Evaluate the Idea That the Region in Which a Person Is from Dictates Their Dialect

Evaluate the idea that the region in which a person is from dictates their dialect.

A person’s dialect can be dictated by many different factors, for example; the region in which a person is from, a person’s age, gender, social class, religion, and ethnicity.

The region in which a person is from plays a huge role in dictating the dialect of individuals. The first and most noticeable example of this is the variation in accents across different countries, cities, and even towns. The region in which an individual lives is easily identified by their accent, for example you can easily differentiate between a person from Liverpool and a person from Birmingham, Manchester, or Ireland, and so on. However, the relationship between dialect and where a person is from goes a lot deeper than just accent, as it can also affect the lexical and grammatical choices they make. For example, research into the Manchester dialect, found that in Manchester, there are many distinguishable dialect features, such as the use of the glottal stop, and the over-enunciation of vowel sounds. ‘The glottal stop’ is when the ‘tt’ sound isn’t pronounced and the over-enunciation is the stressing of vowels, so for example to a Mancunion, the word ‘Letter’ would be pronounced as ‘Le-uh’. As well as this different regions have different semantics, for example a ‘bread roll’, may be called a ‘bap’ in one region but then a ‘bun’ in another. Therefore suggesting that there are large differences between dialects that are caused by regional differences, however it is common that despite some words having different meanings they are all understood, regardless of the dialectical differences present.

As well as this there was a study conducted looking into Estuary English, this is a form of modern dialect, and is a variety of modified regional speech. It is a mixture of non-regional and local south-eastern English pronunciation and iteration. It was described by David Rosewarne as being “between cockney and the queen”. In Estuary English, it is seen that ‘slang’ or ‘common’ lexis and grammar is avoided, for example double negatives are not used and the glottal stop is avoided. Estuary English has been found in different places moving up the river Thames. As it has been found in different places along the river Thames, this suggests that possibly due to increasing living costs in London people are moving to the outskirts where it is significantly cheaper. This would mean that Estuary English begins to spread to different areas within the UK, therefore supporting the idea that dialect is influenced by the area in which a person comes from as individuals’ idiolects can change due to moving to a different region.

Not only has estuary English proven this but urban and rural dialects within the same countries have suggested that even within smaller areas there can be many different