Abstract
According to Huddleston and Pullum (2002: 13), the term accent is used “for varieties of a language distinguished by pronunciation, opposing it to dialect which applies to varieties distinguished by grammar or vocabulary.” The development of national languages has reinforced the idea of dialect as a distributive system of a group of users with common regional or class characteristics and identity, hence the popular misconception that dialect and accent are one and the same. Most speakers of the British family of dialects, for instance, have a non-rhotic accent, which means that the sound /r/ in post-vocalic position is no longer pronounced whereas it is in American English (cf. Huddleston and Pullum 2002: 13). In addition, speaking a dialect or having an accent is often frowned upon as an offense to the standard language, which is regarded as the norm in the speech community. This social judgment is the subject of sociolinguistic studies. Besides, a person can have a regional accent and still speak the standard language. This is why it is important to distinguish dialect and accent, because prestige, status, and high-quality language are notions which vary in place and time, depending on personal, regional, and social factors.
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Notes
- 1.
In AAE, ain’t may also appear as the contraction of the negative auxiliaries hasn’t and haven’t, and is argued to occur in past contexts (cf. Green 2002: 39).
- 2.
It may be suggested that the foregrounding of ain’t (as well as of don’t) parallels that of the syntax of Old English in which the verb was initially placed in order to brings the whole utterance into focus (see, e.g., Stevanovitch 1997: 100).
- 3.
“In language, the African tradition aims at circumlocution rather than at exact definition. The direct statement is considered crude and unimaginative; the veiling of all contents in ever-changing paraphrases is considered the criterion of intelligence and personality. In music, the same tendency toward obliquity and ellipsis is noticeable: …” (Jones 1963: 31).
- 4.
Prosodic features, such as rhythm and intonation, may sometimes influence the construction of phrases and utterances.
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Larroque, P. (2023). Accents and Dialects of English. In: An Introduction to Linguistics through Popular Music. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24703-3_6
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