Dialect Essay

In this essay I will be exploring some aspects of the ways my speech changes accordingg to the context I am in.
I have a very bubbly and funny personality. I always say little jokes which make people laugh. I also am a girl, this contributes towards forming my idiolect because I use more Hedges such as ‘kind of’ and talk about more emotional topics. I also am a teenager and this contributes to my idiolect very much because I am around a social group and we all share words and phrases and we use them every day.
One thing that I picked up from my transcripts is that I tend to use some northern dialect in my speech, such as ‘lads’ instead of boys, ‘ano’ instead of I know and instead of ‘barth (English pronunciation) I say ‘bath’. This is because my mother is from Bolton and still has a slight accent and we have picked up on this. It also comes across stronger when we go to Bolton to go and visit our family. When I am at school I soften my accent, I do this so I do not feel like the odd person out. I have never picked up on the St. Vincent accent as my dad does not speak in that accent and we have not been exposed to it from a young age.
I use different lexis in different contexts. For example, when I was talking to a close friend I used words like ‘ano’, ‘gunna’ and ‘yeh’ .By using slang, dialect and elisions it helps to establish my personality. I always use these words around friends which shows that I am comfortable with the person I am talking to and we both understand each other. We understand each other because we are exposed to sayings and terms like this every day at school. However when talking to my mum my vocabulary changes to ‘I got 92% in my maths test today’, ‘The science test was hard, but I think I done alright’ As shown in these phrases I try not to use fillers and slang as much as what I would if I were around friends. However it implies that I like to talk about more serious topics to my mum. By talking about serious topics it engages my mum...