Analyze my dialect

[Kuciwalker]

Originally posted by JimmyCracksCorn
Hey, whats wrong with Nashville? Nashville's a great town...

Well, if it wasn't in Tennessee, and it wasn't Nashville, I would agree with you.

[Al B. Sure!]

For instance did you know that in France, in the 15th century, only 10% of the population spoke French? 300 years later, in 1792, that number had reached 50%

thank you for agreeing with me that the linguistic variety in England disappeared with time and contact between peoples a short distance from each other...

[Al B. Sure!]

i'm trying to look up the simple theories about differentiation being the result of population drift and seperation but when i google search terms like "linguistics" "differentiation" "diversity" "barrier" "drift", i keep getting these complicated webpages dealing with matrices, gaussian functions, correlations between genetic and linguistic differentiation, etc.

everything i'm finding is far too scholarly and beyond this level of discussion.

clearly, we're dealing with a 'duh' concept that languages differentiate as the populations speaking those languages physically diverge from each other...

[Buck Birdseed]

Originally posted by JimmyCracksCorn
the BBC, which was a great standardizing factor in the UK.

Outside certain middle-class southern circles, I've never heard anyone actually speak BBC english.

[Provost Harrison]

Originally posted by Albert Speer


thank you for agreeing with me that the linguistic variety in England disappeared with time and contact between peoples a short distance from each other...

Most movement has only happened in recent years, definitely a small proportion of our history. The accents are still alive and well. Hell, some accents are virtually incomprehensible to other parts of the country. Hell parts and Wales and Scotland (and even Cornwall, although I think now defunct) even have their own languages. So what about the US?

[Al B. Sure!]

in the 16th century, anyone with a horse or donkey could make a few day's journey and be on the other side of the country... what recent movement? you can travel from one end of England to the other in mere days. movement was constant. America is thousands of miles wide...

[Provost Harrison]

Not for the serf or peasant...they stayed put. This extended to the industrial age.

[Al B. Sure!]

alright fine then... during victorian england, englishmen travelled the mere few miles across the country and had immense contact, shedding their regional differences...

America, however, spans an entire continent and it has only been with the invention of commercial jet airlines and national television that people in NYC have had contact with people in LA.

[Al B. Sure!]

and thats not even mentioning, the dozens of languages the immigrants to america spoke and their transmission into regional dialects... england never experienced that.

[Fake Boris]

Originally posted by Albert Speer


thank you for agreeing with me that the linguistic variety in England disappeared with time and contact between peoples a short distance from each other...

No! distance may have been smaller, but the dialects themselves had a greater difference to be compensated for!

[Kuciwalker]

America had a much less diverse language. People of the time even noted it. They said Americans, in general, spoke better English than the English

[mrmitchell]

For instance did you know that in France, in the 15th century, only 10% of the population spoke French? 300 years later, in 1792, that number had reached 50%

If less than half of French people spoke it, why was it called "French"?

What the hell did the rest of them do for a language? Grunt their way around? German? Some old, forgotten language?

---

OF COURSE the British isles have as much linguistic differences as us. There's even whole seperate languages. English, Gaelic, Welsh, the Irish one. They've been around since, like, two thousand years more than the Americas were even discovered. Of course they've had more time to develop.

And have you seen those British guys talk on this very forum? They're all like, "oh no I'm moving to the South" or "haha! Northerner." or "Ipswich/Exeter/Yomama/this place here or there is very bad." It gets down to specific neighborhoods! How big is Britain, again? About as big as Oregon maybe, and they differentiate between "North" and "South" and have their own little Detroits and Phillies that everyone can agree are sh*tholes? It's incredible. America only makes up by its size, so I hereby end the contest. Both countries are badass.

[Fake Boris]

Originally posted by Albert Speer
and thats not even mentioning, the dozens of languages the immigrants to america spoke and their transmission into regional dialects... england never experienced that.

A good example would be that of French Canada. Even though the colony was separated by a few months of boat from mainland France, the fact that it was colonized in the 17th century made a huge difference. The difference between French Canadian and French is smaller than the difference between some German dialects, which is a fact that definitely goes against how your pseudo-theory applies to the New World.

The fact is probably that uniform education has a huge effect on dialects. All immigrants were different, therefore something with strong conventions had to be taught to them. I'd say that immigration probably has a softening effect on dialects, because immigrants typically don't learn and use local slang like locals do. They tend to uniformize the language.

Also, as I said earlier, colonists in North America all had the same basic language - English or French from the 18th century, with their newly formed standardized grammar - to evolve from, while in Europe, larger political instability and historical dialects that had been there for centuries continued to influence the languages of the populations.

[Al B. Sure!]

England was more homogenous than France and King James actively attempted to standardize the English language so it is likely that Englishmen were speaking a mutually intelligible form of English as far back as the late 17th century... people from all across England travelled to America, bringing their disparite or similiar languages here. Colonists in Virginia had no contact with colonists in Massachussetts. As a result, within 50 years, Virginian was far different from Massachussettian, and both were far different from England English. The Bostoners learned a few regional Indian words, while the Virginians learned a few regional Indian words, further diverging their languages. Fast-forward to the 19th century and the Bostoners experience immigration from Germany, Eastern Europe, Ireland, Italy, etc. and those languages dramatically influence the Boston tongue... Virginian develops with influence from Scotch-Irish and a limited African influence...

and those are two areas only a few hundred miles away from each other. differences become more extreme when dealing with the west coast vs. the east coast.

[Fake Boris]

Originally posted by Kuciwalker
America had a much less diverse language. People of the time even noted it. They said Americans, in general, spoke better English than the English

The same thing was said of French Canadians in the 18th century.