Regional variation

8.3.1. ‘Englishes’ (+levels of analysis)

The following dialogue is borrowed from a show on a British television channel. A man en-ters a petrol station shop.

Shop assistant: It’s self-serve.

Man: I don’t need any petrol, thanks.

Shop assistant: Good. ‘Cause we don’t have any. Only gas.

Can you see why the short conversation above is funny? In it, the Englishman uses the word petrol, and the American shop assistant gas, to name the fuel in cars. The humour comes from the shop assistant’s ignorance of the other variety of English. Can you continue listing similar examples? You probably know that British people put on trousers, live in flatsand go to shopsto buy sweets, whereas Americans wear pants, live in apartmentsand go to stores to buy candies. According to the countries or regions where English is spoken as a mother tongue (see Ch. 16 Bilingualism), we distinguish at least British (English, Irish, Scottish), American, Canadian and Australian English, but there are a large number of further varieties within those countries as well. In a number of countries which used to be English colonies, such as India or Hong Kong (in Asia) and Nigeria or Kenya (in Africa), English is spoken as an official second language in addition to the dozens of locally spoken vernacular lan-guages. These varieties differ from each other on many linguistic levels, from phonetics and phonology (see Ch. 2 Phonetics & Phonology – sounds) through the lexicon (see Ch. 10 Lex-icography – words) to syntax (see Ch. 4 Syntax – sentence grammar). In practical terms there are even more differences, for example, in orthography (spelling).

8.3.1. ‘Englishes’ (+levels of analysis)

Can you name the most famous English food? Fish and what? Well, it depends on where you are. In Britain, it is fish and chips. But be sure not to ask for chipsin an American restaurant, for you will not get the kind of fried potato you want. In the USA, the right term is French fries. To make things more confusing, however, Americans do use chips, but for the popular potato snack which looks very thin and round, and is packaged in a bag. These, by the way, are called crispsin Britain. Chips, French friesand crispsare examples of differences on the lexical level. Grammatical differences include what is considered plural (American (AmE) the police is vs. British (BrE) the police are) or whether the sick are treated in hospital(BrE) or in the hospital (AmE). A phonological example is the pronunciation of the rsound: in most of England, ris not pronounced after a vowel at the end of words (father, fair) or before a consonant (herb, Barbie), but in most of the USA, it is. Can’tis pronounced with the vowel sound of farin Britain but with the vowel sound of panin the States. Orthographic (spelling) differences include neighbor(AmE) and neighbour(BrE). Such differences make British, Irish, American, etc. English different regional varietiesof the same language.

8.3.2. We all speak a dialect

Lexical, grammatical and phonological differences continue to exist on a smaller scale within a country or a region. Regional variants or DIALECTs are the most well-known type of vari-ation and are traditionally studied by dialectologists.

Let us take a phonological example first, the pronunciation of r. Would you please pronounce fatherand farther? Now, did you say them differently? Most learners of English do: they pronounce the rin farther. However, most English people do not: they say [fa:Dә] for both words, because they speak an r-less variety. On the contrary, most Americans keep their r’s in words such as farther; so they say the two words differently, similarly to you. Nevertheless, this is only a tendency, which means there is regional variation. The r-less variety is charac-teristic of the south of England; but the northern regions, as well as Ireland and Scotland, keep their r’s. Likewise, while most Americans in the States do pronounce their r‘s, some Americans use an r-less variety, for instance in Boston or New York (or as some write, “Noo Yawk”) City. The variation of the rsound has historic origins in both Britain and the United States. (Note: The previously mentioned study of r-pronunciation in NYC tells us about so-ciolects and not dialects.)

The best-known examples of dialectal differences are words and expressions. For heavy rain, some say downpour, some say showeror toad frog stranglerin the middle and southern states of the American east coast. Some of these lexical varieties (such as the last) occur mostly in the south. You can find out more about lexical variation in the Middle and South Atlantic States of the USA if you click on the LAMSAS link in the Bibliography.

There may be interesting differences in grammar, which appear strange to the outsider. Did you know that an Irishman may say youswhen he means “you” in the plural (that is, for more than one people)? An American from the South (for example, from Georgia) may use

y’all(you+all) for the same. Standard English does not differentiate between singular and plural you.

You probably know very well that your mother tongue, Hungarian, also varies as you travel some distance from where you live. In or around Szeged for example, there are rules for the ö sound to be frequently (but by no means always) used in place of e. You can promise something by saying möglösz(instead of meglesz‘It will be (done)’). It is common to hear öszök(for eszek, eszem, ‘I eat’), or öttem(for ettem, ‘I ate’). So if you have eaten something up you may say mögöttem– which sounds exactly like ‘behind me’ with standard Hungarian pronunciation.

