From Smithsonian Magazine:
The United States may lack an official language, but a road trip across the country reveals dozens of different accents and dialects of English that serve as living links to Americans’ ancestors.
What’s the difference between these two linguistic terms? Accents center on the pronunciation of words, while dialects encompass pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar. They both often vary by region.
“Even Americans, most of whom speak only English, usually know more than one dialect,” notes the Linguistic Society of America. Consider, for instance, how an individual might speak to their boss versus a stranger who just rear-ended their car.
Dialects are rooted in the same system, but “their partly independent histories leave different parts of the parent system intact,” according to the society.
Myriad factors influence variations among American accents and dialects, including waves of settlement in a region, geographic location and class differences.
“There’s never [just] one accent in a given place,” says Teresa Pratt, a sociolinguist at San Francisco State University. “There’s so much variation, even in one particular region.”
The U.S. is commonly divided into distinct regions: the West, the Midwest, the Southwest, the Southeast and the Northeast. But broad accent categories based on these regions are more accurately broken down into diverse dialects across different localities.
Dialects in the Deep South—encompassing Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia and South Carolina—are distinct from those in Texas, a large state that’s home to several linguistic varieties, as well as a mix of Spanish and English (nicknamed Spanglish) closer to the U.S.-Mexico border.
“The South gets stereotyped as a monolith, which is really unfair,” says Nicole Holliday, a linguist at Pomona College.
The many variations in the American South include South Midland, Ozark, Coastal Southern, Virginia Piedmont, Gullah, Cajun English and Gulf Southern.
The popularity of specific dialects is often tied to regional history. When English colonists first arrived in North America in the early 17th century, they landed on the East Coast, establishing English-speaking communities in the North and the South. The French, the Dutch, the Spanish and other European powers also introduced their own languages as they colonized different parts of the continent. Speaking styles in different colonies remained distinct because travel opportunities were limited at the time, says Jessi Grieser, a linguist at the University of Michigan. “Historically, it’s about migration and who went where,” she adds.
English settlers succumbed to competing influences when they came into contact with Native Americans and colonists from other countries, all while isolating themselves from England. Centuries of settlement on the East Coast resulted in more linguistic variation among the region’s cities because English was spoken there longer, Holliday says.
Link to the rest at Smithsonian Magazine