A dialect includes the pronunciations, grammar and vocabulary that people use within a group. Another definition that has been used to explain the difference is that dialects refer to the way people speak their mother tongue, and accents refer to how someone speaks another language.
A person speaking English with an Italian accent, for example. This can be useful for writers to talk about these two aspects differently. The word refers to variation in the language, and it is used to group together linguistic clusters in a more exacting way. There are geographic varieties Southern English, Boston English , social varieties upper-class Spanish, middle-class English , standard varieties Standard English, Standard French and much more. Try Babbel. Both Soddo and Endegen over on the ends?
Speech worked this way from village to village across Western Europe until recently, when unwritten, rural dialects started steadily disappearing. Now, a typical objection to using literature as the dividing line is that there is oral literature—the Iliad and the Odyssey likely originated as memorized poems. I recall an exquisite exchange I once caught between a man whom Nathan Lane could easily play, wearing an ascot and a long scarf and rather plummy of expression, and a man whom Sacha Baron Cohen would be cast as, straight-backed, earnest, and a little wary.
Nathan asked Sacha what he spoke. However, just about any Native American, Australian Aboriginal, or indigenous African tongue would easily rank among these in terms of difficulty, and actually, many obscure tongues around the world make any language on the FSI list look like a toy. A language, then, is indeed a dialect with an army and a navy; or, more to the point, a language is a dialect that got put up in the shop window. Yes, people can sit down in a room and decide upon a standardized version of a dialect so that large numbers of people can communicate with maximal efficiency—no more clau , clav , and ciav.
Accents affect the way that a language is pronounced. They can vary hugely within a country but, as a general rule, an accent relates to pronunciation only. When different regions use different words to describe the same thing, they can reasonably be considered to be using different dialects, rather than simply different accents.
The Geordie dialect in England is a good example of this. They are known for their distinctive speech patterns — as highlighted by pop star Cheryl Cole, whose Geordie accent was so strong that she was dropped as a judge from the US version of the X Factor due to her inability to be understood by all those with whom she was working.
However, the Geordie way of speaking amounts to more than simply a regional accent. It is a distinctive dialect within the English language, with its own words for a wide variety of things. Scran, canny, breeks, wazzock, clart — all of these are part of the Geordie dialect they mean something to eat, good, trousers, imbecile and to mess about, respectively. Reading not your thing? No worries! Different strokes for different folks.
Watch this video instead! The problem in trying to differentiate a language from a dialect, when it comes to the real world, is that boundaries are considerably blurred. While engaging formal language translation services or should that be dialect translation services?! Should we, then, consider Spanish and Portuguese to be dialects rather than separate languages? Many of those living in Spain and Portugal would surely object to such an assertion along with most of Latin America!
After all, Spanish and Portuguese are both Romance languages. Are they really dialects of the parent Romance language then? And, if so, should we consider Italian, French and Romanian in the same terms? Mutual intelligibility is, in itself, a red herring when it comes to defining the difference between a language and a dialect. We consider the variations of English that are spoken around the globe to be dialects that are mutually intelligible.
However, mutual intelligibility can apply to entire languages as well. Danes, Swedes and Norwegians are able to converse fairly comfortably, despite each speaking a different language. So should we therefore reclassify them as dialects, instead of languages? And what about Chinese languages — or should that be dialects?
We consider Mandarin and Cantonese to both be dialects of Chinese, yet the two are not mutually intelligible. These are varieties of a language that are considered mutually intelligible.
This means that speakers of one form of the language can understand speakers of the other form without learning it from scratch. These are languages that, for social, political, or cultural reasons are considered to be less important when compared to a more standard language.
A clear example of this is in Italy, where the official language spoken is Standard Italian. There are lots of other, non-standard languages like Romanesco and Occitano, which are considered Italian dialects. Some exceptions, to name but a few, are Neapolitan and Sicilian, which have been recognised by UNESCO as languages but not by the Italian state and are therefore not used for official purposes.
On a wider scale, countries like Spain, Colombia, Peru and Argentina speak the same language but each version is quite different to one another.
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