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The English Language is now truly global. It has better than four hundred and twenty million native
speakers in England, Scotland, Ireland, Canada, the United States, South Africa, New Zealand,
Australia, Belize, and several Caribbean islands. There are at least as many citizens of other
countries, born to other languages, who also know English and speak it fluently. Some estimate
this number at more than six hundred million. The number of other individuals who know some
English and can communicate in satisfactory fashion is put somewhere between one and one and a half
billion. All added up, around one third of all the people on the Earth can speak to one another
in a single language, and almost all of them in one of two closely related dialects of this
language. This is unprecedented in the history of the world--like the tower of Babel in
reverse.
Not all of us speak English in precisely the same manner because it is divided, as are all other major
languages, into a number of regional dialects and accents. Before I discuss the number and
extent of each, I must pause to offer a perspective and a few definitions, hopefully to clarify a complex
and sometimes controversial situation.
English speech is a continuum, a spectrum of slightly different idioms spread across the countryside
and around the world. As you travel through the English speaking world, you can observe a
gradual change of vocabulary, syntax, and pronunciation, shading from place to place. In
England you may not have to travel very far to see a substantial difference; in the U.S. you may have
to go half way across the country. When the difference is great enough we say that you have
entered an area where a different dialect is spoken. This simple concept has touched off some
ferocious debates because there is no objective and agreed-upon standard for deciding how different is
different enough. Is any measurably varied brand of speech associated with a region or class of
people to be considered a dialect? Does the difference have to be obvious to an average person
or require a trained linguist and phonetician? For example, is the speech of Northern California
and that of Southern California to be considered different dialects just because I can hear a slight
difference in the pronunciation of certain vowels? On the other extreme, Castillian and Catalan
have long been considered to be dialects of Spanish. However, a citizen of Madrid and one from
Barcelona, not having studied each other's language, will not be able to communicate with any facility. The division of several languages, including English, is affected by political
considerations on the one hand, as well as by academic hair-splitting on the other. I would like to lay before you the criterion which I learned as a college linguistics student because it can easily
offer some guidance in the examples above and it is fairly easy to apply elsewhere.
Consider the concept of the "naive speaker". This would be a individual personally unfamiar with
any but his own variety of speech. Such a person would be very hard to find as an adult due to
the broadening influences of travel, television, radio, and movies, but children often qualify.
Interactions between pairs of naive speakers can provide the basis for deciding whether a language or
dialect boundary exists. For example, if two such people cannot communicate successfully,
perhaps picking out the occasional word, but not even getting the gist of each other's statements, then
they speak two different languages. Further, if a pair of naive speakers can communicate
successfully, but with some surmountable difficulties caused by differing pronunciation, vocabulary, or
grammar, then these two speak different dialects of the same language. Last, if two individuals
can communicate readily, but each notices some difference in pronunciation in the speech of the other,
then they belong to different accent groups. Of course, exactly where the lines are drawn is still
a judgement call because we are trying to make divisions in what is actually a continuity, but the
criteria proposed here are a magnitude more objective that the standards which are generally used and
argued over.
Using the yardstick established above, let us look through a few parts of the world to see where we
should draw the lines. In the first example given above, Southern and Northern Californians do
not speak different dialects. In fact, since the difference in speech between Los Angeles and
San Francisco can only be heard by a trained phonetician, and not by ordinary people, then these
regions don't even have different accents. If you have to slap a label on it, they have differing
regional subvarieties. In our second example we considered part of the situation in Spain where
traditionally they have claimed four dialects. These are Castilian, Leonese, Galician, and Catalan. By our criteria, the first two are slightly more than different accents, the third is a
dialect of Portugese, not Spanish, and the forth is an independent language somewhat related to the
Provencal dialect of French. Remember what I said about politics. A little farther
Northeast in Europe is Scandanavia with four languages, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, and Icelandic. Speakers of the first three can fairly readily understand each other, especially the second and
third, but Iceland is the odd man out. Perhaps we should consider the first three as dialects of
Continental Scandanavian and Iclandic as an independent language. In Germany there are
several major dialects, but the main division is between Platt Deutsch and Hoch Deutsch, spoken in
Northern and Southern Germany respectively. Even though the differences between these two
are fairly great, communication is possible. The fun part is that two other nearby "languages",
Dutch from the Netherlands and Flemish from Belgum are so close to Platt Deutch that they could be
considered sub-dialects of German.
