ABSTRACT
People of a language community live, work, socialize, and communicate together in a dialect or variety of their language. Standard American English (SAE) is the prestige dialect in the United States; BBC English is the prestige dialect in the United Kingdom. Regional dialects show semantic variation, syntactic variation, and phonological variation. Regional dialects have a social meaning in that people make assumptions about others based on the dialect that they speak. African American English (AAE) is one of the terms for the varieties of English spoken in different parts of the United States by African Americans. It is an important part of African American cultural heritage and communal values. African Americans switch back and forth between SAE and AAE as the circumstances require; this practice of changing from one style of language to another is called code switching. Males and females differ in the way they use language. In English, females use informal speech less than males do.
