Geographical Dialects

The Sydney Summer Olympics have given us all an opportunity to hear a variety of English quite different from our own. Not only do Australians pronounce words differently than Canadians or Americans, they use many words and expressions we've never heard, such as "stonker" (full/sated) and "fossick" (systematically search).

A dialect is a variety of language characterized by systematic differences from other varieties of the same language in terms of grammar or vocabulary (or both). Anyone one who has called a "soda" a "pop" in the wrong part of the country can attest to this. An accent, on the other hand, refers only to pronunciation. So for example, someone from Illinois might pronounce "pie" like "peye", while someone from Georgia would pronounce it as "pah." These differences are largely minor; we certainly have no difficulty understanding one another.

The dialects described above are geographical dialects. Geographical dialects arise when groups of speakers are isolated from one another by a barrier--rivers, mountains, lakes, oceans, and national boundaries, to name a few. Over time, the speakers on each side of the barrier sound less and less alike. In the Appalachian Mountains, speakers were isolated for generations from those in the valleys, and as a result, their dialect has marked differences in both grammar and vocabulary. For instance, the following are perfectly grammatical sentences in Appalachian English:

"She's a-washin'." (doing it right now)

"I disremembered." (I forgot)

While these differences may be amusing on first glance, the meaning behind them is largely transparent. When speakers of one language variety can understand speakers of another language variety, linguists say that these varieties are mutually intelligible and therefore dialects. When speakers cannot understand one another, we call these varieties separate languages. In fact, dialects become languages when they are no longer mutually intelligible.

Now, you might be thinking, what about a "language" like Chinese? If you ask the Chinese government how many languages are spoken in China, they will say one--Chinese. But if you take a speaker from Chengdu and ask him to speak to a speaker from Shenyang, you (and they) will quickly realize that they cannot understand each other at all! By the definition above, these are separate languages. However, linguistics is often (and rightly so) superceded by politics, and in China, the written language is the same regardless of "dialect". Further, China is not culturally homogenous, and in order to unify 1.5 billion people, a common language, even if it is so on paper only, is a necessity.

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