Did you know that accent and dialect don’t really mean the same thing? Of course, many people use them interchangeably but they are actually two distinct terms used to explain a certain way of speaking a language.

Let us understand a bit more about them!

Accent:

Broadly stated, your accent is the way you sound when you speak. There are two different kinds of accents.

Foreign Accent: This accent is used when you pronounce foreign words in your own native accent. Like Indians speaking English will sound different from people who use English as their first language, in turn when they speak Hindi, it will sound different than what Indians are used to.

Native Accent: Basically the way you pronounce your first language. It is determined by where they live and what social groups they belong to. Many times, different social groups can have different accents even they speak the same first language!

It is therefore impossible to speak without an accent.

Dialect:

A dialect is a regional or social variety of a language distinguished by pronunciation, grammar, and/or vocabulary. A dialect refers to a branch of a language. Within this branch, different terms are used for different things. Dialects are usually formed around particular regions. However, they may also be used within certain groups of people.

For example,

“Will ye go, lassie, go?”

This is written in a light Scottish dialect. Both of the underlined words are associated with the Scottish dialect of English.

Someone from the United States may say, “Would you like some tea?”, while a person from the UK might instead say, “Fancy a cuppa?” They’re both speaking English, and they’re both expressing the exact same idea. But not only would the pronunciation (the accent) be different, the choice of vocabulary and the grammar behind both sentences is clearly distinct.

The difference between them:

An accent refers to the way how people pronounce specific words and phrases. This is how different people pronounce words of the same language differently from each other.
A dialect refers to a variety of the language. It includes the differences in grammar, morphology, vocabulary, syntax, and pronunciation among different versions of the same language. It’s the type of a certain language that is derived from the primary language.

Another approach explains the difference between the 2 terms in a way that a dialect refers to the way people speak their native language and an accent refers to the way someone speaks a foreign language. For example, a person speaking English with a Spanish accent.

An accent is simply how one pronounces words—a style of pronunciation. A dialect includes not just pronunciations, but also one’s general vocabulary and grammar.

For example :

An American might pronounce the word, “hello,” by speaking the “h” sound.
A Brit might pronounce the word, “hello,” without speaking the “h” sound.
This is still the same word, just spoken with a different accent.

A Northern American might say, “hello.”
A Southern American might say, “howdy.”
This is an example of the differences in dialect.

Although the two terms might seem really similar, there is much difference between them. The accent is only limited to pronunciation but dialect includes not only pronunciation but also grammar.