Ethnolect in the context of Pahlavi scripts

In sociolinguistics, an accent is a way of pronouncing a language that is distinctive to a country, area, social class, or individual. An accent may be identified with the locality in which its speakers reside (a regional or geographical accent), the socioeconomic status of its speakers, their ethnicity (an ethnolect), their caste or social class (a social accent), or influence from their first language (a foreign accent).

Accents typically differ in quality of voice, pronunciation and distinction of vowels and consonants, stress, and prosody. Although grammar, semantics, vocabulary, and other language characteristics often vary concurrently with accent, the word "accent" may refer specifically to the differences in pronunciation, whereas the word "dialect" encompasses the broader set of linguistic differences. "Accent" is often a subset of "dialect".

Sociolinguistics is the descriptive, scientific study of how language is shaped by, and used differently within, any given society. The field largely looks at how a language varies between distinct social groups and under the influence of assorted cultural norms, expectations, and contexts, including how that variation plays a role in language change. Sociolinguistics combines the older field of dialectology with the social sciences in order to identify regional dialects, sociolects, ethnolects, and other sub-varieties and styles within a language.

A major branch of linguistics since the second half of the 20th century, sociolinguistics is closely related to and can partly overlap with pragmatics, linguistic anthropology, and sociology of language, the latter focusing on the effect of language back on society. Sociolinguistics' historical interrelation with anthropology can be observed in studies of how language varieties differ between groups separated by social variables (e.g., ethnicity, religion, status, gender, level of education, age, etc.) or geographical barriers (a mountain range, a desert, a river, etc.). Such studies also examine how such differences in usage and in beliefs about usage produce and reflect social or socioeconomic classes. As the usage of a language varies from place to place, language usage also varies among social classes, and some sociolinguists study these sociolects.

Silesian, occasionally called Upper Silesian, is an ethnolect of the Lechitic group spoken in Upper Silesia. While having secured some international recognition as a language, there is a debate on whether Silesian is either a dialect of Polish or a distinct language, and if Silesians are either a regional ethnic group within the Polish nation or a distinct ethnic minority that historically emerged, but later diverged from, the Polish people. Some Silesians identify as a regional ethnic group within the Polish nation, while others view themselves as a distinct ethnic minority. Its vocabulary was significantly influenced by Central German due to the existence of numerous Silesian German speakers in the area prior to World War II and after. The first mentions of Silesian as a distinct lect date back to the 16th century, and the first literature with Silesian characteristics to the 17th century.

Linguistic distinctiveness of Silesian has long been a topic of discussion among Poland's linguists, especially after all of Upper Silesia was included within the Polish borders following World War II. Some regard it as one of the four major dialects of Polish, while others classify it as a separate regional language, distinct from Polish. The dispute over the status of Silesian is considered to be of purely political character. According to the official data from the 2021 Polish census, 467 145 people use Silesian on daily basis. Internationally, Silesian has been fully recognized as a language since 2007, when it was accorded the ISO 639-3 registration code szl.

The Kawliya, Qawliya or Awaz, Keche-Hjälp (Arabic: كاولية or كاولي), also known as Zott and Ghorbati (known in English as Gypsies), is a community in Iraq of Indian origin, estimated to number over 60,000 people. Today, they speak mostly Arabic, while their ethnolect is a mixture of Persian, Kurdish and Turkish, which is only spoken by the older generations. The largest tribes are the Bu-Baroud, Bu-Swailem, Bu-Helio, Bu-Dakhil, Bu-Akkar, Bu-Murad, Bu-Thanio, Bu-Shati, Al-Farahedah, Al-Mtairat, Bu-Khuzam, Bu-Abd, Bu-Nasif, Bu-Delli and Al-Nawar. Their main occupation is entertainment, and also small trades.

The Kawliya migrated from India approximately 1,000 years ago.

Judeo-Arabic (Judeo-Arabic: ערביה יהודיה, romanized: 'Arabiya Yahūdiya; Arabic: عربية يهودية, romanized: ʿArabiya Yahūdiya (listen); Hebrew: ערבית יהודית, romanized: 'Aravít Yehudít (listen)), sometimes referred to as Sharh in its high-level translation calque, is a group of related ethnolects or religiolects within the branches of the Arabic language used by Jewish communities. Judeo-Arabic is a mixed form of Arabic, in its formal and vernacular varieties, as it has been used by Jews, and refers to both written forms and spoken dialects. Although Jewish dialectical forms of Arabic, which predate Islam, have been distinct from those of other religious communities, they are not a uniform linguistic entity.

Varieties of Arabic formerly spoken by Jews throughout the Arab world have been, in modern times, classified as distinct ethnolects. Under the ISO 639 international standard for language codes, Judeo-Arabic is classified as a macrolanguage under the code jrb, encompassing four languages: Judeo-Moroccan Arabic (aju), Judeo-Yemeni Arabic (jye), Judeo-Egyptian Arabic (yhd), and Judeo-Tripolitanian Arabic (yud).

Pahlavi is an exclusively written form of various Middle Iranian languages, derived from the Aramaic script. It features Aramaic words used as heterograms (called huzwārišn, "archaisms").

Pahlavi compositions have been found for the dialects/ethnolects of Parthia, Persis, Sogdiana, Scythia, and Khotan. Independent of the variant for which the Pahlavi system was used, the written form of that language only qualifies as Pahlavi when it is both Aramaic-derived and features huzwārišn.

Aimaq or Aimaqi (Persian: ایماقی, romanized: Aimāqi) is a Persian dialect and the dominant eastern Persian ethnolect spoken by the Aimaq people in central northwest Afghanistan (west of the Hazarajat) and eastern Iran. It is close to the Dari varieties of Persian. The Aimaq people are thought to have a 5–15% literacy rate.

A religiolect is the language variety belonging to a specific religious or secularized community with its own history and development. Coined by Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies Benjamin Hary in his 1992 book Multiglossia in Judeo-Arabic, the term was originally applied to the Jewish linguistic spectrum, but has been expanded to other religious contexts. In contrast to an ethnolect, which marks its speakers as members of a shared ethnic group, a religiolect does not involve ethnic background but rather religious background.

Religiolects have been studied in the context of a number of religious communities: Judaism, Islam, Christianity (Christianese), the Christian Haugean movement, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormonese), Islamic and Christian communities in post-Soviet Russia, Baháʼí, Buddhism, and others.