Dialect vs. Accent: Differences Explained

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Ever wonder why someone from the United States may say, “Would you like some tea?” while a person from the UK might instead say, “Fancy a cuppa?” It’s not because tea is a vastly different drink in each region. These phrases are examples of dialects—in this case, American English and British English.

People in different regions develop their own ways of speaking their language, including Americans and Brits. But when are these differences considered dialects, and when are they just accents? Pour yourself some tea (or a cuppa) and follow this guide to dialects vs. accents.

Dialect vs. accent: the main differences

Although the terms “dialect” and “accent” are often used interchangeably, they’re not the same thing. A dialect includes pronunciation patterns, grammatical structures, and vocabularies that are distinct from other dialects of that same language. They tend to be mutually intelligible to each other, meaning that a speaker of one dialect (such as American English) can generally understand speakers of another dialect from the same language (such as British English).

Accents, on the other hand, describe only pronunciation differences. A person’s accent doesn’t affect their grammar or the vocabulary they use. Here’s an easy way to remember the difference between dialects and accents:

• dialect: The way you speak your language.
• accent: The way you speak another language (or dialect).

Dialects also include idioms and slang that other speakers of that dialect would understand but wouldn’t immediately make sense to people from another region. Accents don’t include those elements; they just describe the way you say words in another language or dialect.

Examples of dialects

There are over 7,100 languages spoken in the world today, and most of those languages include several dialects (in some cases, hundreds!). Take a look at a few examples of major modern languages and their most popular dialects.

English dialects

There are nearly 1.5 billion people who speak English around the world today, and it would be pretty unlikely that they all speak the same dialect of English. American English, British English, Australian English, and South Asian English (sometimes known as Hinglish) are just a few examples of different English dialects across the globe.

It’s tempting to think that traveling to one of the 64 countries that have English as an official language means you won’t need to learn a new language. But because English dialects vary so widely across continents, it may help to learn common phrases and slang from the dialect of your desired region.

Spanish dialect examples

If someone says they speak Spanish, they may be referring to any of over a dozen Spanish dialects. Castilian Spanish (also known as Peninsular Spanish) is spoken in Spain and considered closest to a standardized Spanish dialect, while Mexican Spanish is one of the most common Spanish dialects in Central America.

Spanish dialects also have idiomatic differences, meaning that certain phrases are popular in one dialect but not another. For example:

French dialect examples

Over 320 million people speak French in dozens of countries, so it’s only natural that it’s developed into many different dialects around the world. Common French dialects include Parisian French (considered standard French) spoken in France, Belgian French, Canadian French, and African French (a broad term for dialects across many French-speaking countries in Africa).

These dialects mainly differ in vocabulary influenced by surrounding languages. For example, Belgian French includes strong influences from Flemish Dutch and German, while French slang and vocabulary in Africa are influenced by Swahili, Yoruba, Hausa, Arabic, and other local languages.

Arabic dialects

Standard Arabic is listed as one of the most commonly spoken languages in the world, but the term applies to many different dialects of Arabic. Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), also known as literary Arabic, is primarily a written language taught to second-language learners. Regional dialects of Arabic incorporate language influences from various regions in the Middle East and North Africa.

Of the nearly 400 million Arabic speakers in the world, Egyptian Arabic (or Masri) is the most commonly spoken Arabic dialect. Egyptian Arabic was influenced by the Coptic language from pre-Islamic Egypt as well as Turkish and French. Moroccan Arabic (known as Darija) is the most distinct dialect of Arabic. It contains many French loanwords, as many Moroccan citizens also speak French.

If you’re planning to learn Arabic, you’ll likely understand most Arabic dialects when you finish your studies. However, learning particular dialectical phrases and slang (like those above) may take more practice and immersion.

Persian dialects

The most common Iranian language, Persian, is mainly spoken in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and Iraq. In Iran, Persian is known as Farsi, while the Persian dialect in Afghanistan is Dari. If you’re traveling to Tajikistan, you’ll hear the Tajik dialect spoken prominently. Over 120 million people speak a Persian dialect worldwide. 

