When several age groups or social strata live within the same locality and especially when people speaking the same language live in separate communities, dialectal differences are easily maintained.
As a general rule, those dialects, or at least certain dialectal features, with greater social prestige tend to replace those that are valued lower on the social scale.
Accordingly, the number of linguistic variables that can be examined is quite limited, in comparison with the number of dialectal features normally recorded by traditional fieldworkers in rural communities; in these situations, the investigator is often satisfied with one or two responses for each feature.
"Da kine talk" is the Island term for the most popular of the colorful dialectal forms- speech that captures the flavor of Hawaii's multiracial community and reflects the successes (and failures) of immigrants from both East and West in learning to communicate in English.
Although Italian has a standard literary form, based on the dialect of Florence, the common speech is dialectal or a local variant of Standard Italian.
Little dialectal variation was observed, and all three dialects unanimously adopted [L] as the predominant category.
The language occurs in two major dialectal forms, northern and southern; the northern, or Tallinn, dialect is the basis of the Estonian literary language.
With the accumulation of dialectal data, investigators became increasingly conscious of the inadequacy of viewing dialects as internally consistent units that were sharply differentiated from neighbouring dialects.
As a spoken language, however, German exists in many dialects, most of which belong to either the High German or Low German dialectal groups.
In a number of areas ("linguistic landscapes") where the dialectal differentiation is essentially even, it is hardly justified to speak of regional dialects.
Two dialectal varieties are distinguished.
