All 50 Uses

dialect
in
Do You Speak American?
(Auto-generated)

He even predicted that, with the Englishman yielding so much to American example, "what he speaks promises to become, on some not too remote tomorrow, a kind of dialect of American."†
Chpt Intr.

dialect = regional variety of a language
Surfer Dude or Valley Girl, the urban black language of hip-hop artists, or any of a dozen other regional or ethnic dialects that together constitute American English—some of them barely intelligible to one another?†
Chpt Intr.

dialects = regional varieties of a language
Some regional dialects have long enjoyed prestige; others suffer from generations of prejudice.†
Chpt Intr. *
A lot of attention had been paid to technical languages of science and mathematics, but the colloquial usages of everyday speech, the literary and philosophical dialects in which men do their thinking about the problems of morals, politics, religion, and psychology—these have been strangely neglected.†
Chpt Intr.
Will there be, for example, an irresistible drive toward a more standardized American, with consequent disenfranchisement, or neglect, of those whose dialects do not conform?†
Chpt Intr.
It takes the form of a journey through the most distinctive dialect regions of the United States, from the Northeast through the Middle Atlantic states, to the Great Lakes, down the Ohio River, through Appalachia to the Deep South, then on through Texas and California, ending in the Pacific Northwest.†
Chpt Intr.

dialect = regional variety of a language
Linguists draw their own maps to mark different dialect areas.†
Chpt Intr.
To use the terms in the latest map, "The Linguistic Atlas of North America," we travel through Eastern New England to New York, then to Philadelphia, then west into the Midland dialect, then to the Northern, the Southern, and on to the West.†
Chpt Intr.
(2) the notion that in a democratic society language must accommodate itself to the whims, idiosyncrasies, dialects, and sheer ignorance of underprivileged minorities, especially if these happened to be black, Hispanic, and, later on, female or homosexual;†
Chpt 1

dialects = regional varieties of a language
two Changing Dialects: Dingbatters Versus Hoi-Toiders Many Americans believe that television and radio are homogenizing our language, making all of us talk more alike.†
Chpt 2
Some dialects are indeed threatened with extinction; this is, however, caused not by the media but by movements of people.†
Chpt 2
Someone once observed that if you traveled down the Atlantic coast of the United States you would hear dozens of distinctive local dialects, but if you drove straight west across the country you would hear just one.†
Chpt 2
This is an oversimplification, but it holds a lot of truth, because there is more dialect diversity in the East than in the West.†
Chpt 2

dialect = regional variety of a language
As for the local dialect—or accent, as John Coffin would call it— with its characteristic ayuh for yes, "I think in this area it's going to be a lost thing.†
Chpt 2
Some other local dialect words are cunnin' for cute, numb for stupid, as in numb as a hake, and from away for anyone not from Maine.†
Chpt 2
The Maine way of talking is part of a larger speech pattern centered on Boston, known as the Eastern New England dialect.†
Chpt 2
Local dialects thrive when communities are isolated, which is how different dialects, even whole languages, evolved in the first place.†
Chpt 2

dialects = regional varieties of a language
Local dialects thrive when communities are isolated, which is how different dialects, even whole languages, evolved in the first place.†
Chpt 2
A number of island dialects on the eastern seaboard are in grave danger of extinction.†
Chpt 2
In the 1980s, a few elderly people still spoke Gullah, a dialect linguists trace back to the African slave trade.†
Chpt 2

dialect = regional variety of a language
The dialect on the island of Ocracoke, off the coast of North Carolina, about fifty miles south of Roanoke Island, site of the first British attempt to create a colony in America, is dying out because many outsiders have moved in, diluting native speech with their own.†
Chpt 2
Sometimes referred to as the Outer Banks Brogue, Ocracoke dialect is marked by unusual pronunciations of words like high and tide, which sound like hoi and toid, so that locals are often referred to as Hoi-Toiders.†
Chpt 2
In contrast to this, dialects in some island communities are getting stronger and more distinctive, because they have not been overrun by dingbatters.†
Chpt 2

dialects = regional varieties of a language
But, like lobsters in Maine, crabs are getting scarce, the island is losing population, and there is increasing contact with the outside world— all a common recipe for dialect dissipation, as the linguists call it.†
Chpt 2

