Your Words: Dialect, People and Places
What words do you have from your hometown? What words have you adopted from friends, or inherited from family? Have you moved for work and picked up words from your colleagues? Do you borrow your partner’s words? Or perhaps you use expressions passed down from grandparents and other relatives.
We’re interested in three types of words: regional, inherited and adopted. Scroll down and watch our videos to find out more about each type of word, then get involved by telling us your words and where – or who – you got them from by clicking the button!
Your contribution will help us with our research into how dialect is passed from person to person and from place to place.
Most of us have words and phrases that we have acquired early on in life because of where we grew up and went to school. These often help people to guess where we come from, because they are strongly associated with particular regions.
We also sometimes have words in our vocabulary that are more surprising, or more difficult to explain. Besides words from our hometowns, we can also have words that we have acquired by other means – like from parents or grandparents who grew up in a different part of the country. Sometimes this means we have words from places we’ve never been, or people we’ve never met!
We also tend to pick up new words from partners, friends, or even work colleagues – especially if we’ve moved to a new place.
