3 things people get wrong about language

Here are three things people tend to get wrong about language:

1. You think you don’t speak with an accent/dialect.

Everybody speaks with an accent and a dialect. There’s no such thing as a “standard” dialect. Standard dialects are artificial creations that nobody actually speaks.

If you give people a map and ask them to draw and label the dialect areas on the map, most people include one region that they label “standard” or “normal”—and guess what‽ That region is always the area where they’re from. Everybody thinks their way of speaking is “normal” because that’s how they grew up speaking. But there is no “normal” when it comes to dialects.