dialect = regional variety of a language
Instead, the opposite is happening and is known as dialect concentration.†
Chpt 2
Also, Smith Islanders consider their dialect an important part of their cultural uniqueness, a badge of their independence and distinctiveness.†
Chpt 2
Smith Island's dialect is close to that on nearby Tangier Island, Virginia, so close that their common name for each other is yarney, derived from yarnin', or telling tales.†
Chpt 2
Walt Wolfram tells the story of a BBC television producer who came determined to film "Shakespearean" English spoken on Ocracoke, and approached Wolfram as the acknowledged expert on the local dialect.†
Chpt 2
Changing How Dialects Are Studied The earliest dialect studies looked for words particular to one region and drew lines to connect similarities of usage.†
Chpt 2

dialects = regional varieties of a language
Changing How Dialects Are Studied The earliest dialect studies looked for words particular to one region and drew lines to connect similarities of usage.†
Chpt 2

dialect = regional variety of a language
From those findings, they produced the first dialect maps.†
Chpt 2
More recently, linguists began marking dialect areas not by different vocabulary but by how differently words were pronounced.†
Chpt 2
Clusters of similarly colored dots define a dialect area but also show how pronunciations from a neighboring area can infiltrate or bleed into it—for example, how the typically Southern pronunciation of / (a single syllable resembling Ah) pops up in states north of the Mason-Dixon Line, where the usual pronunciation makes / sound more like two syllables, Eye-ee.†
Chpt 2
The dialect areas revealed by the new phonological approach, mapping by pronunciations, still correspond closely with the old dialect mapping by local word use, as shown, for example, in the comprehensive Dictionary of American Regional English.†
Chpt 2
The dialect areas revealed by the new phonological approach, mapping by pronunciations, still correspond closely with the old dialect mapping by local word use, as shown, for example, in the comprehensive Dictionary of American Regional English.†
Chpt 2
Linguists are impressed by how stable the traditional boundaries remain, between North, Midland, and South dialect regions, even with all the modern movement of people.†
Chpt 2
Walt Wolfram says, "The first group to settle an area seems to have a lasting effect on the dialect area.†
Chpt 2
And even though we've got all these changes over a couple of hundred years, the original dialect boundaries seem to be fairly intact still.†
Chpt 2
There are startling vowel changes in the largest American dialect areas, North and South.†
Chpt 2
These dialect differences are the major reasons why computers cannot understand people.... Now, we don't know yet what's driving the whole engine, but we know it's the same forces that have led to this tremendous dispersion of our language family.†
Chpt 2
One of the first to notice this was a French dialectician, Louis Gauchat, who studied changing pronunciations in the dialect of a small village in the Swiss Alps.†
Chpt 2
People in St. Louis, for example, continue to merge the sound "ahr" in words such as car, are, far with the "ohr" sound found in corps, or, for— strong enough to be a defining feature of a St. Louis dialect.†
Chpt 2
In a time when some dialects are disappearing, the old coal-and-steel city is clinging to, even promoting, "Pittsburghese" as a mark of pride and local identity.†
Chpt 2

dialects = regional varieties of a language
This Pittsburgh dialect has become a commodity in books and T-shirts.†
Chpt 2

dialect = regional variety of a language
In the old days, when most men worked in the steel mills, it didn't matter how they talked, Johnstone says, because each felt like one of the guys, but with employment now shifting to the service industries, the local dialect can work against them.†
Chpt 2
John Baugh, a Stanford linguist, believes that mainstream media dialect is well understood by speakers of American English from almost every background, but that media influence on actual speech patterns is not great, because those speech patterns are really shaped locally.†
Chpt 2
And when they were not careful, were just speaking casually, they stayed with their 'r'—less dialect.†
Chpt 3
Let's face it, when I grew up—I mean, erudite people spoke British dialect, and there was no American dialect that was really anything but at best neutral.†
Chpt 3
Let's face it, when I grew up—I mean, erudite people spoke British dialect, and there was no American dialect that was really anything but at best neutral.†
Chpt 3
What has emerged instead in the United States is a fairly stable grammatical standard with major variations in how it is spoken according to the different dialect regions.†
Chpt 3

Click For
Best Example Sentences
From Other Sources

Definitions:

(1) (dialect)
a regional variety of a language

A dialect can use a different accent, vocabulary, and grammar than other dialects of the same language.
(2) (meaning too rare to warrant focus)

dialect in Do You Speak American? (Auto-generated)

dialect
in
Do You Speak American?
(Auto-generated)