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You'll find that India and Australia have their own slang and colloquialities that you wouldn't likely be familiar with either.
Dunno about Belize. When I've been in China, they speak English more like us than the US way.
I wouldn't base an opinion on that alone.
Yes - and yeah - I think so. Rather humourous when you get the picture. Took a while though.
Graham
used in a large geographically expansive country. Think of how the language >
changes within cliques of teenagers. It drifts so quickly that one
Teenagers are are special case - they use aberrant language with the fixed intention of not being understood by the previous generation. See also "thieve's cant".
The fact that the U.S. is geographically bigger than England doesn't signify in this context - England has more different dialects than the US, and a greater variation between the dialects, while Australia, which is about the same size as the continental U.S.A. has hardly any perceptible regional dialect variation.
Not really. English is spoken in a lot of places beside England and the U.S.A. and no single dialect has any particular claim to pre-emminence.
The aberrant spelling to which the OP was objecting, is a slightly different case. Noah Webster "reformed" American spelling in 1828
while the rest of us have stumbled on using Dr.Johnson's spellings. Since English spelling embodies some six different schemes for coding the phonetics of English into the Latin alphabet, there is probably room for a lot more reform than Noah Webster's idiosyncratic variations.
--------- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen
language used in a small community can evolve through creative new words, meanings and phrases, without causing confusion, much more quickly than the language used in a large geographically expansive country. Think of how the language changes within clicks of teenagers. It drifts so quickly that one generation cannot readily understand another.
Surely, the communication gaps between generations, and ethnic groups, is more about the use of fashionable words and phrases than a true change in the language....
Many of the words used by Americans that are not part of modern "British" English, like: trash, garbage, sidewalk, attorney, fall (Autumn in Britain)and the American English spellings like color, date from the English at the time of the pilgrim fathers. There is so much communication between the US and other English speaking countries by way of tv shows, movies, the internet, that since about the early part of the 20th century separate evolution paths for English have been quite limited worldwide.
I would contend that the "American English" in product manuals and help files is more to do with American style that the actual language...
Prescott
That's why Northern English dialects (the most intensively industrialised parts of the UK, with large immigrant populations- Flemish, Huguenot, Irish, Cornish- over hundreds of years) retain Anglo-Saxon and Norse features not found in Standard English, and why in the US the Deep South dialects so much resemble those of New England, I suppose.
Paul Burke
Have you ever HEARD a "British accent"? One of the newest things the Devil has invented to plague us with is the outsourced Indian cold sales call. It must do wonders for race relations in the UK when you KNOW that an Asian accent means that they aren't trying to sell you anything, no, they just want you to take part in a survey.
Paul Burke
intention of not being understood by the
Yes, their intention is to obscure, but look at how the teens quickly change the language that THEY understand. That is evolution at work.
in this context - England has more
while Australia, which is about the
dialect variation.
It sounds like you are agreeing with me:
USA large -> few dialects Australia large -> few dialects England small -> many dialects
Regions with a large number of dialects are a brewing pot for language change. Regions with few dialects are an indication of a stable language.
aberration.
and no single dialect has any
England certainly has pre-eminence to the English language, they are where the language developed. Do they *control* the language? No, inspite of their former role in the spread of the language.
The only country that I am aware of that claims eminence over a language is France. But then, they are the center of the known universe ;-)
case. Noah Webster "reformed" American
English spelling embodies some six
there is probably room for a lot more
Noah Webster, and Benjamin Franklin wanted to make English spelling phonetic. Their results failed and never gained popularity. I have seen copies of their "reformed" dictionary, and I cannot recall even one of their phonetic spellings that made it into the modern dictionary. Well, that isn't exactly true, if you look at the pronunciation guides, they are really close to what Webster and Franklin proposed.
In today's US English, 60% of the words in the dictionary are pronounced differently from their phonetic pronunciation.
Ample evidence that Webster and Franklin's idea failed.
Where Webster and Franklin did succeed, was in making spelling more uniform. They took a language where spelling varied greatly depending on where you were educated, and provide a reference of American spellings. These spellings were not the simple phonetic spellings that they wanted to have adopted, but rather, the spellings that were commonly used by Webster, Franklin, Jefferson and others. It is interesting to notice that the spellings used by Jefferson in his writings exactly match those in the current American English dictionaries.
-Chuck Harris
Television is having a dramatic affect on the English language. It is standardizing the US on the Midwestern dialect of US English.... and it has done so within my lifetime. When I was a kid, we used to travel throughout the US and Canada quite a lot, and I used to marvel at the way people in different parts of the country talked, but now, they all sound mostly the same.
