Variants of English (British English and its Varieties.
American English and its Varieties. Ebonics.
Standard English - the official language of Great Britain taught at schools and universities, used by the press, the radio and the television and spoken by educated people may be" defined as that form of English which is current and literary, substantially uniform and recognized as acceptable wherever English is spoken or understood. Its vocabulary is contrasted to" dialect words or dialectisms. Local d i a-1 e c t s are varieties of the English language peculiar to some districts and having no normalized literary form. Regional varieties possessing a literary form are called variants. In Great Britain there are two variants, Scottish English and Irish English, and five main groups of dialects: Northern, Midland, Southeastern, Southwestern and Southern. Every group contains several (up to ten) dialects.
Dialects are now chiefly preserved in rural communities, in the speech of elderly people
The standard work of reference in dialect study is Joseph Wright's
"English Dialect Dictionary".
'West Highland English Standard Scots English
Take that whisky here. Bring that whisky here.
I'm seeing you! I can see you!
It's not that that I'm wanting. I don't want that
Anglo-Irish
The main peculiarities concern syntax, and they are reflected in some form words.
English Urban Dialects
The most commonly cited cases in Britain are Cockney (London), Geordie
(Newcastle), Scouse (Liverpool) and Glaswegian (Glasgow).
American English
The American variant of the English language differs from British English1 in pronunciation, some minor features of grammar, but chiefly in vocabulary
British spelling American spelling
cosy cozy
offence offense
practice practise
jewellery jewelry
travelling traveling
The existing cases of difference between the two variants are conveniently classified into;
1) Cases where there are no equivalents in British English: drive-in 'a
cinema where you can see the film,without getting out of your car'
or 'a shop where motorisls buy things staying in'the car'; dude ranch
'a sham ranch used as a summer residence for holiday-makers from
the cities'.
2) Cases where different words are used for the same denotatum, such as can, candy, mailbox, movies, suspenders, truck in the USA and tin, sweets, pillar-box (or letter-box), pictures or flicks, braces and lorry in England.
3) Cases where, the semantic structure of a partially equivalent word is different. The word pavement, for example, means in the first place 'covering of the street or the floor and the like made of asphalt, stones or some other material'. In England the derived meaning is 'the footway at the side of the road'. The Americans use the noun sidewalk for this, while pavement with them means 'the roadway'.
4) Cases where otherwise equivalent words are different in distribution. The verb ride in Standard English is mostly combined with such nouns as a horse, a bicycle, more seldom they say ride on a bus. In American English combinations like a ride on the train, ride in a boat are quite usual.
5) It sometimes happens that the same word is used in American English with some difference in emotional and stylistic colouring. Nasty, for example, is a much milder expression of disapproval in England than in the States, where it was even considered obscene in the 19th century. Politician in England means 'someone in polities', and is derogatory in the USA.
6) Last but not least, there may be a marked difference in frequency characteristics. Thus, time-table which occurs in American English very rarely, yielded its place to schedule.
The trend to shorten words and to use initial abbreviations in American English is even more pronounced than in the British variant.
Communicative practices and linguistic patterns in rap and hip-hop
In the hip-hop world, New York and Los Angeles, gigantic sites of, Black oppression, become "Zoo York" and "Los Scandalous". Semantic inversion/flippin the script was an act of linguistic empowerment as Africans in America took an alien tongue and made it theirs; simultaneously, they created a communication system that became linguistically unintelligible to the oppressor, even though it was his language.
Canadian English is influenced both by British and American English but it also has some specific features of its own. Specifically Canadian words are called Canadianisms. They are not very frequent outside Canada, except shack 'a hut' and fathom out 'to explain'.
The distinctions that one must make in the Caribbean are distinctions among English and, in the case of Jamaica, Jamaican English and Jamaican Creole. These varieties stretch from "Caribbean Standard" to the contact developments known variously as "Creoles", "patois", and "broken talk".
Iit may be useful to distinguish four types of West African English.
Pidgin English, varieties of which can be found in coastal areas from Gambia to Equatorial Guinea Second, second-language English, Standard West African English,( Ghanaian and Nigerian English), francophone West African English
South African English vocabulary is characterized by semantic reformulation of English words with international currency and loans, many of which are from Afrikaans.
South Asian English refers to several broad regional varieties such as Indian English, Lankan English, and Pakistani English. There are basicaliy two subvarieties within educated South Asian English; each providing a continuum from Pidgin English or broken English on the one hand to educated (or standard) south Asian English
Singapore-Malaysian English
representative examples of typical Singapore-Malaysian English expressions come from the background languages, especially from Malay and its pidginized form.
ENGLISH IN AUSTRALIA AND NEW ZEALAND: word formation, semantic differentiation, the influence of aboriginal languages
The hybrid lingo known as Spanglish - the language of choice for a growing number of Hispanic-Americans who view the hyphen in their heritage as a metaphor for two coexisting worlds.