REGIONAL AND SOCIAL DIALECTS

The focus in this topic is on language variation in monolingual communities. People often use a language to signal
their membership of particular groups and to construct different aspects of their social identity. Social status, gender,
age, ethnicity and the kinds of social networks that people belong to turn out to be important dimensions of identity
in many communities.

Telephone rings.
Pat : Hello.
Caller : Hello, is Mark there?
Pat : Yes. Just hold on a minute.
Pat (to Mark) : There’s a rather well-educated young lady from Scotland on the phone for you.

The afore-mentioned example is a clear indication of how speech provides social and regional information.

Regional Variation

International Varieties

There are vocabulary differences in the varieties spoken in different regions. Australians talk of sole parents, for
example, while people in England call them single parents, and New Zealanders call them solo parents. South
Africans use the term robot for British traffic-light. British wellies (Wellington boots) are New Zealand gummies
(gumboots), while the word togs refers to very different types of clothes in different places. In New Zealand, togs are
what you swim in. In Britain you might wear them to a formal dinner.

Sometimes the differences between dialects are a matter of the frequencies with which particular features occur,
rather than completely different ways of saying things. People in Montreal, for example, do not always pronounce
the l in phrases like il pleut and il fait. Parisians omit the l too – but less often.

Intra-national or Intra-continental Variation

Rob : This wheel’s completely disjaskit.

Alan : I might could get it changed.
Rob : You couldn’t do nothing of the sort. It needs dumped.

This conversation between two Geordies (people from Tyneside in England) is likely to perplex many English
speakers. The double modal might could is typical Geordie, though it is also heard in some parts of the southern
USA. The expression needs dumped is also typical Tyneside, though also used in Scotland, as is the vocabulary item
disjasket , meaning ‘worn out’ or ‘completely ruined’. The way English is pronounced is also quite distinctive in
Tyneside, and perhaps especially the intonation patterns. Because they like the speech heard in television
programmes such as Auf Wiedersehen Pet, Byker Grove and Joe Maddison’s War, some people can imitate the tune
of Geordie speech – if nothing else. We are dealing here not just with different accents but with dialect differences
within a country, since the distinguishing forms involve grammatical usages and lexical items as well as
pronunciation.

Regional variation takes time to develop. British and US English, for instance, provide much more evidence of
regional variation than New Zealand or Australian English. Dialectologists can distinguish regional varieties for almost
every English county, e.g. Yorkshire, Lancashire, Northumberland, Somerset, Cornwall and so on, and for many towns
too.

Cross-continental Variation: Dialect Chains

Though a map suggests the languages of Europe or India are tidily compartmentalized, in reality they ‘blend’ into
one another. The varieties of French spoken in the border towns and villages of Italy, Spain and Switzerland have
more in common with the language of the next village than the language of Paris. From one village and town to the
next there is a chain or continuum.
Dialect chains are very common across the whole of Europe. One chain links all the dialects of German, Dutch and
Flemish from Switzerland through Austria and Germany, to the Netherlands and Belgium, and there is another which
links dialects of Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, French and Italian. A Scandinavian chain links dialects of Norwegian,
Swedish and Danish, so that Swedes and Norwegians in adjacent areas can communicate more easily than fellow-
Swedes from southern and northern Sweden. The same kind of dialect chains are found throughout India and China.
They illustrate very clearly the arbitrariness of the distinction between ‘language’ and ‘dialect’.

Social Variation

Languages are not purely linguistic entities. They serve social functions. In order to define a language, it is important
to look to its social and political functions, as well as its linguistic features. So a language can be thought of as a
collection of dialects that are usually linguistically similar, used by different social groups who choose to say that they
are speakers of one language which functions to unite and represent them to other groups. This definition is a
sociolinguistic rather than a linguistic one: it includes all the linguistically very different Chinese dialects, which the
Chinese define as one language, while separating the languages of Scandinavia which are linguistically very similar,
but politically quite distinct varieties.

RP: a social accent

In earlier centuries, you could tell where an English lord or lady came from by their regional form of English. But by
the early twentieth century, a person who spoke with a regional accent in England was most unlikely to belong to the
upper class. Upper-class people had an upper-class education, and that generally meant a public (i.e. private!) school
where they learned to speak RP. RP stands not for ‘Real Posh’ (as suggested to me by a young friend), but rather for
Received Pronunciation – the accent of the best educated and most
prestigious members of English society. It is claimed that the label derives from
the accent which was ‘received’ at the royal court, and it is sometimes
identified with ‘the Queen’s English’, although the accent used by Queen
Elizabeth II, as portrayed so brilliantly by Helen Mirren in the movie The Queen,
is a rather old-fashioned variety of RP. RP was promoted by the BBC for decades.
It is essentially a social accent, not a regional one. Indeed, it conceals a speaker’s regional origins.