-Chuck
differences.
on
Oh no! Not Clarence! Who IS this guy..? Indian people do NOT have British accents Clarence. People fom Britain do.... yes, Britain - that's the largeish island off mainland Europe on the map. People from India have Indian accents. Yes, I know it's difficult for you to understand, but just try to remember: people from a given country that speak English tend to have the accent associated with that country..... If you say it over and over it just might stick....!
Prescott
Well, I have been in Pennsylvania, New York, West Virginia, Michigan, Ohio, Ontario, Wisconsin, Maryland and Virginia so far this year. My mother is from Minnesota. And I have traveled in the South quite extensively over the last couple of years. And some would say that I live in the south.
-Chuck
Clarence, I really don't know what you're on but you come out with some statements that are impossible to understand. "Strunk and White"
- what on earth does that mean..?
Just for the record, what country are you from...?
Prescott
differences.
someone on
Good Friend, name of "Nigel" just returned from his "Mum's" in Britain. Still hasn't lost his interesting pattern of speech. Says he can't understand "Cockney" whatever that is.
I get the calls, I just hang up. The call is also illegal here.
I thought that Television had something to do with providing some sense of "standardizing" the manner of speech in the US. Perhaps the source of that (TV) was bragging?
Well, style is also dictated. "Strunk and White" come to mind.
Certainly, but unlike 40 years ago, you will understand virtually everything that they are saying.
I believe the reason is we all share a common source of language and pronunciation that comes from the radio, and the boob tube.
-Chuck
US pronunciation derived largely from
Right. Not so much Cornish as West Country English. If you visit the west of England counties: Cornwall, Devon, Somerset, you can detect the faint echos of the modern American accent. This makes perfect sense of course as Plymouth, from whence came the pilgrim fathers, is in Devon.
Prescott
It isn't evolution, because teenagers go back to using standard language when they grow up.
No, I'm not. Australian English has essentially no geographical dialects, and presents a very different picture from the U.S.
As Paul Burke points out, the difference has to do with history. In the UK the regional dialects reflect the languages that used to be spoken in the various regions before English was imposed, and have persisted for about a thousand years, because the population doesn't move around much.
The U.S. dialects haven't evolved apart from an intially uniform version of English, but rather reflect the dialects of the different groups who migrated into the different regions of the U.S.
Australia's lack of geographical variation in dialect reflects a very mobile population - something like 30% of the population moves interstate at least once in their lives.
As Paul Burke points out, dialects are pretty stable and the "isogloss" contour lines are equally stable.
Can you produce a few examples to test this claim? It doesn't seem to apply to Dutch or German, any more than it does to English.
aberration.
They certainly act as if this is the case.
Color, and sulfur have made it into modern U.S. dictionaries - I spell them colour and sulphur.
This assumes a single, specific grapheme to phoneme rule. There are in fact six different sets of rules that show up in modern English spelling.
Have a look at Elizabethan spelling sometime - the modern habit of spelling the same word the same way every time your write it is a comparatively recent innovation. I'd be very surprised if Jefferson spelled everything exactly the same way as current American dictionaries do - can you post a URL for a web-site that supports this claim?
------- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen
Really? When's the last time y'all traveled down south? Or Minnesohwtah for that matter.
Bob
That's not true at all. The dialects are stable over many years- in fact it's believed that the "ordinary" US pronunciation derived largely from the still- current Cornish dialect. Dialects are NOT slang, and they can be VERY stable indeed- Norse and Anglo-Saxon elements dating back over a thousand years are still current. And Welsh (not an English dialect by the way) has changed only slightly in that thousand years- there are few smaller countries than Wales. And it's obvious if you think about it- tightly knitted communities are likely to share speech patterns and value them as a defence against external encroachment.
It's mass communications (starting with railroads) that prevented the fragmentation of US English. I'm sure that had the Southern US dialects had another half century of separation from the Northern, they would have become so mutually unintelligible to have constituted different languages.
Paul Burke
Just picking communities from three of those areas that I am familiar with. Don't you think it would be pretty easy to distinguish between natives of Brooklyn, Minneapolis and Memphis blindfolded?
Bob
Memphis might be a little hard to pick out, if the speaker is caucasian. One of the lighter southern accents. I know, I was raised there! 8-)
-- Charlie -- Edmondson Engineering Unique Solutions to Unusual Problems
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