People may have different feelings about dialects and accents, yet these varieties continue existing.

If there are a large number of language phenomena (words, grammatical features, sound va-rieties) that appear only in one region, they distinguish a regional variety called DIALECT. So a dialect is neither “country language” nor some language variety your grandparents speak;

it is simply a geographical variety of language. We all speak a dialect of our mother tongue.

Does it surprise you that you speak a dialect? People usually think of others and not them-selves as dialect speakers. This is because of the everyday meaning of “dialect”: because it is usually considered different from the standard, perhaps incorrect or ill-educated. (You will be even more surprised soon to see that the standard is also a dialect.)

For now it is best to accept that a dialect is simply a regional variety in sociolinguistics, and because we usually grow up in one region, we speak that regional variety. Speakers of Hun-garian in and around Szeged, for instance, belong to the South Plain Region dialect.

8.3.3. Accent

In the example from Szeged above, it was the ACCENT, that is, the pronunciation pattern that we focused on. Accents represent varieties in pronunciation (phonetics and phonology).

An accent tells us which country or part of the country the speaker comes from; accordingly, people are said to have an Irish accent, an American accent, an Edinburgh accent, or a ‘South-ern drawl’ (as they say in the USA). A foreign accent warns that the speaker comes ‘from abroad’ and is not a native speaker of a language. Since accents are phonetic or phonological

8.3.3. Accent

variants, and do not involve lexical and syntactic features, they are not equivalent to dialects.

However, dialect regions may be recognized by the speakers’ characteristic accent. Received pronunciation (RP) is a highly prestigious accent in England.

So far we have distinguished sociolects (or social dialects, which are social varieties) and di-alects (or regional varieties). We also clarified the difference between dialect and accent.Note that we used the word ‘language’ for larger regional varieties like ‘Englishes’ (English English, American English, Australian English, etc.), but called smaller regional varieties ‘dialects’.

We shall see next if there is any difference between them.

8.3.4. Language or dialect?

Is Irish English a language or “just a dialect”? Is it a separate language, like Hungarian, Slovenian or Estonian, or is it just a dialect of English, like London Cockney or Boston Eng-lish? If the ‘thing’ spoken in a country is a language, then Irish English should be a language;

but one can argue that speakers of other varieties of English can very well understand Irish English, and then, according to this criterion called intelligibility (=‘understandability’), it is a dialect. We cannot really decide if Irish English is a dialect or a language.

It is not always easy to determine if a certain variety should be considered a language or a di-alect. Everyday thinking suggests that if speakers from two regions can understand one an-other (that is, if the two varieties are mutually intelligible), they speak dialects; and if they do not understand each other (that is, if the two varieties are mutually unintelligible), the speak-ers speak two different languages. This criterion often works but sometimes it does not: there

are mutually unintelligible dialects and mutually intelligible languages! In China, for example, Cantonese and Mandarin are mutually unintelligible varieties, that is, the speakers cannot un-derstand one another, yet Cantonese and Mandarin are considered dialects because they are spoken in one country and have a common writing system. On the other hand, Serbians and Croatians, who now live in different countries, understand each other perfectly. In case you think this is perhaps an exception, there will be more examples here. Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian speakers can more or less understand one another; Ukrainian and Russian (and many other Slavic languages) are mutually intelligible; and Hindi (in Northern India) and Urdu (in neighbouring Pakistan) are also mutually intelligible varieties. All these are consid-ered languages, and not dialects, because they are used in different countries or have different historical and cultural backgrounds. For instance, Croats are largely Catholic and use Latin script, whereas Serbs are mostly Orthodox and use Cyrillic letters in their writing.

To make things a bit more complicated, dialects are not really affected or separated by coun-try borders: for instance, German gradually changes as we go from north to more southern regions, even when crossing a country border. Therefore, we can speak about a dialect con-tinuum. Nearby languages also become similar, as the Italian spoken near the French border becomes more “French-like” and the neighbouring French variety more “Italian-like”. The same can be said about minority languages spoken in a country: ethnic Slovakian or Schwabish in Hungary sound more “Hungarian-like” than ‘mainland’ Slovakian or German.

As you can see, linguists have tried their best to distinguish dialect and language – but they simply cannot do so by using linguistic means. We cannot really define in linguistic terms where dialects end and languages start. For this reason, and also because of social and cultural factors such as national pride, religion and writing systems, sociolinguists usually let the speakers of that variety decide for themselves if they speak a dialect or a language.