How do dialects develop

We would love to hear your thoughts, so please feel free to leave a comment below. Post your Comment. Tomedes Translation Services is committed to broadening the horizons of individuals and businesses in the United States and internationally, through the effective use of professional translation services. Translation Services. Interpretation Services. Content Writing Services. Professional Proofreading. Testing Services.

Globalization Consulting Services. Machine Translation Post-editing. Blog for Translators. Tomedes Insights. Translation News. Supported file formats. Our Translators. Translation Conferences.

Customer Reviews. Summary Tool. Word Count Ratio. Who We Are. Our Quality Guarantee. All Rights Reserved. Sign In. What Is a Language? There are actually various ways that we can go about it: 1. A language is a system of communication used by a particular country or community. Do You Speak American? Dialects in Schools and Communities, Second Edition This book describes dialect differences in American English, explores the impact in education and daily life for dialect speakers, and outlines issues facing educational practitioners working with these students.

Ebonics: The Urban Education Debate, 2nd Edition This publication traces the distant and recent history of the Ebonics debate in the United States, with leading scholars placing the debate within its historical and contemporary context.

Literacy and Language Diversity in the United States, 2nd Edition In this revised and updated edition, the author takes a fresh look at the differences between native and nonnative speakers of English in the United States in terms of their literacy performance and educational achievement. Sociolinguistic Variation: Theories, Methods, and Applications This publication features the work of widely recognized scholars in the field of sociolinguistics, brought together to honor the long and productive career of Walt Wolfram, a founder of the field and a strong believer in linking high-quality research to meaningful application.

Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group.

Create a free Team What is Teams? Learn more. Where do accents and dialects come from? Ask Question. Asked 10 years, 11 months ago. Active 6 years, 10 months ago. Viewed 53k times. Reading recommendations on this topic would be welcome. Improve this question. As with biologial speciation, linguistic speciation between two dialects occurs primarily because of long periods of separation.

Mostly this is geographic separation, but it can also be social, and there are many, many ways to use language differences as social markers. Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. What do we mean by "dialect"?

Defining what a "language" is in real terms A good way to think about why we have dialects and accents is if you don't think about a language as a single entity of some kind.

Differences in language change today There are certain things that drive a language towards greater and broader coherence nowadays. Improve this answer. Community Bot 1. Kosmonaut Kosmonaut 49k 10 10 gold badges silver badges bronze badges. Excellent answer. As they say, "a language is a dialect with an army and navy. Are you saying that isolated, coherent groups of speakers will end up speaking a language that diverges greatly from its closest kins in innovation and change?

If so, that is certainly sometimes the case, but it is also often not the case. Icelandic has been quite isolated and coherent for many hundred years, but it has remained remarkably stable and unchanging throughout its history—certainly compared to the much less isolated and coherent other Scandinavian languages who have all evolved much farther from their common source.

The isolation does not even have to be geographical. Kosmanaut's conclusion, which I agree with, seems to belie his opening claim, which I disagree with. By OED definitions, dialects are subsets of a language. The rulers of a culture speak a language , with regional accents and slang that may develop, over time in isolation, into dialects. Each dialect remains a denizen to the original language, until the masters of the language permit the dialect to stand independently.

A dialect grows into a language when its speakers establish a linguistic impact that sets it apart as a discrete ruling unit.

ScotM: Dialects have nothing whatever to do with rulers. It is often the case that one dialect of a language becomes established as the standard form of the language, and that will usually be a dialect used by the political or economic elite. Politically and culturally that dialect will be treated differently from the other dialects, but linguistically it is just a dialect.

Show 2 more comments. Except that even that 'oo' pronunciation is becoming less common among Canadians. Unifying Forces A language has lexical rules established by dictionaries. These rules are enforced in a very pragmatic fashion: I rule the house! Some traditional dialects are disappearing, but new urban and multicultural varieties continue to arise. This can be influenced by music.

In addition, people change the language they use depending on who they are talking to, and why they are talking, for example formally in a job interview or casually to friends and family at home. People also change the way they speak to make themselves understood more easily, a phenomenon called linguistic accommodation.

Ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality and age can all affect language usage. And there are also personal reasons for using dialects and accents to identify yourself. I have lived in England for 16 years, but you can still hear my Scottish accent and that is unlikely to change. And as the modern world becomes increasingly connected, linguists have wondered whether dialects and accents in general are bound to disappear.

But while there is much discussion about the disappearance of dialects and accents, public interest in the subject is growing. A consensus has not yet been reached.