The signs by these once read ‘STOP WHILE LIGHTS FLASH’ but after a number of accidents the signs were changed in parts of northern England. Apparently in some areas the word while is used to mean until. Some drivers, therefore, had stopped until the lights flashed and then driven onto the railway line!

However, it would be foolish to ignore the fact that some dialects have greater status than others.

Linguists have long argued that all languages have communicative value, meaning they allow people to share thoughts, feelings, and ideas with one another; no language is better or worse than another.

speakers of other languages tend to carry relatively lower social and political status.

The Internet has also perpetuated the use of a distinctive informal written style that is replete with acronyms and community-specific jargon. The most common of these have even entered spoken English among young people—for example, the acronym OMG, originally used in emails and instant messages for “Oh my God,” sometimes takes the place of saying “Oh my God” in spoken conversation, where it is pronounced “oh em gee.” Similarly, LOL for “laugh out loud” has entered spoken English in some communities as the interjection “lol.” The rules of usage for these acronyms are often different from those of the words for which they stand. For example, “lol” has evolved a plural form, “lulz,” which means “laughs,” with a nuance of “joy obtained at the expense of others.” “I did it for the lulz” has become a common excuse for online misbehavior.

Slang occurs chiefly in casual, playful speech and is typically made up of short-lived coinages and figures of speech that are deliberately used in place of standard terms for the sake of added raciness, humor, irreverence, or other effect.

One of the ways we can tell that American speech is undergoing change in this area is that younger people use the newer forms more often than older people do.

American English, like all living languages, is not uniform and static but diverse and dynamic.