What Is Your Dialect?

I have decided that it would be useful to also post my e-notebook entries here on my blog as place to compile all of my thoughts throughout TE 402. So with that, I would like to respond to the question, "what is your dialect?" When this question was first posed to me I thought it was funny and I just answered to myself, as I thought if I had to actually choose a specific dialect I would name it mid-west English. But, I never really thought I had a dialect. To me the first thing that came to mind was "accent." I don't have a Spanish accent, or a German accent, etc. And then I realized there was a difference between dialect and accent. Dialects are just simply the way you speak and there can be thousands of dialects within a single language. In class, we talked about the phrases, "like," and "you know," or better put, conversation fillers, and it was interesting to me that these were considered part of a dialect. I had never thought about that before...