dialect – English noun declension

English noun forms of dialect

Noun: dialect
Singulardialect
Pluraldialects

Sample Sentences

  • The question could be put: 'Is there anything inherent in a dialect which gives it a negative stigma or is it that the status of the majority of the speakers is transferred to the dialect?' — something that occurs in many regions in different countries. [1995, Michael [G.] Clyne, The German language in a changing Europe, Cambridge University Press, →ISBN, page 117:]
  • Comparative wordlists of two dialects of Yoruba with Igala. [2007 February 5, Roger Blench, “The Ayere and Ahan languages of Central Nigeria and their affinities”, in rogerblench.info, page 25:]
  • Bloomfield, for example, noted that “local dialects are spoken by the peasants and the poorest people of the towns” (1933: 50) though he also thought that the lower middle class spoke 'sub-standard' speech. [2010, Mirjam Fried, Jan-Ola Östman, Jef Verschueren, editors, Variation and Change: Pragmatic perspectives (Handbook of Pragmatics Highlights; 6), John Benjamins Publishing Company, →ISBN, Dialect, by Ronald Macaulay, page 61:]
  • Among common errors still persisting in the minds of educated people, one error which dies very hard is the theory that a dialect is an arbitrary distortion of the mother tongue, a wilful mispronunciation of the sounds, and disregard of the syntax of a standard language. [2014, Elizabeth Mary Wright (died 1958), Rustic Speech and Folk-Lore:]
  • And in addition, many dialects of English make no morphological distinction between Adjectives and Adverbs, and thus use Adjectives in contexts where the standard language requires -ly Adverbs [1988, Andrew Radford, Transformational Grammar: A First Course, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, page 139:]
  • Well, those children don't speak dialect, not in this school. Maybe in the public schools, but not here. [1975, H. Carl, Linguistic Perspectives on Black English, page 219:]
  • […] on the second day, Miss Anderson gave the school a lecture on why it was wrong to speak dialect. She had ended by saying "Respectable people don't speak dialect." [1994, H. Nigel Thomas, Spirits in the Dark, Heinemann, page 11:]
  • Many even deny it and say something like this: "No, we don't speak a dialect around here. [1967, Roger W. Shuy, Discovering American Dialects, National Council of Teachers of English, page 1:]
  • Home computers in the 1980s had many incompatible dialects of BASIC.
  • A curious question, which has as yet attracted but little attention, is whether the notes of the same species of Bird are in all countries alike. From my own observation I am inclined to think that they are not, and that there exist "dialects," so to speak, of the song. [1896, Alfred Newton, A Dictionary of Birds, page 893:]

Etymology

From Middle French dialecte, from Latin dialectos, dialectus, from Ancient Greek διάλεκτος (diálektos, “conversation, the language of a country or a place or a nation, the local idiom which derives from a dominant language”), from διαλέγομαι (dialégomai, “to participate in a dialogue”), from διά (diá, “inter, through”) + λέγω (légō, “to speak”); by surface analysis, dia- + -lect. See: Latin Nouns 'dialectos', Ancient Greek Nouns 'διάλεκτος'.

Verbs referencing "dialect"

Finnish Nouns dialekti.