Sociolinguistics Dialect VS Accent

Emmanuel Nieto Vargas

The definition of sociolinguistic could easily be summarized in the study of the societys influences in the developing and performance of language. When we talk about influences of the society, were talking about beliefs, culture traditions, politics, economics aspects and a lot of other features which can cause a direct or non-direct change in the evolution of a language. Because of all this we can say that the sociolinguistic includes the study of the language in different contexts (How a specific language changes its way of performance from a place to other). Thanks to sociolinguistic we now know that English can be spoken not only with a British or an American variation but with a lot of them e.g. African English, Chicano English, Ireland English, and Australian English. Although most of those variations come from countries which have stayed English as their main language, there are also variations that come from countries which dont have the English as one of the main languages like the Canadians. In order to make this more understandable we must stand that there are two main concepts in sociolinguistic which are Dialect and Accent.

Shortly we can say that an accent is just how the pronunciation changes from a community to other and that a dialect includes all those deeper features of language but also pronunciation. So we can say that the accents are included in the dialect but because its well-known and remarkable in the actual performance of the language, its placed in the same level of the dialect. The variations of a language are classified in grammar, pronunciation and vocabulary. As I said the discrepancies in the way a language is spoken or written in some place or other are influenced mostly by the culture and the immediate social context, we can see a very clear example of this in the book of Yule, The Study of Language where he stays:

We recognize that the sentence You dont know what youre talking about will generally look the same whether spoken with an American accent or a Scottish accent.1 Both speakers will be using Standard English forms, but havedifferent pronunciations. However, this next sentence Ye dinnae ken whit yerhaverin aboot has the same meaning as the first, but has been written out inan approximation of what a person who speaks one dialect of Scottish English might say2. There are differences in pronunciation (e.g. whit, aboot), but there are also examples of different vocabulary (e.g. ken, haverin) and a different grammatical form (dinnae).
Yule G, The Study of Language, Cambridge University Press. Third Edition. 2005

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Accent Dialect

I guess this example is pretty enough in order to make a few more clear the difference of dialect and accent. Following the same line, its important to remark that usually an accent is acquired by a non-native English speaker, I said usually because even in communities where English is one of the main languages, the accent persists. In fact the acquisition of an accent or a dialect is clearly resulting of the geographic position and the division between these communities e.g. England and the United States of America are countries where English is the main language however the people in these countries talk different from each other, even inside of the same country, as result of the distances from America and Europe, because of years of separation, wars, and maybe only the physical distance, those two countries have been isolated and this affected the evolution of English. Then it makes us realize that the aspects which helped the language on its growth are different in England and America. And as it happens with English, it happens with other languages. But why there are different accents inside of a same country? The answer to this is pretty simple: its the same as the countries, the different cities have their own influences and in certain communities the average of immigrant people is bigger than in others, the fact of being close to a frontier makes easier the acquisition of new words and the combination of rules that came from outside. As conclusion we could remark the difference between dialect and accent as more clear and still standing the first statement: an accent is just how the pronunciation changes from a community to other and that a dialect

includes all those deeper features of language but also pronunciation. And finally say that it wasnt that hard as so much people think.