Accents and dialects!

Hey guys!

Did you ever think of how many different styles and sounds there are of English? How people speak differently and that an accent can tell you a lot about a person?

Since culture is a part of our PC3 as well, I decided to write a blog about accents and dialects of English.

First of all we need to know what the difference between an accent and a dialect is.

A dialect is a kind of version of a language. It might be used by a particular group of people. These people use different vocabulary, sentence structure and form of a language. Nearly every region has a dialect.

An accent is the sound someone uses and the ways of different pronunciation. There is not just one accent of English; there are a lot, because many countries speak English.

For example the UK, USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa etc. Every country has different accents and a unique sounding.

In this blog I’m going to focus on the accents in the UK.

Even though the UK is a small country, it has many different accents. There is not just the “British accent”, there are about 10 to 15 (!) different accents at least. You can group accents to British, because they have the same features and are all from Britain. The accents are linked closely to the regions and cultures. The standard accent is RP (received pronunciation) or the BBC English. It’s the standard form and a non-region specific accent. Nearly everyone knows how to speak it.

One example on how different the accents in England are, are Liverpool and Manchester. Even though they are only an hour away from each other, the accents are very, very different. It's really interesting and I think it's amazing how different accents can be, although it is just one small country.

I think that’s the most important information on accents and dialects. I got this information from a podcast and think that it’s really interesting and that you can learn a lot from it.

See you next time =)

Greetings

Steffi