in reply to Re^7: Inclusion of Raku on PerlMonks in thread Inclusion of Raku on PerlMonks
Indeed. I think the US would have descended into 3 or so dialects of American English by now were it not for radio and television (update: and air travel). I believe the ideal US accent is approximately Midwest or a modified Canadian (no “aboot” or “sorerry” allowed) because whatever accent is hardest to pin down—the most neutral being the least specific—comes off the most “American.” A talented linguist can tell you which state you’re from still but the average listener… Then again, I’ve had two linguists guess I was from Philadelphia—I’ve been accused of being Canadian more than once too—and until recently, I’d never been more than a few miles East of the Rio Grande.
Re^9: Inclusion of Raku on PerlMonks
by LanX (Saint) on Oct 25, 2019 at 12:05 UTC
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To avoid misunderstandings, accent and dialect are often confused.
An accent is heard when pronouncing the same text.
A dialect is a language variety which has different words and grammars.
You might be interested in this Dialect Map of American English, though the author doesn't seem to follow his own advice and often explains dialects by accents.
The term, accent, is often incorrectly used in its place, but an accent refers only to the way words are pronounced, while a dialect has its own grammar, vocabulary, syntax, and common expressions as well as pronunciation rules that make it unique from other dialects of the same language.
Unfortunately the word "dialect" is of political importance since the French Revolution invented the nation state and is emotionally overloaded.
From a linguistic perspective do all Dutch, German, Afrikaans and Yiddish dialects belong to the same dialect continuum, like Portuguese, Castilian, Catalan, Occitan French, "proper" French and Italian do.
Making this statement too carelessly will at best end you up in a pub fight, at worst start a war.
> for radio and television
the Sunday sermon had this function in medieval days
I have to say I really love dialects and accents and I consider them part of high culture!
But I wouldn't object if some key figures of the Perl community would bother to be understood at conferences.
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Oh, sure. I was being too loose—or more properly, too lay, :P—with
the word dialect.
That dialect map, however academically correct it may be, is
pedantic to the point of being bonkers. If there is zero grammatical
variation and no chance of having vocabulary misunderstood then, to
me, it cannot be considered dialect. Washingtonians and Floridians
speak exactly the same English. Just because sofa and couch or soda
and pop may be preferred… they are understood and nearly no one bats an
eye to have them mingled. I cannot see local vocabulary like
geoduck (a giant clam in the Northwest) or dolphin (a
game fish in the Southeast) changing that either. It would be like
considering placenames dialect. The idea that New York City English is
as much a dialect as Gullah (a real dialect so localized that most
Americans live and die never knowing it exists) is risible. Almost
everything I wouldn’t argue about is like that: extremely limited
and self-contained geographically. When I said three dialects before I
was thinking Northeast, Western, and Southern/Southeast, basically
falling along the major surviving meta-accent divisions.
This does return to a more interesting (in US terms, the
European stuff you’ve been writing about is quite interesting) topic
that I wish I knew more about: American dialects of foreign
languages. You wrote about the Pennsylvania Dutch [sic] before.
There are multiple French dialects in the US, including an imported
Hatian creole I only know about because a local radio station does an
hour long show on Monday nights in it. The Spanish spoken in Northern
New Mexico and Southern Colorado has all kinds of 400 year hold-outs
from the Conquistadors and contains quite a bit of English for modern
words because the dialect itself was evolving too slowly. This
map is extremely fun for me.
Anyway, anyone reading these discussions should probably prefer
your definitions to mine. :P
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> If there is zero grammatical variation and no chance of having vocabulary misunderstood then, to me, it cannot be considered dialect.
In general do European languages in America have much less variations, mostly because there was not that much time to diverge.
Creol languages are not really dialects, but mergers.
In Europe dialects can vary from one valley to the next one.
Try looking up English dialects like "Geordy" °. I've also met Brazilians stating that they have less problems understanding a Spanish movie than a Portuguese one.
> American dialects of foreign languages.
There is also "Texas German" which results from an immigration wave in the 19th century, which is hard to classify.
Well I've seen dialect speakers in French TV like Acadian or Quebecois. I just recently met a Canadian guy who insisted that he spoke "original" French and that Parisian French is "way to gay" (no offense just citing)
Valid point here is that most European settlers were rural farmers, while the European standards were constantly redefined by their intellectual elite. (Posh Southern Englishmen in the case of BE)
°) which very similar to Low German didn't undergo many southern sound shifts.
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