Dialect

What is a person's dialect?

As we are learning, the study of language in society is called sociolinguistics. The real basis for much of sociolinguistics is that the variations -- the differences -- in language among members of a speech community or between different regions speaking different varieties of the same language are often meaningful for society. Not everyone who speaks a given language speaks it in the same way.  Actually, every individual uses language in their own unique way.  This is evident from an analysis of writers' vocabulary usage, for example.  It is possible to prove the authorship of an anonymous work based on statistical studies of word usage.  An individual's particular way of speaking is called an idiolect.  Language variants spoken by entire groups of people are referred to as dialects.  

Dialectology is a branch of sociolinguistics that studies the systematic variants of a language.  The term dialect was first coined in 1577 from the Latin dialectus, way of speaking.  Dialectal variation is present in most language areas and often has important social implications