Definition
 The
term dialect refers to any variety of a language used by
a group of speakers.
It
refers to the content of the utterance rather than the pronunciation.
Examples
There
are two main types of dialect in English:
Use
The
term dialect used to refer to deviations from Standard English
which were used by groups of speakers.
Political
awareness has now given us the current concept of dialect as any
developed speech system.
Standard
English itself is therefore now considered to be a dialect
of English – equal in status with regional dialects such
as Scottish or social dialects such as Black English.
The
concept of dialect embraces all aspects of a language from grammar
to vocabulary.
Linguists
take a descriptive view of all language phenomena. They
do not promote the notion of the superiority of Standard
English.
This
is not to say that Standard English and Received
Pronunciation are considered equal to other forms by the majority
of speakers, but certainly attitudes are becoming more liberal.
This
may be as a result of the increase in mass media in Britain and
the exposure this provides to varieties of
English such as American English and Australian English.
The
past participle 'gotten' as in 'he had gotten into his car' is
Standard American English – whereas it would be an abberation
if used by a native British speaker.
The
concept of a dialect used to be applied to a deviant form of the
standard which had no written version. This is no longer the case.
The written form of Standard English is now considered as a dialect.
Thus we may write in a variety of dialects – one of
which is the Standard English which most of us employ.
Dialect
poetry has become popular recently, along with the shift in perception
which political correctness has demanded.
Writers
have for centuries attempted to represent dialect utterances in
their work. Shakespeare often gave his yokels such items. Snout
the tinker in A Midsummer Night's Dream says "By'r
lakin, a parlous fear."
The
novelist D.H.Lawrence represented the Nottinghamshire dialect in
many of his novels by interspersing Standard
English with utterances such as "Come into th'ut" spoken
by Mellors in Lady Chatterley's Lover.
Perhaps
the most interesting factor here is that the writer needs to use
the English alphabet in the attempt to write dialect terms. This
is not always possible, and so one of the skills a dialect writer
needs is the ability to select those words which lend themselves
to representation by means of the orthodox alphabet.
Some
contemporary regional dialect forms are ones which have remained
as such after being eliminated from what is now Standard English.
An example of this is the Scottish 'kirtle' which was replaced
in Standard English during the Old English period by 'skirt'.
Some
of the terms used to command the sheep dogs in Cumbria and Northumbria
are unrecognizable in any dialect. They have remained intact since
Old English or Middle English times.
This
is an interesting phenomenon and explicable when one considers
that the utterance is necessarily one-way, with the dog as the
listener! For this same reason, we can't accurately define this
set of commands as a contemporary dialect.
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