Accent (sociolinguistics)

In sociolinguistics, an accent is a way of pronouncing a language that is distinctive to a country, area, social class, or individual.[1] An accent may be identified with the locality in which its speakers reside (a regional or geographical accent), the socioeconomic status of its speakers, their ethnicity (an ethnolect), their caste or social class (a social accent), or influence from their first language (a foreign accent).[2]

Accents typically differ in quality of voice, pronunciation and distinction of vowels and consonants, stress, and prosody.[3] Although grammar, semantics, vocabulary, and other language characteristics often vary concurrently with accent, the word "accent" may refer specifically to the differences in pronunciation, whereas the word "dialect" encompasses the broader set of linguistic differences. "Accent" is often a subset of "dialect".[1]