In many ways, the vocabulary or lexicon is the most intuitive feature of a dialect. In the past, much dialect research was based on differences in vocabulary alone.

Researchers asked subjects if they said things like snap beans or green beans, bucket or pail, cottage cheese or clabber cheese, and everyone’s favorites: soda or pop and you guys or y’all. These differences were remarkably stable in the last century and entire dialect geographies and dialect boundaries could be drawn based completely on lists like these. However, in more modern times, because of the ease of communication and travel across large distances, these dialect-based differences in vocabulary are dying out (…though not completely! Do you say wicked to mean something is cool or awesome? People in the Northeast do!). Although modern dialectology research doesn’t rely on vocabulary lists anymore, these word-level differences still play an important part in sociolinguistic research.