A word is one or more sounds that in combination have a specific meaning assigned by a language. The symbolic meaning of words can be so powerful that people are willing to risk their lives for them or take the lives of others. For instance, words such as “queer” and “nigger” have symbolic meaning that is highly charged emotionally in America today. They are much more than just a sequence of sounds to us.

Language and speech are not the same thing. Speech is a broad term simply referring to patterned verbal behavior. In contrast, a language is a set of rules for generating speech. A dialect is a variant of a language. If it is associated with a geographically isolated speech community, it is referred to as a regional dialect. However, if it is spoken by a speech community that is merely socially isolated, it is called a social dialect. These latter dialects are mostly based on class, ethnicity, gender, age, and particular social situations. Black English (or Ebonics) in the United States is an example of a social dialect. Dialects may be both regional and social. Not all societies have distinct dialects. They are far more common in large-scale diverse societies than in small-scale homogenous ones.

A pidgin is a simplified, makeshift language that develops to fulfill the communication needs of people who have no language in common but who need to occasionally interact for commercial and other reasons. Pidgins combine a limited amount of the vocabulary and grammar of the different languages. People who use pidgin languages also speak their own native language. Over the last several centuries, dozens of pidgin languages developed. The most well known one is Pidgin English in New Guinea and pidgin developed by American Indians is Chinook used on the Northwest Coast of North America.

At times, a pidgin language becomes the mother tongue of a population. When that happens, it is called a creole language. As pidgins change into creoles over several generations, their vocabularies enlarge. In Haiti, a French-African pidgin became the creole language spoken in that nation today by the majority of the population as their principle or only language. The same thing happened among some of the peoples of Papua New Guinea, the Pacific Islands of Vanuatu, and Sierra Leone in West Africa, where different versions of Pidgin English became creoles.

It is common for creole speakers to also speak another "standard" language as well. People may quickly switch back and forth between dialects, depending on the person they are talking to at the time. This pattern is referred to as diglossia. The African American situational use of standard and Black English is a prime example. Black English is usually reserved for talking with other African Americans.

Typically, the dialects of a society are ranked relative to each other in terms of social status. In the London area of England, the upper class speak "public school" English, while the lower class often use a Cockney dialect. Because of the stigma against the latter, upwardly mobile Cockneys in the business world may take language lessons to acquire the “public school” speech patterns.