A language researcher is trying to find out if people in southern Alberta have a distinct local dialect.

Nicole Rosen, who teaches in the modern languages department at the University of Lethbridge, says she has noticed people in rural Alberta occasionally speak differently than urban dwellers.

"Instead of 'I have done or I have seen' — just saying 'I seen'. These things all happen for a reason and so it's not that people didn't learn how to speak English at school or something like that," she said.

"The fact is that everyone does it, and just people think it's the wrong way of speaking. But when everyone is doing it, it's sort of hard to say that they're all wrong," she said.

Rosen needs about 150 people from all over southern Alberta — including people of various ages, educational backgrounds and a mix of urban and rural Albertans — for her research, she said.

"It could be older versus younger, it could be people from ethnic backgrounds that speak differently, people from rural areas versus urban areas. So we want to look at all these different factors and see what comes out as significantly different between the groups," she said.