like the parts of a machine. [8] Standardization may originate from a motivation to make the written form of a language more uniform, as is the case of Standard English. [9]