Other forms: dialects
A dialect is the particular form of a language that one region speaks. A local dialect, the northern dialect, dialect words.
It covers vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation together — accent is pronunciation alone, which is the distinction people most often miss. The line between a dialect and a separate language is political rather than linguistic, which is why the old joke says a language is a dialect with an army. Note dialectal; and that dialect comes from the Greek for conversation, not for difference.
1noundialectThe particular form of a language spoken in one region.
“My grandparents speak a local dialect that even people from the next valley struggle to understand.”
dialect is a regional form of a language.
Greek dialektos meant conversation or the speech of a place, from dialegesthai, to converse. Dialogue and dialectic come from the same talking.
Middle French
dialecte
English, today
dialect
Built from
Borrowed from Middle French dialecte. From Middle French dialecte, from Latin dialectos, dialectus, from Ancient Greek διάλεκτος (“conversation, the language of a country or a place or a nation, the local idiom which derives from a dominant language”), from διαλέγομαι (“to participate in a dialogue”), from διά (“inter, through”) + λέγω (“to speak”); by surface analysis, dia- + -lect.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA