Peculiarities of Regional Varieties of the English Language . Standard English, Variants and Dialects

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Peculiarities of regional varieties of the English language . Standard English, variants and dialects Contents Introduction 1. Regional varieties and non-regional varieties 2. Local varieties of English on the British Isles 3. British and American English 3.1 Differences of spelling 3.2 Differences in pronunciation 4. Canadian, Australian and Indian variants 5. What is a Standard English? 6. Dialects of English 7. Features of traditional dialects 8. Contemporary changes to modern dialects Conclusion Bibliography Introduction Every language allows different kinds of variations: geographical or territorial, perhaps the most obvious, stylistic, the difference between the written and the spoken form of the standard national language and others. 1. Regional varieties and non-regional varieties The traditional dialects are varieties spoken by people in a given geographical area - the speech of the Black Country, East Yorkshire or Cardiff as a traditional, regional dialect. The modern dialects are varieties spoken in urban areas. On the one hand, there is a standardizing tendency, or dialect levelling - so the urban dialect shares more features with standard spoken English. On the other hand, the urban dialects still retain features that are distinctive to the area where they are spoken - so Hull and East Yorkshire dialect retains distinctive sounds (like the "er" vowel [close to /?:/] where standard English has the diphthong /??/) lexis (non-standard forms, like beer-off for an off-licence or tenfoot for the access road behind a house, and standard forms with non-standard meanings, like the use of while in the sense of until) grammar (such as I aren't for Standard English I'm not) 2. Local varieties of English on the British Isles On the British Isles there are some local varieties of English , which developed from Old English local

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