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dialect
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The American Language, by Mencken
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On the contrary, they are keenly aware of the differences between the two dialects, and often discuss them, as the following pages show.†
*

dialects = regional varieties of a language
Perhaps one dialect, in the long run, will defeat and absorb the other; if the two nations continue to be partners in great adventures it may very well happen.†

dialect = regional variety of a language
Moreover, I have a hand for a compromise dialect which embodies the common materials of both, and is thus free from offense on both sides of the water—as befits the editor of a magazine published in both countries.†
But that compromise dialect is the living speech of neither.†
No historical study of American pronunciation exists; the influence of German, Irish-English, Yiddish and other such immigrant dialects upon American has never been investigated; there is no adequate treatise on American geographical names.†

dialects = regional varieties of a language
An American dialect will therefore be formed.†

dialect = regional variety of a language
What their professors try to teach is not their mother-tongue at all, but a dialect that stands quite outside their common experience, and into which they have to translate their thoughts, consciously and painfully.†
And in Latin-America, to come nearer to our own case, the native philologists have produced a copious literature on the matter closest at hand, [Pg006] and one finds in it very excellent works upon the Portuguese dialect of Brazil, and the variations of Spanish in Mexico, the Argentine, Chili, Peru, Ecuador, Uraguay and even Honduras and Costa Rica.†
I am not forgetting, of course, the early explorations of Noah Webster, of which much more anon, nor the labors of our later dictionary makers, nor the inquiries of the American Dialect Society,[9] nor even the occasional illuminations of such writers as Richard Grant White, Thomas S. Lounsbury and Brander Matthews.†
Webster, as we shall see, was far more a reformer of the American dialect than a student of it.†
The defect in the work of the Dialect Society lies in a somewhat similar circumscription of activity.†
Its constitution, adopted in 1889, says that "its object is the investigation of the spoken English of the United States and Canada," but that investigation, so far, has got little beyond the accumulation of vocabularies of local dialects, such as they are.†

dialects = regional varieties of a language
Even in this department its work is very far from finished, and the Dialect Dictionary announced years ago has not yet appeared.†

dialect = regional variety of a language
The meagreness of the materials accumulated in the five slow-moving volumes of /Dialect Notes/ shows clearly, indeed, how little the American philologist is [Pg008] interested in the language that falls upon his ears every hour of the day.†
And in /Modern Language Notes/ that impression is reinforced, for its bulky volumes contain exhaustive studies of all the other living languages and dialects, but only an occasional essay upon American.†

dialects = regional varieties of a language
The Cambridge History of English Literature, for example, says that English and American are now "notably dissimilar" in vocabulary, and that the latter is splitting off into a distinct dialect.†

dialect = regional variety of a language
It might be well argued, he goes on, that this strange dialect is as near to "the tongue that Shakespeare spoke" as "the dialect of Bayswater or Brixton," but that philological fact does not help to its understanding.†
It might be well argued, he goes on, that this strange dialect is as near to "the tongue that Shakespeare spoke" as "the dialect of Bayswater or Brixton," but that philological fact does not help to its understanding.†
Already in "Roughing It" he was celebrating "the vigorous new vernacular of the [Pg017] occidental plains and mountains,"[29] and in all his writings, even the most serious, he deliberately engrafted its greater liberty and more fluent idiom upon the stem of English, and so lent the dignity of his high achievement to a dialect that was as unmistakably American as the point of view underlying it.†
[36] /The Characters of American/—The characters chiefly noted in American speech by all who have discussed it are, first, its general uniformity throughout the country, so that, dialects, properly speaking, are confined to recent immigrants, to the native whites of a few isolated areas and to the negroes of the South; and, secondly, its impatient disdain of rule and precedent, and hence its large capacity (distinctly greater than that of the English of England) for taking in new words and phrases and for manufacturing new locutions out of its own materials†

dialects = regional varieties of a language
In place of the local dialects of other countries we have a general /Volkssprache/ for the whole nation, and if it is conditioned [Pg020] at all it is only by minor differences in pronunciation and by the linguistic struggles of various groups of newcomers.†
"The speech of the United States," said Gilbert M. Tucker, "is quite unlike that of Great Britain in the important particular that here we have no dialects."†
Outside of the Tennessee mountains and the back country of New England there is no true dialect.†

dialect = regional variety of a language
[39] "From Portland, Maine, to Portland, Oregon," agrees an English critic, "no trace of a distinct dialect is to be found†
[41] "When we remember," says the New International Encyclopaedia[42] "that the dialects of the countries (/sic/) in England have marked differences—so marked, indeed that it may be doubted whether a Lancashire miner and a Lincolnshire farmer could understand each other—we may well be proud that our vast country has, strictly speaking, only one language.†

