A dialect is a particular form of a language spoken by people in a specific region or social group. When you travel across the United States, you'll notice people say things differently: someone in Boston might say “pahk the cah” while someone in Texas drawls their words more slowly, and someone in Minnesota might say “you betcha.” They're all speaking English, but each is using a different dialect.

Dialects include pronunciation (how words sound), vocabulary choices, and grammar patterns. In some parts of the South, people might say “y'all” for “you all,” while in Pittsburgh, people say “yinz” or “you'uns” for the same thing. Someone might call a fizzy drink “soda,” “pop,” or “Coke” depending on where they grew up.

Every dialect is a legitimate, rule-governed way of speaking. No dialect is “wrong” or “broken” English. Linguists study dialects to understand how language works and how communities shape their own ways of communicating.

You might also hear people use dialect more loosely to describe specialized vocabularies, like saying programmers speak the “dialect of computer science,” though that's really more about jargon than a true dialect.