3.4.2

Introduction to Accents & Dialects

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Accents and Dialect - Introduction

One of the most obvious ways we can tell differences in language is by listening to how people pronounce things.

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Accent and dialect

  • In linguistics, we use the terms accent and dialect.
    • We say that dialect is the words that are fairly unique to that area.
    • The term accent describes how we say words. Everybody speaks with an accent, even if they think they don’t. You will often hear people say that they ‘don’t have an accent’, but this is not true – people have difficulties understanding that they have an accent because they believe that they speak ‘normally’.
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Writing about accents

  • Before we can look at accent, we need to look at how you write about accents for your exam.
  • When writing about a sound, we always write the phoneme (unit of sound) in two forward slashes like this: /a/.
  • When describing longer sounds, we use ‘:’ after the symbol.
  • To transcribe sounds, we use the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet). These are freely available online. But you will not be given this in your Paper 2 exam, so you will have to memorise phonological features from the studies.

Jump to other topics

1Language Levels

2Language, The Individual & Society

3Language Diversity & Change

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