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Dialects can be classified at broader or narrower levels: within a broad national or regional dialect, various more localised sub-dialects can be identified, and so on. The combination of differences in pronunciation and use of local words may make some English dialects almost unintelligible to speakers from other regions without any prior ...
Variation is a characteristic of language: there is more than one way of saying the same thing in a given language. Variation can exist in domains such as pronunciation (e.g., more than one way of pronouncing the same phoneme or the same word), lexicon (e.g., multiple words with the same meaning), grammar (e.g., different syntactic constructions expressing the same grammatical function), and ...
An opposite example is Chinese, whose variations such as Mandarin and Cantonese are often called dialects and not languages in China, despite their mutual unintelligibility. National boundaries sometimes make the distinction between "language" and "dialect" an issue of political importance.
Part of map 72 of the Atlas linguistique de la France, recording local forms meaning "today". Dialectologists record variation across a dialect continuum using maps of various features collected in a linguistic atlas, beginning with an atlas of German dialects by Georg Wenker (from 1888), based on a postal survey of schoolmasters.
Dialectology (from Greek διάλεκτος, dialektos, "talk, dialect"; and -λογία, -logia) is the scientific study of dialects: subsets of languages.Though in the 19th century a branch of historical linguistics, dialectology is often now considered a sub-field of, or subsumed by, sociolinguistics. [1]
Dialect and register may thus be thought of as different dimensions of linguistic variation. For example, Trudgill suggests the following sentence as an example of a nonstandard dialect that is used with the technical register of physical geography: There was two eskers what we saw in them U-shaped valleys. [16]
While there are other types of regional variation in Peninsular Spanish, and the Spanish of bilingual regions shows influence from other languages, the greatest division in Old World varieties is from north to south, with a central-northern dialect north of Madrid, an Andalusian dialect to the south, and an intermediary region between the two ...
Most Wu dialects retain the tone categories of Middle Chinese, but in Shanghainese several of these have merged. Many Chinese varieties exhibit tone sandhi, in which the realization of a tone varies depending on the context of the syllable. For example, in Standard Chinese a third tone changes to a second tone when followed by another third ...