Standard English and dialect - статья на английском языке

It is obvious to all of us that different kinds of English are spoken, even inside England. This is not merely a question of individual peculiarities (though these of course exist) but of the peculiarities of groups of speakers. We can all recognize a kind of speech characteristic of the north of England, of the West country, of the London area, even if we lack the power to analyze the differences; in other words there are in England clearly marked regional dialects, and those are much more numerous and finely graded than is apparent to the untrained ear; the ordinary Londoner recognizes a style of speech as "northern", but he is in fact lumping together a whole host of dialects; the speech of Lancashire differs from that of Yorkshire, that of West Riding from that of East Riding, and so on; and within these areas there are even finer differences, between districts, between towns, sometimes even between neighbouring villages; though in real life you will never meet a dialectologist who can, like professor Higgins in Shaw's "Pygmalion", distinguish between the dialects of different streets. To the ordinary speaker, the most obvious differences between the regional dialects are those of pronunciation: the Londoner trying to imitate Lancashire speech wilt usually concentrate on such things as the vowel-sounds in the words cup and ask and don't, and (if he is a good mimic) on certain distinctive features of rhythm and melody. <...>
Besides being thus diversified horizontally into regional dialects, the language is also diversified vertically, into class dialects. In a given town, a mill-hand, a clerk, a primary-school teacher, the shopkeeper, the lawyer, the bank-manager and the company-director may all speak a local variant of the language, but they will also speak a sub-variant of it, according to their social status, social pretensions, and education. <...>
The social stratification of the language appears in syntax and vocabulary as well as in pronunciation. The speaker higher in the scale describes many of the usages of lower strata as "ungrammatical": it would be more accurate to say that the grammar of these dialects is different from the grammar of his own. In vocabulary, one can sometimes find a whole series of words used at different social levels: a good example for this is the word for the course of a meal which follows the main course; there are regional variations in this, but the general pattern of usage is as follows: pudding (upper and upper-middle), sweet (middle), dessert (lower-middle), afters (lower-middle and lower), and pudding (lower). The coincidence in usage between top and bottom is interesting, and is found in some other things.
(From "Linguistic Change in Present-Day English" by Charles Barber)