民族方言是特定民族成员所说语言的独特形式。也称为社会民族方言。

罗纳德·沃德豪（Ronald Wardhaugh）和珍妮特·富勒（Janet Fuller）指出，“民族方言不仅仅是大多数语言的外国口音，因为他们的许多说话者很可能是大多数语言的单语说话者……民族方言是大多数语言的群体内说话方式”（社会语言学导论，2015年）。

在美国，研究最广泛的两种民族方言是非洲裔美国人的白话英语（AAVE）和奇卡诺英语（也称为西班牙裔白话英语）。

实况报道

"People who live in one place talk differently from people in another place due largely to the settlement patterns of that area--the linguistic characteristics of the people who settled there are the primary influence on that dialect, and the speech of most people in that area shares similar dialect features. However, . . . African American English is spoken primarily by Americans of African descent; its unique characteristics were due initially to settlement patterns as well but now persist due to the social isolation of African Americans and the historical discrimination against them. African American English is therefore more accurately defined as an ethnic dialect than as a regional one."

（克里斯汀·德纳姆和安妮·洛贝克，《每个人的语言学：导论》，沃兹沃斯，2010）

美国的民族方言。

"The desegregation of ethnic communities is an ongoing process in American society that continually brings speakers of different groups into closer contact. However, the result of contact is not always the erosion of ethnic dialect boundaries. Ethnolinguistic distinctiveness can be remarkably persistent, even in face of sustained, daily inter-ethnic contact. Ethnic dialect varieties are a product of cultural and individual identity as well as a matter of simple contact. One of the dialect lessons of the twentieth century is that speakers of ethnic varieties like Ebonics not only have maintained but have even enhanced their linguistic distinctiveness over the past half century."

（沃尔特·沃尔夫拉姆，《美国之声：不同海岸方言的差异》，布莱克威尔，2006）

"Although no other ethnic dialect has been studied to the extent that AAVE has, we know that there are other ethnic groups in the United States with distinctive linguistic characteristics: Jews, Italians, Germans, Latinos, Vietnamese, Native Americans, and Arabs are some examples. In these cases the distinctive characteristics of English are traceable to another language, such as Jewish English oy vay from Yiddish or the southeastern Pennsylvania Dutch (actually German) Make the window shut. In some cases, the immigrant populations are too new to determine what lasting effects the first language will have on English. And, of course, we must always keep in mind that language differences never fall into discrete compartments even though it may seem that way when we try to describe them. Rather, such factors as region, social class, and ethnic identity will interact in complicated ways."

（Anita K.Berry，《语言与教育的语言学视角》，格林伍德，2002年）