A new book on American English in the Midwest makes Chicago seem exotic. It’s certainly not the title: “Language Variation and Change in the American Midland: A New Look at `Heartland’ English” (John ...

I am so glad that we are now recognised as a people - Caribbean people. In the past we were pegged on to a motherland and so came the confusion over the way we speak. Back then the leaders insisted ...

“He made a party to celebrate his son’s birthday.” These phrases might sound off to the ears of most English-speaking Americans. In Miami, however, they’ve become part of the local parlance. According ...

At first glance, the Scots Wikipedia page reads like a transcription of a person with a Scottish accent: “Walcome tae Wikipaedia, the free enclopaedia that awbody can eedit,” it says. The main page’s ...

Rob Penhallurick’s history of dialect research, Studying Dialect, is published by Palgrave Macmillan. This was a question that I should really have anticipated, but it took me by surprise. I had just ...

A new dialect, born of mingling between English and Spanish speakers has been heard in some parts of Miami recently. The Cuban revolution in 1959 saw thousands of Spanish speakers arrive on the shores ...

Browsing through the BBC archives, I found an old recording of people from all over the UK speaking with their local accents. How many do you think you could recognise? I love accents and dialect, I ...

Travel to Miami, and you might hear people say 'get down from the car' instead of 'get out of the car.' Miami Herald/Getty Images “We got down from the car and went inside.” “I made the line to pay ...

Later, I emigrated to the U.S. to teach linguistics at Wayne State University and began researching and teaching what academics call African American Vernacular English, or the everyday speech of ...

TRAINS are a great place to meet people. Close proximity to a complete stranger for a finite period of time expands the horizons. Thus your correspondent found himself on the 17.02 train from ...