Words & WritingGreek → English
Dialect
/ˈdaɪəlɛkt/noun
A regional or social variety of a language, with its own words and pronunciations.
The Greek roots
διά
diá
through, across
λέγειν
légein
to speak, gather
Literally: “talking across”
The story of the word
διάλεκτος first meant conversation, the act of talking things across between people, and only later a local way of speaking. Ancient Greek was a set of dialects rather than one language with variants, and the choice was aesthetic as much as geographical: an Athenian tragedian wrote his choral odes with Doric vowels because that is what choral song sounded like. The same verb λέγειν, which also means to gather or pick out, gives lexicon, eclectic and dialogue.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → French → English
- First recorded
- 1570s
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
dialoguedialecticlexiconeclecticprologue
In a sentence
Two villages an hour apart, and the dialect changes enough to notice.