This week's articles are about social linguistics, focusing on the variations of English dialects and accents in the United States. In McKay's chapter, we see how the spread of English has lead to the varieties of English not only between countries but within countries. He uses Nigeria as an example: it has four varieties of English that are accepted at different social levels. The varieties in the English make it so that each one is unique yet they all come from the same roots, the same original language. I think that English, as well as other global languages, are always changing and evolving. With every new speaker there is a new way to pronounce or use a word and this should be notes and acknowledged instead of hidden.
Lippi-Green's article goes further into language variation and defines the difference between dialects and accents. Accents are when two varieties of a language are divided by phonology and dialect is when the language varies in morphological structures, syntax, lexicon, and semantics.
My parents struggle with dialect and I often have to explain why certain people from a region call something different than I do. Its such a difficult thing to explain because as a native American English speaker these things are 'known'- we learn them like we learn other social and cultural things, through school, books, television, movies, and social interactions. These differences were most apparent to me when I studied abroad and met people from everywhere in the United States. Their accents and dialects stood out among our Chicago accent and we loved hearing each other talk. We all laughed and questioned certain things but in the end we never felt that one accent was better than another, an ideal that we should carry on in the classroom.
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