There are different dialect influences based on the countries they border and their political history. Iranian Farsi includes influences from French and Turkish, for example, while Dari in Afghanistan contains several loanwords from Pashto and Urdu from neighboring Pakistan. Tajik grammar and vocabulary were strongly influenced by the Russian language during the Soviet Union era.

Written Persian is standardized in Farsi and Dari in the Perso-Arabic script, an adaptation of the Arabic alphabet that includes additional Persian letters. Tajik uses the Cyrillic alphabet from its history in the Soviet Union.

Examples of accents

Unlike a dialect, which includes grammatical and vocabulary differences, an accent describes the way a person sounds when they speak a language other than their first language. For example, if a British person were speaking in American English, they would sound British. Their ending “r” sounds would be softer than in American English. They’d be using a British accent with American grammar and vocabulary.

Traits of an accent include stress placement within words, sound replacement, and pacing. An accent can reflect one’s region of origin, first language, and the social class they grew up in. 

Examples of common accents include:

• Mexican accent: quick pace, links words and sentences smoothly together, often using the “b” sound in English words with a “v” sound
• French accent: lyrical, sentence pitch upward leading toward the end, substituting “th” sounds in English with “s” or “z”
• Indian accent: additional stresses within English words, using “d” sounds in place of English “th” sounds and “w” in place of English “v”
• German accent: pronounces consonants with more force, replaces English “v” sound with an “f” sound, pronounces “st” and “sp” like “sht” and “shp”
• Nigerian accent: lengthens English vowels (long vowels rather than short) and blends other vowels together, “th” is often pronounced as “t” or “d”

Keep in mind that these accents encapsulate many additional accents. Just as an American accent may refer to a Southern American accent or a New York accent, an Indian accent may refer to a Punjabi Indian accent, a Bengali Indian accent, or a Malayali Indian accent.

Dialect vs. language

Languages and dialects are not the same thing. Although languages can be from the same family, such as the Indo-European language family or the Slavic language family, they are distinctly different systems of communication. Unlike dialects, languages are not mutually intelligible to each other. 

Some dialects become so distinct from each other that they become different languages over time. Additionally, some languages seem so similar that they must be dialects of the same language, but they’re actually two completely different languages.

Common dialect vs. language examples:

• English and German are both Germanic languages, but English speakers can’t readily understand German (and vice versa). They share some basic vocabulary but differ in grammatical structure and pronunciation.
• Cantonese and Mandarin are both spoken in China, but they are different languages with varying numbers of tones and divergent phonetic systems.
• Portuguese and Spanish are both Romance languages that sound similar and share vocabulary, but Spanish only has five vowel sounds (Portuguese has 14) and a different grammar structure.
• Italian and Sicilian are also Romance languages, but Sicilian is derived from Greek, French, Spanish, and Arabic, while Italian comes mainly from Latin.
• Dutch and Afrikaans are similar because Afrikaans is derived from Dutch. However, influences from other languages spoken in and around South Africa, including Portuguese, Bantu, and Malay, resulted in Afrikaans becoming its own language.

Political and linguistic debates on dialect vs. language

You’ll find that politics and history have a lot to do with the identity of a language or a dialect. For example, even though Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian are derived from a Serbo-Croatian language, many people consider them separate languages and not dialects of Serbo-Croatian. Each is spoken by a different population and uses a different alphabet. 

Linguists also differ when it comes to whether African American Vernacular English (AAVE) is a dialect or a language. Some say that it’s a dialect of American English because it uses a similar grammar and vocabulary structure. Others believe that AAVE is distinctive enough from American English to be considered its own language.

Key takeaways about dialects vs. accents

Your dialect and accent say a lot about where you were raised and what languages you learned growing up. But like every language around the world, dialects and accents change after exposure to new experiences in different parts of the world. 

• A dialect includes pronunciation patterns, grammatical structures, and vocabularies that are distinct from other dialects of that same language.
• An accent includes pronunciation differences.
• Examples of dialects include American, British, and Australian English.
• Examples of accents include the French accent and the German accent.