Dialect & accent (was: Announcement: New auxlang "Choton")

On Saturday, October 9, 2004, at 04:30 , taliesin the storyteller wrote:
[snip]
> Though, maybe English is the only language which has internal
> accents, the rest of the world calls the same thing dialects?
Nope - there is a difference between dialect and accent. Dialect forms of
English differ from the written standard in matters of _grammar_ &
_lexicon_ as well as pronunciation. In some cases the differences were
considerable. Since the end of the 19th century, universal education has
greatly reduced dialect differences, what mostly remains is the
application of derivatives old dialect pronunciations applied to (more or
less) standard English. The latter is what we term regional accents.

A few older dialect relicts remain, e.g. in my native Sussex, the simple
present tense affixes -(e)s for _all_ persons, not just the 3rd singular.
This is found also in some other southern dialects. This feature, however,
  is confined to what is regarded as the 'lower status' speakers. Other
Sussexisms like the use of "somewhen" and "anywhen" can be found in the
speech of speakers of all social statuses. Although we were told at school
that these words were not standard English, on the whole we ignored our
teachers as practically everyone used them. It wasn't until I got to
university that I discovered the teachers were right   :)

But full dialect speech disappeared from most areas in the early 20th
century, tho in some like the Jordie of the NE England and some of the
lowland Scots dialects have proved more resistant.

Ray
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Anything is possible in the fabulous Celtic twilight,
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