What Are the Dialects of English?

If you brought something really close to your eyes, you wouldn’t be able to see it. The image will get blurry and your eyes will begin to water from trying to hard to focus. But you can’t see an object if it is too close to your eyes. However, this isn’t only true about our sight. No matter what we are trying to observe, we have to do it from a distance. If we get too close to it, our vision will become clouded. This is why psychologists cannot treat their friends and family members. If their opinion is not neutral at the beginning of the treatment, they won’t be able to help their client.

Researches and scientists also have to maintain a minimum distance from their subjects and have zero feelings about them, if they want to conduct a successful experiment. A quality observation not only requires distance from the subject but also a neutral perspective about it. This is why our opinions about our country, our culture, and our friends are rarely balanced. The things we love too much or that are a part of our personality, cannot be separated from our minds enough for us to view them as they are.

You will hardly meet anyone in your life who doesn’t love their culture. Even the customs they don’t really enjoy, they wouldn’t want anyone to disrespect or make fun of. And they will always be ready to defend their culture from all kinds of attacks, whether it comes from newspapers or other societies. The people who are able to see the faults in their society or the problems in their country reach that stage in life after countless years of blind following. They have to go through the necessary stages in order to see the truth in every aspect of their lives. But many of us continue to live in ignorance and never learn to think beyond our personal prejudices and beliefs. This is why countries keep on electing corrupt politicians and people keep on engaging in risky behavior.

Get To Know The English Language:

Some things have such a huge impact on the world that they become a universally accepted part of everyone’s lives. You can find plenty of examples of this in your everyday life. But no single thing has had more universal effect on our lives than the English language. It has become a universal language; the one people go back to when they can’t understand each other’s tongues no matter which countries they are from. The fact that more people speak English as their second language today than there are native speakers of this tongue on the planet says a lot about its power.

But like our cultures and customs, English is so close to us that we can’t get a neutral view of it. None of us think of English as a tongue that can have dialects and varieties because it has been one of the most consistent things in everyone’s lives. It was here when we were kids and it is still here today in our adulthood. Although new slang words have joined the everyday vocabulary of people, the language itself has pretty much remained the same. However, it is incorrect to think that a tongue with millions of speakers won’t have any varieties.

What Are the Dialects of English? Know Them

Many people have engaged in the British vs American English debate in their lives without realizing that the two are dialects of the same tongue. The reason people don’t think of these two varieties as dialects is because they sound the same, at least for the most part. But the more English dialects you learn about, the more differences you will see to the point that some of them might not even be mutually intelligible. England alone has over 25 dialects of the vernacular and that is excluding the ones spoken in Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. The dialects spoken in England are a lot different from each other, if not in spellings and grammar, then in pronunciation. Some of them sound so different from the Standard English that the speakers of the latter have trouble understanding them. If you live in England and have met and tried to carry out a conversation with someone from Manchester, you know the struggle all too well.

Today, English is the most widely learned second language in the world. So, in every country where English is studied and learned by the population, it gets influenced by the native vocabulary and as a result, get divided into a new type of dialect. Some of the dialects of English have also gone extinct. After American and British version, Australian and Canadian English have the greatest number of speakers. Both of these dialects not only have their unique features but also share a few similarities with the UK and US’s version. Most of the dialects of English have one most prominent feature that they are recognized for, like the missing ‘u’ in the American variety and the rolled ‘r’ in the Scottish English.

Looking at English from a distance will make you realize that it has more dialects that can be counted because its influence is growing every day and more communities are adapting it and mixing their own element in it. Many countries have more than one dialect of English that have a lot of differences between each other.