The Virginian-Pilot

What’s language anyway?

For the average person, the differences between a language and a dialect seem pretty clear. A dialect is a subset of a language. One speaks in a dialect and writes in a language. As the linguist and ...
The Forward

My father spoke like Tevye the Dairyman – but with a Polish-Yiddish dialect

My father Hershl (Harry in English, Heshek in Polish) was a Holocaust survivor of many camps and ghettos, as was my mother. Each made their way to America separately. My father, by way of Germany; my ...
Mental Floss

Accent vs. Dialect vs. Language: What’s the Difference?

Part of the fun of getting to know an English speaker from somewhere else—be it a different U.S. region or a whole other country—is debating how to say certain words. To you, pecan is “pih-KAHN.” To ...
The Economist

Of dialects, armies and navies

YESTERDAY'S post on Cantonese touched a few nerves. A blog post is a very compressed medium, and I said some things briefly that I still stand by but which deserve a bit of elaboration. My calling ...