Question

write an essay about various types and varieties of English

Answer 1

Introduction

This guide is written for students who are following GCE Advanced level (AS and A2) syllabuses in English Language. This resource may also be of general interest to language students on university degree courses, trainee teachers and anyone with a general interest in language science.

Please look at the contents page for a full list of specific guides on this site.

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The Assessment and Qualifications Alliance (AQA) has made this a subject for examination within a general area of study described as Language and Social Contexts. The AQA outlines the requirements for students taking this module in this way:

In preparing this topic area candidates should study: the variety of regional forms in terms of accent, lexis and grammar; the social functions that dialects perform; the relationship between dialects and Standard English; historical and contemporary changes, where appropriate. In particular, they should examine

social factors affecting variations within dialects;
representations in writing.
This guide will reflect the categories that the AQA examiners identify, but will look at English dialects more widely than appears in their description.

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What is dialect?
It may be useful to begin by deciding what a dialect is. Dialect describes a language variety where a user's regional or social background appears in his or her use of vocabulary and grammar. This description is a very open one, and there is continuing debate about its application to particular varieties. Before considering these, it may help to explain the related feature of accent. (Some linguists include accent, along with lexis and grammar, as a feature of dialect.)

Accent denotes the features of pronunciation (the speech sounds) that show regional or social identity (and arguably that of an individual, since one could have a personal and idiosyncratic accent).

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Problems with this description
Size | Politics and language varieties

This description of dialect lacks precision and coherence. We can see these as problems, but reflecting on the reasons for them brings more understanding of what dialect means, and of why an exact definition is an impossibility. That is, any dialect is a generalization from the individual language use of a wider population. It comes from observation and perhaps some objective study. But we will not, if we stand outside St. Mary-le-Bow church in London, hear everyone around us speaking a uniform variety of English that matches a description of “Cockney”. We will, however, if we speak to a hundred people who have lived there for more than ten years, observe some common features of lexis, grammar and phonology that we would not find commonly used if we repeated the observation in Aberdeen, Hull or Plymouth.

There is a more fundamental objection to the conventional description of dialect - and this is that all language is dialect, including Standard English. This was originally a regional dialect, but has become a prestige variety, favoured by the courts, government, the civil service, the officer class of the armed services and the elite universities. Moreover there is a prescriptive tradition in education and broadcasting that has formalised the status and prestige of both written and spoken standard English.

Barrie Rhodes, of the Yorkshire Dialect Spciety, states this more bluntly:

Increasingly, we have come to criticise the whole concept of dialect (and associated adjectives such as “traditional” and “regional”); we now subscribe more to the notion of idiolect in recognition of the fact that there are as many “dialects” as people. For instance, one of my friends in Norway uses the musical hall northern expression “Ee, by gum!” and so, increasingly, does her daughter. My friend says she picked up this expression from one of her mother's in-laws in Lancashire.

Now, given that this expression is habitually used by two people in Lillestrom, does it now make it part of that locality's