Standard English is the official language of Great Britain used in its literary form. Regional varieties possessing a literary form are called national variants. Local dialects are varieties of English peculiar to some districts and having no normalized literary form. In Great Britain there are two variants, Scottish English and Irish English, and five main groups of dialects: Northern, Midland, Eastern, Western and Southern. Every group contains several (up to ten) dialects. The local dialects are used mainly by the rural population and only for the purposes of oral communication. Local distinctions are more marked in pronunciation, less conspicuous in vocabulary and insignificant in grammar. The British local dialects are traced back to Old English dialects. Numerous and distinct, they are characterized by phonemic and structural peculiarities.
One of the best known Southern dialects is Cockney, the regional dialect of London. This dialect exists on two levels: as spoken by the educated lower middle classes and as spoken by the uneducated. In the first case Cockney is a regional dialect marked by some deviations in pronunciation but few in vocabulary and syntax. In the second case it differs from Standard English not only in pronunciation but also in vocabulary, morphology and syntax.
The Scottish Tongue and the Irish English have a special linguistic status as compared with dialects because of the literature composed in them. The name of Robert Burns, the great national poet of Scotland, is known all over the world. The poetic features of Anglo-Irish may be seen in the plays by J.M.Synge and Sean O'Casey.
English is the national language of England proper, the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Hence, there exist five national variants: British English (BE), American English (AE), Canadian English (CnE), Australian English (AuE), New Zealand English (NZE).
These five varieties of English are national variants of the same language, because their structural peculiarities, especially their word-formation system, syntax and morphology, as well as their word-stock and phonetic system are essentially the same. The main lexical differences of these variants from Standard English (General English) are connected with the lack of equivalent lexical units in one of them, divergences in the semantic structure of polysemantic words and peculiarities of usage of some words on the British Isles and in the
named countries. The historic causes of the deviations in lexis are based on the fact of exporting the language of the mother country on a certain date of colonization.
The existing cases of difference between regional lexis and General English are classified into several groups:
1. cases when different words are used for the same denotatum,
2. cases when the semantic structure of a partially equivalent word is dif
ferent,
3. cases when otherwise equivalent words are different in distribution,
4. it sometimes happens that the same word is used with some difference
in emotional and stylistic colouring,
5. there may be a marked difference in frequency characteristics.
Special words used in these variants are called: briticism, americanism,
canadism, australianism, newzealandism. They have no equivalents in General English, and they mostly belong to the following semantic groups: flora and fauna, trades and agriculture, names of the inhabitants of the country and the geographical names, everyday life, customs and traditions, historical events. Every national variant includes words from the language(s) of the native population.