What's a dialect and what's an accent?

There seems to be a lot of confusion out there about what a dialect is and what an accent is, so I'll spend a little time clearing that up as best I can.


Dialect - a variety of a language that is characteristic of a particular group of the language's speakers.


(a la wikipedia)

Everyone speaks in one dialect or another (actually, people make use of several dialects depending on company). Dialects include accents and local usages (think y'all or chav or hizzle); they are more general ways of speaking that a speech community shares.


Accent -  is a manner of pronunciation of a language


(also from wikipedia)

Just as everyone speaks in one or more dialects, everyone has an accent. There isn't an English speaker that is 'accentless'. The people on the news are either speaking in a west coast accent, or are using something called received pronunciation (or Broadcast English). They usually have been trained to speak this way because it is thought those dialects are the ones most easily understood by the public at large.

Here's a map of America from a phonological perspective: http://www.ling.upenn.edu/phono_atlas/home.html

Individually, we all have an idiolect. An idiolect is a specific person's own unique way of speaking (their word choice, preferred grammar patterns etc). In linguistics, we tend to avoid studying the idiolect because the data is only useful for that one person and it's also very difficult to determine the specifics of an idiolect.

So, hopefully you can see a tiered system of the Dialect, Accent, and Idiolect. This is one of the ways human language is so layered, that variation occurs in association with huge social groups right down to the individual.