Accent or Dialect?
"Accent" and "dialect" are words that are often confused. I decided to discover the difference--and this is what I learned.
Language: A system of spoken communication that is used by a particular community or country.
Dialect: Any variety of a language that is peculiar to a specific region or social group.
So, what exactly does that mean?
Well, linguists say that people speak different languages if they cannot understand each other. This means that I speak a different language than someone who lives in China. English is definitely a different language than Chinese!
However, if two speakers from different places can understand each other, they are speaking dialects of the same language. For example, my friends and I in the Rocky Mountain region can understand what people say in the southern part of the United States, and they can understand us. However, we speak at different speeds, we pronounce some sounds differently, and we use different words for some of the same things. In each area, we have our own grammar, vocabulary, syntax, common expressions and pronunciation rules that make their dialect unique from other dialects in the United States. That means we all speak a dialect, and in the United States, we all speak different dialects of American English.
So what is an accent? Well, we all pronounce words in a certain way--which means we all have an accent. But because our accent is just the way we pronounce words, it is only part of our dialect--and our dialect is just our part of our common language.
