The Stories of English

The growing awareness and use of regional variation in the sixteenth century eventually manifested itself in terminology, notably in the arrival in English of the words dialect and accent. Accent came first, from Latin via French, recorded in 1538 in a very general sense of 'tone of voice' or 'pronunciation': call with a 'timorous accent', Iago tells Roderigo, in the opening scene of Othello (I.i.75). And from the 1580s we find writers such as Sidney and Spenser using it with reference to the accentual beat of poetry and to the diacritical marks used to represent it. Dialect, referring to the whole manner of speaking typical of a person or group - including grammar and vocabulary as well as pronunciation - is also a borrowing from Latin via French, first recorded in the dedication to Spenser's Shepheardes Calender (1579). The notion of a dialect as a variety of a language -with a first hint of a subordinate status - is also present from the 1570s, when a writer talks of 'Hebrew dialects'. And there is a third usage, in which the term was used for dialectic - a confusion which may still be heard today, when people talk of dialectical (instead of dialectal) variation.