The dialect (方言) regions of the United arc most clearly marked along the Atlantic coast, where the earlier settlements (定居地) were created. There dialects can be defined: Northern, Midland, and Southern.

To some extent these regions save the traditional speech of southeastern and southern England, where most of the early colonists were born. The first settlers that arrived in Virginia (1607) and Massachusetts (1620) soon learned to adapt old words to new uses, but they were also pleased to borrow names from the local Indian languages for unknown trees, such as hickory and persimmon trees, and for unfamiliar animals, such as raccoons and woodchucks. Later they took words from other foreign settlers — the French and the Dutch.

Before the Declaration of Independence (1776), two-thirds of the immigrants (移民) had come from England, but after that date immigrants from Ireland arrived in large numbers. The Great Hunger of 1845-1852 drove 1.5 million Irish to seek homes in the New World, and the European Revolutions of 1848 drove as many Germans to settle in Pennsylvania and the Midwest. After the close of the American Civil War in 1865, millions of Scandinavians, Slavs, and Italians crossed the ocean and eventually settled mostly in the North Central and Upper Midwest states. In some areas of South Carolina and Georgia, Africans working on rice and cotton plantations developed a language called Gullah, which made use of many structural and vocabulary features of their native languages.

The speech of the Atlantic Seaboard shows far greater differences in pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary than that of any area in the North Central states, the Upper Midwest, the Rocky Mountains, or the Pacific Coast. Today, urbanization, quick transport, and television have decreased some dialectal differences in the United States. On the other hand, immigrant groups have introduced new varieties in which the influence of their native languages is evident, and some immigrant languages are widely spoken.

The Korean culture wave has swept through the editorial offices of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), which has added more than 20 new words of Korean origin to its latest edition.

The new words include hallyu, the Korean original for the wave of pop culture that has made BTS one of the world’s most popular bands and Squid Game the Netflix sensation of 2021. The dictionary defines it as the increase in international interest in South Korea and its popular culture, esp. as represented by the global success of South Korean music, film, television, fashion, and food.

But as the dictionary’s new additions make clear, there is much more to Korean cuisine than its spicy staple kimchi, which appeared in the OED as long ago as 1976. New food-related entries include bulgogi, thin slices of beef or pork, and chimaek, Korean-style fried chicken and beer.

Traditional culture is represented by hanbok, formal costumes worn by both men and women, and Hangul, the Korean alphabet (字母表) created by King Sejong in 1443.

Aegyo, a certain kind of cuteness or charm considered characteristically Korean, and similar to the Japanese word kawaii, has been included as both a noun and adjective. There is room, too, for mukbang, or livestreams of people eating extraordinary amounts of food while talking to the online audience.

The inclusion of “skinship” is more surprising. Commonly used in South Korea, where it is translated as seukinsip, and in Japan (sukinshippu), it captures the emotional bond that comes from close physical contact between a parent and child, lovers and friends, the dictionary said.

“The adoption and development of these Korean words in English demonstrate how lexical (词汇的) innovation is no longer restricted to the traditional centres of English in the United Kingdom and the United States,” the OED said.“They show how Asians in different parts of the continent invent and exchange words within their own local contexts, then introduce these words to the rest of the English-speaking world, thus allowing the Korean wave to continue to ripple on the sea of English words.”