Present-day Dialect Atlas of The UK and Major Differences in REgional Variants of Pronunciation (ID:236063)

Chapter I. British English as One Tongue of Many Voices 1.1 Contemporary Dialectology: Essence and Main Notions It may be surprising that the major step toward studying dialects systematically begins in the latter half of the 19th century, although there is a long history of observation of dialect differences prior to this time. [9, p.6] Dialectology is the scientific study of linguistic dialect, a sub-field of sociolinguistics that studies variations in language based primarily on geographic distribution and their associated features. [5, p. 2] Dialectologists are ultimately concerned with grammatical, lexical and phonological features that correspond to regional areas. Pter Trudgill and William Labov are among the most prominent researchers in this field. Traditional dialectology aimed to draw up linguistic atlases showing the geographical distribution of different dialect forms. The information collected for these dialect atlases has been an invaluable resource even to present-day dialectologists, providing a valuable snapshot of the variety of different dialect structures used at a particular point in time.[5, p.10] Sociolinguistic dialectology aimed to do the recordings obtained during data collection enabled researchers not just to analyse continuous speech but also to examine how consistently speakers used different dialect forms in their speech. It became readily possible to examine, through a quantitative analysis, the relative proportions of different dialect variants used by individuals, and, through aggregation, by different (age, gender, ethnic, etc) groups in society. [5, p.11] The nexy our task is to study the main terms in dialectology. Such terms are language, dialect and accent. The issue of how we can distinguish between a language and a dialect is quite important for many dialectologists. R. Hickey proposes to regard languages as a collection of mutually intelligible dialects and a dialect as a recognisable variety within this group. Anthropological linguists define dialect as the specific form of a language used by a speech community. In other words, the difference between language and dialect is the difference between the abstract or general and the concrete and particular. From this perspective, no one speaks a "language," everyone speaks a dialect of a language. [20, p.18] Hughes A. raises the problem concerning the terms accent and dialect. They are often used interchangeably, although in strict linguistic terms they refer to different aspects of language variation. [12, p.135] Many people, including a lot of linguists, do not draw a sharp distinction between the meanings of the two terms, however. It is quite common, particularly in North American texts on linguistics, for the term ‘dialect’ to be used to refer to a characteristic combination of phonetic features (i.e. what we are calling an accent). A dialect is a complete system of verbal communication (oral but not necessarily written). [14, p. 24] Dialects differ from other varieties in three specific ways: 1) lexis (vocabulary); 2) grammar (structure); 3) phonology (pronunciation or accent).