There are many reasons behind the formation of a dialect, especially a personal one. A person’s history has a lot to do with the way they use language. The way that my father, Muhammad Ullah, speaks is greatly influenced by his personal life experiences; in fact, these experiences are directly responsible for his for the way he speaks. Since his life is different than mine, he speaks differently than I do.  Born in what is now Bangladesh, he grew up speaking only Bengali, but was taught from an early age English, Urdu, Hindi, and, being a Muslim, a little Arabic. The schools that he attended were all British style public schools, and later on, were military schools as well. He earned a masters degree in chemical engineering from the University of Engineering Pakistan in 1969, and, upon coming to the United States in 1979, he attended classes at Berkeley and Stanford, and earned a masters degree in material science engineering from San Jose State University. He then got a job at IBM where he has worked for twenty-three years and is currently an Adviser Engineer / Scientist. He has traveled to many places in his fifty-two years of life, and seen many things that have left an imprint on him. I, on the other hand, am an eighteen-year-old college freshman at UC Davis, who has lived his whole life in California. Although I too have traveled to many places, I have not done half as many things in my life as my father has in his. My language background is basically just Californian English. I learned some Bengali at an early age, but it was never my first language. I also took four years of French in high school, but it did not really affect my own personal dialect of English, which is what I am using as the standard in this comparison. The difference between our casually spoken dialects is quite marked, but it is not so outstanding that I can’t easily understand what he says. This, of course, may be due to the fact that I have lived with him and have become accustomed to his manner of speech. Nevertheless, I can still hear the differences. However, the fact that these differences exist is not as important as the reasons why they exist.

Growing up, I had always noticed differences in the way that my dad and I talked, but I never really tried to find the reasons behind those differences. His pronunciation of certain words always sounded strange to me. It sounded like a blend of Indian, English, and American accents, but it also had something unique-something personal. In a phonological comparison of some words, one can see this difference quite clearly. In Table A below, we will compare the phonetic differences of some common words when spoken by my father, and when spoken by myself in Standard English.

Table A wood sweet hello where
Isaac
Muhammad                           (Sorry, tables of Phonetic spellings cannot be represented here.)

Table A cont. laugh boy public sequoia
Isaac
Muhammad                           (Sorry, tables of Phonetic spellings cannot be represented here.)

In words such as wood, he cannot pronounce the “w”. This is because in the Bengali language, his native tongue, there is no match for the phoneme /w/. In Bengali the dipthong /oy/ does not exist either, therefore it is very difficult for him to pronounce it, especially after the sound /k/. Another deviation from the standard is that he uses the phoneme /   / where I use /   / and vice versa. This is very characteristic of many British dialects, and is probably a direct result of his British style schooling. Another speech characteristic that most probably came from his schooling as a young boy is his tendency to pronounce the phoneme /k/ with a /   / afterward. We see an example of this in his pronunciation of the word “public”.

Other differences between our dialects are in semantics, the study of meaning in language, and in word order. We say things very differently, and we generally use different words to portray the same messages. I asked him a series of short questions that needed only a one-sentence reply, and then compared his answers with mine, which I had recorded earlier. An example of the kinds of questions that were asked is: “ What would you say to someone if you wanted to find out how they did on a test?” In Table B below, I have my responses compared to his.
     Table B
Isaac      Muhammad
What grade are you in? What do you read?
Are you studying? Are you doing your studies?
What grade did you get? What was your result?
Turn offs the light. Close the light.
Did you do all right on your test?  How was your exam?
I have good grades in school. I always had good marks in my classes.
Turn off the faucet. Close the faucet.
Are you weight-lifting? Are you pulling weights?
This table demonstrates the very different words we use to pass on the same message. Several of his replies show very British characteristics, as when he uses the lexeme “exam” instead of “test”. Another example of very British speaking habits is his tendency to the lexemes “results” and “marks” instead of “grades”. The probable reason for this habit of his is the fact that he attended British style schools as a child, and the first version of English that he learned was in that same style. His usage of the lexeme “close” in the sentence “close the faucet/light” is very typical of the Bengali language where the words for “to close”, “bundo coro”, are also used for “turn off”. The fact that Bengali was his first language is the most likely reason that he uses the lexeme “close” in this way. Another habit of speech that he got from his Bengali background is his usage of the verb “doing”, which is very distinctive. He replaces the verb in a sentence with “doing”, and then places the noun form of that verb at the end of the sentence as in, “Are you doing your studies?” A case in which he both changes the order of the words, and uses a different meaning of a lexeme is in the sentence, “Are you pulling weights?” In this sentence, he replaces the verb “weight-lifting” with “pulling”, and then puts the noun form of that verb, “weights” at the end of the sentence. Thus it is both a semantic and word order change from the standard.

I believe that certain life experiences can greatly affect the way you speak. Though my father and I have lived together all my life, our dialects are drastically different. Why is this so? I can only see one reason: we have had different lives. He was educated under the old British style in Bangladesh, and did not even speak English as a first language. The result is a dialect that has British English, Bengali, and American English traits. I, on the other hand, have lived in California all my life, and was educated in California public schools. As a consequence, I have a standard California dialect. The difference in our backgrounds is the main reason why our dialects are so different even though our relation ship to each other is so close. After completing this experiment, I firmly believe that life experiences, personal histories, and backgrounds greatly affect the way a person speaks their language.