surprising to find that the major thrust toward studying dialects systematically begins only in the latter half of the nineteenth century.
Dialect is closely related to the vowels in English. Speakers of English may have differences in specific words. It can be seen easily, for example, people
commonly failed to cite half, won’t, tomato correctly. What is probably failed to recognize is that the differences are almost always in vowels. When considering
English vowels, it will be found that different dialects differ one and another. But it is also possible that speakers of a language do not all make the same vowel
differences. Language is always changing and a change may happen in some places, or among some groups of people, but may not happen everywhere
Charles W. Kreidler.
2.4. Mutual Intelligibility
What next are the criteria for deciding that linguistic differences should count as differences of dialect or of language? Many people hold the essential
criterion to be that of mutual intelligibility: dialects are different but mutually intelligible of speech. So if two speakers, though there are some differences in
their speech, can understand each other, they are using different dialects, while if two speakers cannot understand each other, they are speaking different languages.
At first sight, it seems to accord with what we intuitively feel to be the distinction between dialect and language Keraf Gorys : 1983 .
Mutual intelligibility may also not be equal in both directions. It is often said, for instance, that German understand Englishman better than Englishman
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understand German. It may be due to more specifically linguistic factors. Mutual intelligibility will also depend, it appears, on other factors such as listeners’
degree of exposure to the other language, their degree of education and their willingness to understand Ayahtrohaedi :1995 . It seems that people sometimes
do not understand because they do not want to at some level of consciousness. Thus mutual intelligibility requires a lot of shared vocabulary in spite of
some differences. Mutual intelligibility is not an all matter; there are also degrees of comprehension between the speakers K.M. Petyt. A Cockney and
Cornishman may understand each other very well, while a Geordie and Cornishman may sometimes be in some difficulty. The lack of mutual
intelligibility could mean that there are differences of language rather than just of dialect. If ‘W’ can just understand ‘Y’, but can not really understand ‘Z’, the
language division may come between ‘Y’ and ‘Z’. ‘Y’ and ‘Z’ may understand each other quite well, so mutual intelligibility could show that these are different
dialect rather than different language.
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CHAPTER 3 THE VOWEL INVENTORIES OF SPECIFIC ENGLISH
