Dialect is a form of a
language which is spoken only in one area, with words or grammar that are slightly
different from
other forms of the same language. It conveys information about a person’s geographical origin. It is a result of historical and geographical movement of people from the original speech community. As people move from the centre of the language community, variations set in.
As example is English Language. Its original location was Britain, but through colonization it has speed to America, Australia, Canada, South-Africa. These peoplespeak the native dialect of English. English Language also has non-native dialect speakers. These are the former territories of British Colonial rule who adopt the language as their second language e.g Asia, West and East Africa.
Yoruba language in Nigeria also has a lot of dialects. Oyo dialect is
different from Egba, Ijebu, Ekiti etc but Oyo is considered to be standard probably because the speakers of this dialect are the remnants of where Yoruba originated from. Every dialect, however, is used to express the culture of the speaker, so no dialect should be seen as superior to others.
ACCENT
Accent means the way someone pronounces the words of language, showing which country or which part of a country they come from. It is different from dialect because it is a characteristic pronunciation determined by the phonetic habits of the speaker’s native language transported to his use of another language. Accent is a part of dialect variation and everyone who speaks a language speaks it with one accent or the other.
A particular accent essentially portrays a person’s linguistics background. For example the accent of a Ghanaian
speaking English is different from a Nigerian speaking English language. Even in Nigeria the three major languages use different accents when speaking English. So it is very easy to determine which part of Nigeria a speaker comes from when you listen to his accents in spoken English.
IDIOLECT This is the way in which a particular person uses language. It is the features of speech peculiar to an individual. Learning through reading makes knowledge accumulations a lot easy.