Everyone speaks with an accent, though people notice others' accents more than their own. This level looks at variation within languages, how standard languages come to be, and how judgments about speech can become judgments about people.

Dialects are everywhere

A dialect is a variety of a language with its own pronunciation, words and grammar, and every speaker uses one. The standard variety taught in schools is a dialect too, one with special social status. Linguists find that every dialect studied follows consistent rules.

Language or dialect?

It seems natural to say two varieties are dialects of one language if their speakers understand each other, and separate languages if they do not. Reality does not cooperate. Norwegians, Swedes and Danes can often follow each other's speech, yet they speak three "languages." Speakers of Mandarin and Cantonese cannot understand each other's speech, yet both are often called "dialects" of Chinese. Whether two varieties count as separate languages or dialects is often decided by politics and history rather than by linguistics. Linguists often repeat a quip, usually credited to the Yiddish scholar Max Weinreich, that a language is a dialect backed by an army and a navy.

How standards arise

A standard language usually grows from the speech of a capital, court or powerful class, spread by printing, schools and government. Standard English grew largely from the speech and writing of London and its region. Standard French is based on the speech of Paris, and in 1794 a report by the revolutionary priest Henri Grégoire found that a large share of French citizens did not speak French fluently. Standard Italian is based on the Tuscan of Florence, the dialect of Dante, and when Italy unified in 1861 only a small minority of Italians spoke it at home.

Standards have real uses, such as letting distant regions communicate. The problem begins when other varieties are treated as broken versions of the standard.

Different, not deficient

African American English (sometimes called AAVE) is the most studied example in the United States. Linguists, starting with William Labov and others in the 1960s, showed that it is systematic. One feature is habitual be. In African American English, habitual "be" marks an action that happens regularly, a meaning standard English needs extra words to express. "She be working" means she usually works; "She working" means she is working right now.

Double negatives are another feature that draws scorn, yet they are found in many languages, including French and Spanish, and in older English. Chaucer wrote of his Knight, about 1390: "He nevere yet no vileynye ne sayde / In al his lyf unto no maner wight." Four negatives, and no one doubts the meaning.

Variation tracks society

In 1966 Labov studied New York speech by asking salespeople in department stores a question whose answer was "fourth floor," which contains two chances to pronounce or drop an r. The r sound was pronounced most often in the most upscale store, Saks, less at Macy's and least at the cheaper S. Klein. Speech, Labov showed, tracks social class in measurable ways.

When accents become discrimination

Judgments about speech can shut doors. In experiments by John Baugh and his colleagues published in 1999, a caller phoned landlords about advertised apartments using African American, Chicano and standard American accents. Callers using African American or Chicano accents got fewer offers to see apartments than the same caller using a standard accent. The landlords only heard a voice.

Schools have faced the same issue. In 1979 a federal judge in Michigan, in a case brought by parents of Black children at an Ann Arbor school, ruled that the school had to take the children's home dialect into account when teaching them to read. In 1996 the school board in Oakland, California, passed a resolution about "Ebonics" that set off a national uproar; critics heard a plan to teach slang, while supporters described using students' home speech to teach standard English.

Pidgins and creoles

When people without a shared language must communicate, as in trade or on plantations, they often create a pidgin. A pidgin is a simplified contact language with no native speakers; a creole develops when children learn a pidgin as their first language and it grows a full grammar. Tok Pisin, an official language of Papua New Guinea, and Haitian Creole, spoken by millions and official in Haiti since 1987, are examples.

Worked example: a teacher's choice

A student in an American classroom writes: "My brother be late on Mondays." The teacher has choices.

One teacher circles "be" in red and writes "wrong." The student, whose dialect makes the sentence perfectly grammatical, learns mainly that his family's speech is bad.

Another teacher says: "In the English we use at home in many families, 'My brother be late on Mondays' means it happens regularly. In school English, we'd write 'My brother is usually late on Mondays.' Let's practice switching." This approach, often called contrastive analysis or code-switching, treats the student as someone who already commands one grammar and is adding another. Some programs report gains, though the studies are small.

The goal of both teachers is the same: a student who can write standard English when it is needed. Linguistics suggests the second path respects the student's intelligence and fits what is known about how dialects work.