Question of the Month: Answer

Question:

What’s the difference between an accent and a dialect?

Answer:

Accent and dialect often get mixed up, but they refer to different things.

Accent
An accent is how you pronounce words. It's purely about pronunciation — the sounds of speech. For example, someone from Texas and someone from London both speak English, but with different accents.

Dialect
A dialect includes accent, but also adds: vocabulary (e.g., "soda" vs. "pop"); grammar (e.g., "I ain't going" vs "I'm not going"; “y’all” vs “you all”); expressions or idioms. A dialect is a broader term that covers the way people speak including pronunciation, but also the words and sentence structure they use.

Source: University of Pennsylvania