Being a Better Writer: Dialects · 10:59pm Nov 20th, 2017
When you go to the grocery store, what do you call the wheeled apparatus that you collect your groceries in? Is it a shopping cart? Or is it a carriage? Or a trolley?
I'm willing to bet that a good number, if not most of you said "shopping cart." But if you were from the American northeast—say, Connecticut or Rhode Island—there's a high chance that you said "Carriage" instead. Or that you might say "bubbler" instead of "water fountain." Or "soda pop" instead of "soda." Or crud, maybe you're even one of those individuals who calls all sodas "coke." You know, as in "Get me a coke," followed by "What do you want?" and "Oh, a Pepsi."
All of these differences (and many, many more, from snow machine to snowmobile) are examples of what are know as "regional dialects." Which makes today's post a bit of a companion piece to last week's on accents. And, I must admit, this topic wasn't on the list, but after a comment about the concept by reader ocalhoun (no, I don't know how you pronounce that either, but I've always read it as "o-cull-hoon") brought up the subject, I realized that it was worth posting about, rather than just giving it an offhand mention as I had previously done.
So, dialects! What are they, how do they come about, and—this part is a bit key—what separates a dialect from an accent? Because yes, they are two different things. You can have two individuals with the same accent but a different dialect.
I prefer Skuttlebutt, myself.
But in relation to the post, very nice
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That was a good post, although I must say I'm surprised you didn't mention the military because they are famous (or infamous
) for speaking in a nearly indecipherable mess of jargon and acronyms which can be so bad and service-specific that part of the job of liaison officers (e.g. a US Air Force officer in a US Army unit to help call in air strikes) is to act as a translator.