Comments on: Accent And Dialect

By: Lapomme

Lapomme — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 21:50:54 +0000

I know as it stands, this is absolutely right… but I disagree with the way ‘accents’ and ‘dialects’ are recognised in general (in the UK at least). In my opinion, the reason why most regional variations in the UK are described as accents is because we all use the same spelling conventions, that happen not to be regular for any of us. Therefore whenever people from different ends of the country say a word, they are said to be pronouncing the same word differently (accent). But what would happen if we had a spelling reform? There would be no possible way of having one spelling for the whole country, we would need several to keep everyone happy. Whereas Northerners would be happy to keep words like ‘grass’, ‘bath’ etc the same, Southerners would not. They could turn out something like ‘grahss’, ‘bahth’ or ‘grarse’ and ‘barth’. Take a word like ‘castle’ and it could turn out very different; maybe ‘kassel’ in the north and ‘karssol’ in the south. How would the situation be described now? Would we be pronouncing the same word differently, or would we have two different words? As far as I’m concerned, it’s the latter… and that to me is a situation that makes far more sense. Of course, it wouldn’t be in the government’s interests to do that to the most powerful language in the world… but my point is, it would be possible. And that alone to me undermines the whole argument that ‘accents’ and ‘dialects’ are different. Compare Castillian Spanish ‘playa’ (beach) with Catalan ‘platja’. They could easily be said to be the same word, if they were spelled the same, just pronounced differently. However, dialects are given more recognition in Spain whereas they are suppressed in England. Feel free to shoot my theory down

By: Sharon

Sharon — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 13:32:20 +0000

I’m in much the same boat, Kirsty, combining a British accent with the accent learned from my Trinidadian mother.

By: kirsty

kirsty — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 18:25:12 +0000

As a child, you can very easily pick up accents. I was born in Manchester, though my parents are Scottish. I had a scottish accent. By my first few weeks of school, I had picked up a Manchester one! then, when we moved to the Netherlands, thus only hearing Manchester accents on Dinnerladies (a comedy), i began to pick up a scottish accent from my parents again. I now have half a scottish accent. i’m not quite sure what the other half is. all I know is that my English teacher does a feeble attempt at immitating my accent lol

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By: Inspirational Editor

Inspirational Editor — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 18:27:19 +0000

“Standard English” usually depends on where a book is published. Books published in the UK follow UK conventions, those published in the States follow US conventions, and those published in Canada often follow a mix of conventions depending on the book’s target market.