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Do dialects of a language have grammar?
A dialect is a form of the language that is spoken in a particular part of the country or by a particular group of people. There are many different dialects of English and they have different words and grammar. Most learners of English learn the standard dialects of the language. A dialect is not the same as an accent.
What language group does Spanish belong to?
romance languages
Spanish, Italian, Romanian, Portuguese, and French belong to a language family known as the “romance languages.” Certain languages are related to each other.
What is the difference between language and a language?
Language refers to a system of communication unique to human beings that makes use of written and vocal symbols. A language, on the other hand is a subcategory of this type of communication peculiar to a particular people, region, geographical region or socio-political background.
Why are languages different?
The main reason why there are so many languages has to do with distance and time. Groups of people who speak a common language get divided by distance, and over time their dialects evolve in different directions. After enough time passes, they end up speaking two separate, but related languages.
Does Spanish have dialects?
Dialects are not specific to just English. Spanish has a lot of different dialects and some might sound completely foreign to you. You likely already know about two major Spanish dialects: Castilian and Latin American. But there are many others, depending on where in the world the language is spoken.
How do linguists determine if languages are of the same language family?
Membership of languages in a language family is established by research in comparative linguistics. Sister languages are said to descend “genetically” from a common ancestor. Individuals belonging to other speech communities may also adopt languages from a different language family through the language shift process.
What are the differences between language and dialect?
Generally, a language is written as well as spoken, while a dialect is just spoken until it is promoted to the elite status usually for political purposes. When it becomes a national language, it then becomes codified into that nation’s literary tradition and acts as an identifier or national identity.
How many languages don’t have genders?
About 3/5 of the world’s language don’t have genders (the white dots below): That map (and corresponding chapter on WALS: Number of Genders) shows 257 languages, of which 145 have no grammatical gender or ‘noun classes’, especially in Europe, Australia/Oceania, northeastern Asia, and the Americas, but elsewhere also.
How are gender and subject matter different in different languages?
Languages also vary in how gender is used in the grammatical system. For example, Arabic has masculine and feminine like many European languages, but the verbs agree with the subject in gender: yaktub ‘he writes’ but taktub ‘she writes’. And ‘ you ’ has masculine and feminine forms.
Why is English a gendered language?
Actually, English used to be a gendered language, too. English speakers stopped classifying most nouns by gender during the Middle English period. Basically, gender in languages is just one way of breaking up nouns into classes.
What is grammatical gender in English grammar?
Grammatical gender is a way of categorising nouns; it doesn’t necessarily match up with the “natural gender” of the person or object being described. In some languages, grammatical gender is more than just “male” or “female.”