dialects = regional varieties of a language
Even "educated American English," agrees the chief of modern English grammarians, "is now almost entirely independent of British influence, and differs from it considerably, though as yet not enough to make the two dialects —American English and British English—mutually unintelligible."†
The ladies and gentlemen of the American Dialect Society, though praiseworthy for their somewhat deliberate industry, fall into a similar fault, for they are so eager to establish minute dialectic variations that they forget the general language almost altogether.†

dialect = regional variety of a language
Some time before this, but after the publication of Bartlett's first edition in 1848, William C. Fowler, professor of rhetoric at Amherst, devoted a brief chapter to "American Dialects" in his well-known work on English[58] and in it one finds the following formidable classification of Americanisms: 1.†

dialects = regional varieties of a language
Schele de Vere, in 1872, followed Bartlett, and devoted himself largely to words borrowed from the Indian dialects, and from the French, Spanish and Dutch.†
The chief impediment to its wider acceptance lies in the fact that it is not, as it stands, a natural language, but an artificial amalgamation of peasant dialects.†
[41] W. W. Skeat distinguishes no less than 9 dialects in Scotland, 3 in Ireland and 30 in England and Wales†
/Vide/ English Dialects From the Eighth Century to the Present Day; Cambridge, 1911, p. 107 /et seq.†
Webster harbored no fantastic notion of abandoning English altogether, but he was eager to set up American as a distinct and independent dialect.†

dialect = regional variety of a language
The growing independence of the colonial dialect, not only in its spoken form, but also in its most dignified written form, had begun, indeed, to attract the attention of purists in both England and America, and they sought to dispose of it in its infancy by /force majeure/.†
§ 2 /Sources of Early Americanisms/—The first genuine Americanisms were undoubtedly words borrowed bodily from the Indian dialects—words, in the main, indicating natural objects that had no counterparts in England.†

dialects = regional varieties of a language
The total number of such borrowings, direct and indirect, was a good deal larger [Pg042] than now appears, for with the disappearance of the red man the use of loan-words from his dialects has decreased.†
[10] A curious phenomenon is presented by the case of /maize/, which came into the colonial speech from some West Indian dialect, went over into orthodox English, and from English into French, German and other continental languages, and was then abandoned by the colonists†

dialect = regional variety of a language
Whether or not /Yankee/ comes from an Indian dialect is still disputed.†
/To scoon/ was a verb borrowed by the New Englanders from some Scotch dialect, and meant to skim or skip across the water like a flat stone.†
/ J. H. Combs: Old, Early and Elizabethan English in the Southern Mountains, /Dialect Notes/, vol. iv, pt. iv, pp. 283-97.†
But the average Ohio boatman of 1810 or plainsman of 1815 was already speaking a dialect that the Englishman would have shrunk from as barbarous and unintelligible, and before long it began to leave [Pg067] its mark upon and to get direction and support from a distinctively national literature.†
Of more importance was the suggestive and indirect effect of his polysynthetic dialects, and particularly of his vivid proper names, /e.†

dialects = regional varieties of a language
/Coyote/ came from the Mexican dialect of Spanish; its first parent was the Aztec /coyotl/.†

dialect = regional variety of a language
e./, a mixture, much debased, of the German dialects of Switzerland, Suabia and the Palatinate.†

dialects = regional varieties of a language
This usage, of course, is native to English, as /aboard/ and /afoot/ demonstrate, but it is much more common in the Irish dialect, on account of the influence of the parallel Gaelic form, as in /a-n-aice/=/a-near/, and it is also much more common in American.†

dialect = regional variety of a language
The dissentient, Bristed, says that /to linch/ is in various northern English dialects, and means to beat or maltreat.†

dialects = regional varieties of a language
/ Terms of Approbation and Eulogy....by Elise L. Warnock, /Dialect Notes/, vol. iv, part 1, 1913.†

dialect = regional variety of a language
/Dialect Notes/, vol. iv, pt. v, 1916, p. 322.†
The word itself is from an Indian dialect, probably the Haitian, and came into American through the Spanish, in which it survives as /canoa/.†
I [Pg148] find the former in the title of an article in /Dialect Notes/, which plainly gives it scholastic authority.†

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(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 The American Language, by Mencken (Auto-generated)

dialect
in
The American Language, by Mencken
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