As the triangle suggests, most linguistic variation will be found at the lowest socioeconomic level where regional
differences abound. Further up the social ladder the amount of observable variation reduces till one reaches the
pinnacle of RP – an accent used by less than 5 per cent of the British population. So a linguist travelling round Britain
may collect over a dozen different pronunciations of the word grass from the working-class people she meets in
different regions. She will hear very much less variation from the lower-middle-class and middle-class people. And, at
least until recently, the upper classes would pronounce the word as [gra:s] wherever they came from in England.

Standard English

Just as RP is a social accent, so is Standard English. It is the dialect used by well-educated English speakers
throughout the world. It is the variety used for national news broadcasts and in print, and it is the variety generally
taught in English-medium schools. There are also many standard Englishes. US Standard English is distinguishable
from South African Standard English and Australian Standard English, for instance, and all three differ from the
British standard dialect. In social terms, linguistic forms which are not part of Standard English are by definition non-
standard. Because the standard dialect is always the first to be codified, it is difficult to avoid defining other dialects
without contrasting them with the standard.

And then, because such non-standard forms are associated with the speech of less prestigious social groups, the
label inevitably acquires negative connotations.
The Relationship between Speech and Social Status or Class

Caste Dialects

People can be grouped together on the basis of similar social and economic factors. Their language generally reflects
these groupings – they use different social dialects. It is easiest to see the evidence for social dialects in places such
as Indonesia and India where social divisions are very clear-cut. In these countries, there are caste systems
determined by birth, and strict social rules govern the kind of behaviour appropriate to each group. The rules cover
such matters as the kind of job people can have, who they can marry, how they should dress, what they should eat,
and how they should behave in a range of social situations. Not surprisingly, these social distinctions have
corresponding speech differences. A person’s dialect is an indication of their social background.

There are quite clear differences in Indian languages, for example, between the speech of the Brahmins and non-
Brahmin castes. The Brahmin word for ‘milk’ in the Kannada language, for instance, is haalu, while non-Brahmin
dialects say aalu . The Tamil Brahmin word for ‘sleep’ is tuungu, while non-Brahmin dialects use the word orangu .

Social Class Dialects

The term social class is used here as a shorthand term for differences between people which are associated with
differences in social prestige, wealth and education. In most societies, bank managers do not talk like office cleaners,
and lawyers do not speak in the same way as the burglars they defend. Class divisions are based on such status
differences. Status refers to the deference or respect people give someone – or don’t give them, as the case may be
– Social dialect research in many different countries has revealed a consistent relationship between social class and
language patterns. People from different social classes speak differently.

The most obvious differences – in vocabulary – are in many ways the least illuminating from a sociolinguistic point of
view, though they clearly capture the public imagination. In the 1950s in England, many pairs of words were
identified which, it was claimed, distinguished the speech of upper-class English people (‘U speakers’) from the rest
(‘non-U speakers’). U speakers used sitting room rather than lounge (non-U), and referred to the lavatory rather than
the (non-U) toilet.

For the aspect of pronunciation, in one city the higher one’s social class, the more one pronounces post-vocalic [r]. In
the other, the higher one’s social class the fewer one pronounces. As with pronunciation, there is a clear pattern to
the relationship between the grammatical speech forms and the social groups who use them. The higher social
groups use more of the standard grammatical form and fewer instances of the vernacular or non-standard form. For
an example, regarding the third person singular form of the present tense regular verb (e.g. standard she walks vs
vernacular she walk), there is a sharp distinction between the middle-class groups and the lower-class groups.
Sociolinguists describe this pattern as sharp stratification. People are often more aware of social stigma in relation to
vernacular grammatical forms, and this is reflected in the lower incidence of vernacular forms among middle-class
speakers in particular. Note that this pattern is found both in a variety of US English spoken in Detroit, and in a
variety of British English spoken in Norwich.

Conclusion

The evidence discussed above indicates that the region/social class someone belongs to is generally signalled by
one’s speech patterns.