Speaker 1: Welcome to English 1120, our introduction to grammar course at Southern Utah University. The goal of this video is to give a quick introduction to regional dialects and how that affects English grammar. So first what we want to talk about is what is a dialect. Then we'll talk about some regional dialects of English in different countries. And then we'll talk about specifically how grammatical variation may occur between dialects. So a dialect is usually defined as a form of the language that is mutually intelligible by other forms of that same language. But there are significant variations in pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, or spelling. Now how significant that is really depends. And how much something is a dialect again depends on how significant we want to look at these differences. Some of them we may consider very part of the same dialect, but if we dig in more we may separate them more. What we should be clear here though is that the idea of dialect and different language is not just a scientific distinction, it's also kind of a social distinction. So for example, Scandinavian languages, many of them are mutually intelligible, but people in those countries would not want to describe them as being just dialects of the same language. They would want to describe each of their languages as a distinct language. At the same time, there are many varieties, for instance of Chinese, that are not mutually intelligible. But people in that country may not want to describe those as different languages, because of the idea of maybe national unity so instead they would just use the term dialect to describe them. So we can't be totally sure on the deciding line between what is a different language and what is a different dialect. Here is a map of United Kingdom and Ireland. We can see that it has been divided up into a variety of different dialect groups, and within each of those groups there are subgroups. What is interesting to note here is that dialects, regional dialects, tend to be divided along geographical features, but also political borders. So if we look at our map here we can see that there is a very clear dialect that is associated with Wales. There's another different dialect that's associated with Scotland, and then another one with Ireland. And in fact, as you look at Northern Ireland, we see the border there between what is officially part of the United Kingdom and which is part of the Republic of Ireland, and those differences in dialects match fairly closely to those national borders. But then even within each of those countries, there are different dialects. Obviously you can see within England there are many different dialects, depending on the region. But even within Wales, we can see that there's a general Welsh dialect. There's one for the Isle of Man, and then Cardiff, the main city there, that has its own dialect which is different from the rest of Wales. We see a similar thing in Scotland, right? We see that Glaswegian has its own kind of Scottish dialect, and then we have the Lowland Scottish and the Highland Scottish. And again here we're seeing sometimes geographical features, right? Mountain ranges, rivers, those could be one way that different dialects are established. Let's go ahead here and look at this is a very general kind of big idea look at American English dialects in the United States. There's more dialects along the east, and then as we move to the west we get kind of this unified Western dialect. Now, other maps, if you go and you look at the internet, you'll see that each of these regions is separated into sub-regional dialects. But the history of United States English can date back to immigrant groups that came from different parts of Europe, settled in different parts of the colonies, and so they started to develop their own dialect of English within those different colonies. And many of those are still today exist, even though there has been movement between the descendants of those original settlers. But then what we see as we move west, there's a much greater mix among all of these immigrant groups. And so we get more of a blending of those different dialect features into something that's a little more cohesive. So here is a map of Australia and New Zealand and we see similar kinds of things, right? Australia has this kind of group of English dialect and then New Zealand has its own. And what's interesting to notice that the North Island and even the northern part of the southern island have one dialect and then as we move south, we get a different dialect. We look at Australia and we can see that all along the Gold Coast, where the major cities are coming around the south of the country, we've got one kind of dialect. And then Adelaide, okay, has that South Australian dialect, its smaller region. Then we have sort of a more rural dialect that's further away from the cities. Tasmania gets its own dialect and then way on the other side of the country in Perth has its own Western Australian dialect. And there are others as you can see on the map. So dialects can change often based on geographical features and geographical distance. So let's talk about how dialect might impact grammatical features of the language. Often when people talk about dialects, they often fixate on pronunciation. And it's true, pronunciation is one of the features that changes with the dialect. And grammar, I mean, vocabulary is another one that is pretty heavy, as well as spelling. But we often don't think of grammar, but it does play a role in regional dialects as well. So here are some sentences that have negation. Our first two, he isn't insincere, and we don't dislike him. Both of these could be considered standard American English. And the meaning behind them is actually a compounding negation, right? And that they mean, the first one means he is sincere. Okay, he may have some sincerity. And we don't dislike them, meaning that there isn't a hatred towards them, that maybe they feel neutral, maybe even like them. And this is a kind of double negation or double negative that is considered acceptable and part of standard American English. But let's look at these next two. She's never going nowhere with you. Or they don't have no money for that. As you hear these, you may judge these sentences. They are not standard American English. And there's a lot of stigma attached to this kind of negation. In fact, these are not really considered double negatives in the sense of the first two, where the one negation cancels out the other negation. These are compounding negation. These are a kind of negation where it takes two parts to reinforce the negative aspect. So she's never going nowhere with you doesn't mean that she will go somewhere. It means she absolutely will not do that. And they don't have no money for that doesn't mean that they have some money available. It means that they have absolutely no money available. So these are sometimes a difference between regional differences in more southern varieties of American English, we're more likely to see these last two examples where we have sort of that emphatic or compounding negation to communicate negation, but we see it far less in northern dialects of American English. It's also a difference as we'll talk about in future weeks about social varieties of English, social class, or ethnic group may also have some of these kinds of differences. Here's another type of regional difference having to do with grammar and its use of modals. So generally, in standard American English, we only allow one modal per main verb phrase, you can't keep adding modals together, except English speakers do do this in certain varieties of English. So here are two examples. One of them says, I might can jump that high. Or another one, would you might want to wait until the eight o'clock flight when it's cheaper. So I don't think that either of these would match maybe the constructions I would use. I don't use the compounding modals probably in my variety of English, but they are more common in southern American varieties. And it's been observed quite a bit actually in different varieties of Utah English as well. So you may use this, you may have family members or friends or neighbors who use this depending on the varieties of Utah English you encounter. And some people have also stigmatized this particular grammatical variation of English, that it's somehow rural or it's uneducated and although it may be more common in rural areas, it's certainly not necessarily a sign that someone is not intelligent, but it may mean that they are just not as familiar or want to use standard forms of English. In fact, some people have hypothesized that there are things that you can do with these multiple modals in grammar that you can't do with standard English, that they give more nuance, they communicate more about maybe the intent or the idea behind the language, that standard English is unable to do. For example, the first sentence if I were to say that I might have to say. Sorry, I just did a double modal because have to can be a modal phrase, but I might have, I might say, I might be able to jump over that and so I have to use a different phrase, I can't use the can and the can is actually shorter. Our second one you might want to wait to the eight of four. And then, sometimes these are used to give nuance in terms of what is expected or what is wanted. We want to take from this that we shouldn't stigmatize different grammatical variation from regional differences of English. There's not a right or wrong. As long as the idea is communicated correctly to its audience. But we should be aware that some people do stigmatize these differences, and we should do our best to eliminate that stigma, but also to recognize it. If we want to enter a community where it may be stigmatized we may want to consider how do we want to adjust our language to best approach our audience. So we talked about what a dialect is we talked about how regional dialects may form, and some of the differences between them and especially on focusing on grammatical variation.