Varieties of English

We usually think of English as one language, well it is not. There are, so to say, as many variations of the language as there are grains of sand in the world. It is said that Britain alone has more than 42 dialects. 42 is only an estimate, the actual number would be much higher if we actually counted all different versions of all dialects. Basically every household has its own idiolect.
Does anyone know what that means? It basically entails the speech habits peculiar to a particular person or household.

These 42 dialects are sort of split into regions, called isoglosses, these are just notional conveniences for the benefit of geographical linguists. It would be almost impossible to pinpoint exactly where one dialect stops and another one begins. An example of this are the Berkshire villages. There are 3 villages there: Kintbury, Boxford and Cold Ash. They are all within eight miles of each other, which is about 13 kilometres, yet they all have a different word for the same clothing item. One calls it a greatcoat, the other a topical, and the last an overcoat. There will always be these small differences are so negligible, that it is not really considered a sign of an entire different dialect.

English dialects all over the world are influenced by different factors, from Australia to America, these factors are somewhat the same, but have very different outcomes. History is the first one of those, The colonization by the British obviously made English a very widespread language. These were along the way altered by the local dialects also having influence on the original language the colonizers brought with.
The second factor, which sort of goes together with history, is geography. This has a lot to do with how close by certain areas are to each other. I just have an example to get the gist of this one. When Great Britain colonized America, they had quite good access to the east coast of the, what we now call, United States. All they really had to do was cross the Atlantic ocean. This is a big contrast with, for example the West coast. This is noticeable in the way east coasters speak and the vocabulary they use. The influences of British English are really way more apparent.The third factor that is mentioned in my chapter is an indicator of socioeconomic status. People with a common factor like race, socioeconomic status, etc. tend to talk in a similar way. Here I do want to give another example.
This dialect, mainly spoken in the USA, is called African American Vernacular English, or AAVE. The dialect is largely used by, as the name already reveals, African American people. The origins are not quite clear, but my extra source for this speculates that it has a lot of similarities to the way people speak in the south. This would implicate that it goes all the way back to before the confederate war, where slaves worked alongside white servants and got it there, or there is also a lot of similarities to the Creole languages, so that is also a possibility. It could also, of course, be a combination of different factors.
This dialect has its own vocabulary, words like 'hood and slay' are all part of AAVE. These words are now also used in mainstream American slang, the word 'slay' for example is used a lot by teenagers around our age. They also don't conjugate verbs the same way 'normal' English speakers would. They would say, for example 'The food be delicious' instead of 'the food is delicious.'

So now with that backstory I can go back to the socioeconomic factor. African American Vernacular English is often regarded quite negatively in white-dominated spaces. It was and still is considered an indicator of lower status and lack of education by many. These are obviously wrong perceptions, but a lot of black people in America still do face that discrimination based on the way they speak. This is why a lot of people want to make it an entirely separate language, to free it of its negative association and to make people who speak AAVE not feel any less valid, just because of speaking in a different manner.

So, that were the three main factors that make English a language with a whole lot of variety and dialects, as we now all know. This much information was both really nice and really annoying for this project, because on one side I did have a lot of options for examples, but on the other side, I did have to remain quite surface level in this presentation, because there is so much to say about it and such a wide variation of examples. I hoped you enjoyed my presentation and thank you for your attention.