Old Devīshc Conlang Guide

Dialects and Accents

Before we get into this chapter, let me define accent and dialect.

Accents: An accent is a way of speaking a language with a different phonology, and mostly similar grammar. The English language has many accents according to this definition. The word choice is mostly the same, with some variation form place to place and person to person, but usually just minor words or sayings.  An American and British person could speak, and one would say 'car' while the says 'ca-' and drops the 'r' but the words are still the same. There are a few words/phrases like 'stuck in' and 'daft' that Americans don't use and British do, but important, common words like 'you,' 'is,' 'walk,' etc. are all still the same. They are all easily mutually intelligible.

Dialects: A dialect, as defined by me for the purposes of this book, is a way of speaking a language with many different words between dialects. It is often mid-level difficult to understand people of different dialects due to using different words for common ideas. Words like'you,' 'is,' 'walk,' etc. may be different. This idea comes from Norwegian and Arabic. You learn Bokmål Norwegian or Standard Arabic first, then learn the dialect of your choice after that, because they are relatively different from each other. For English, it doesn't matter at all. You don't learn 'Standard English' then learn American or British English, you just learn English and end up having whatever accent you learned with.

There is one example of a different dialect of English to help you understand the difference, and that is African American Vernacular English (AAVE). Here is a video that explains it better than I could: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkzVOXKXfQk (Or search in YouTube "The Linguistics of AAVE" by the channel called "Xidnaf").

Now that you know those distinctions, this chapter will be dedicated to how in different regions, people speak Devi with an accent or dialect, and the accents or dialects of people who learn Devīśc as a second language.