Now we come at last to English. Of course there are distinct dialects of our language, but the
number is subject to much debate. I can only speak comprehensively about the situation in my
own country and so I will dwell most heavily on North American English. I will use the criteria
outlined above to describe the major dialect divisions there and then I will give a rough account of
other English dialects throughout the world
The majority dialect in the U.S. is commonly known as GA--that is General American English.
Including Canada it has perhaps two hundred million speakers. Some authorities divide GA into
at least four dialects within the U.S. proper, but others, and I, think that Inland Northern, Northern
Midwestern, Midlands, and Western are not dialects proper but merely accent groups. These
have almost no differences in grammar, syntax, and vocabulary; and differences in pronunciation are
never an impediment to communication. The speech of the Northern East Coast, New England,
as we call it, once had a distinctive dialect and covered a fairly wide area. However, now it is
much reduced and its characteristic features have largely been lost, and so we may consider it an
accent group as well. Educated Southern speakers, from the Southern East Coast to New
Mexico, generally speak GA also, but with their own characteristic accent. Less educated
speakers from this region have vocabulary and grammatical differences from GA, and so probably rate
dialect status. Actually, in this region there are two distinct styles of speech, Highland and
Lowland Southern. The former has "r" pronounced in all positions, and the latter is "r dropping".
There is one other idiom in the U.S. called African American English Vernacular (AAEV).
This is, without a doubt, a distincive dialect of English, with grammatical, vocabulary, and
pronunciation differences from GA. It is a social dialect and is not confined to any particular
region of the country. To sum up, we have two distinctive dialects, GA and AAEV; probably one
more, the Southern, in two varieties; and perhaps one additional if New England speech is considered
distinctive enough.
In Canada, the situation is much like the U.S. The western two thirds of the country speaks a
fairly uniform brand of English, almost indistinguishable from that heard below the border. As
we move toward the East Coast, regional accents become more prominent, until you might find speech
qualifying as a dialect in the far Eastern part of the country.
In the Southern Hemisphere, English is spoken in South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand.
Colonists to these countries came from roughly the same region of England and during about the same
period, so we find many similarities in the speech of these three countries. There are, of
course, words unique to each variety and a few minor pronounciation differences, but over all, perhaps
we could consider these three to be regional varieties of one dialect. This is a tentative
analysis, and probably a controversial one, but the fact is that the citizens of these three distant
countries do not have much trouble understanding each other.
In the British Isles we have a situation quite different from the regions discussed above.
Dialects are numerous, especially throughout England, and this is to be expected.
Wherever a language has been the longest, it is likely to have differentiated into the most abundant
varieties, some almost mutually incomprehensible. I will not attempt to give any sort of
comprehensive listing of all of these, but I will concentrate on only three major idioms, RP (educated
Southern British), Scottish (Scots), and Irish. The first is what we know as "BBC English" and is
widespread in England as the speech of educated people. It had its origin in Southern England,
but now it is often spoken elsewhere within regions where there may be highly divergent dialects as
well. There is a Northern variety of RP, differing mostly in pronunciation, which has traits
shared with Scottish speech. Scotland has its own dialect standard, and probably several
distinct dialects within its borders. They are deliniated by considerable differences in
pronunciation and vocabulary from other varieties of English. In Ireland, the speech has much
in common with Scottish English and also shares some traits with North American speech. Here
also there are likely to be several distinctive dialects.
So now what do we have? Even though English is a world-wide language, its grammar and
syntax are surprisingly uniform. Each dialect outlined above has a set of words unique to it,
but most of the vast English vocabulary is used in common by all. Pronunciation varies from
region to region, of course, but seldom to the point of incomprehension. Wherever a native
English speaker comes from, he will have little trouble communicating with another, even if they come
from opposite sides of the globe. Truly an amazing situation, eh?
The remainder of this page contains links to other pages which have information on some of the
varieties of English mentioned above. They will require some knowledge of phonetics and
especially ASCII-IPA. If you already know something about these subjects or wish to learn
more, pursue the links. So far I only have data on standard British speech and American
GA. I hope in the future to have comprehensive descriptions of other dialects as well.
The link to the page on British speech will take you directly to Justin B. Rye's phonetics page. From
here you can backtrack to his homepage where there is much interesting material. The page on
GA describes my own speech, which is typical of the Western U.S. and Canada, with a few listed
idiosyncracies and regionalisms.
British American
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