Re: dialectal diversity in English
| From: | Stone Gordonssen <stonegordonssen@...> |
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| Date: | Saturday, May 17, 2003, 13:52 |
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>When I was in Valencia, at least some locals were pretty adamant that their
>language wasn't Catalan. Yet another instance were the mutual intelligible
>criterion does not map well to what speakers consider themselves to be
>speaking.
While I can see where cultures' claims of exclusion or inclusion of selected
dialects to have significance politically and socially, I personally place
this in the catagory of subjective rather than objective fact. I guess I
value obhectivity more when it comes to scientific analysis.
E.g. to my father and mother, there was what they spoke - "American"
["mVrkin] or ["m{r`kin]- and what everyone else spoke - "Foreign" [fVr`n] (a
very us-vs-them approach to life). Often my father would claim complete
unintelligability of accents from "the North" while having no problem with
my dialect which sounds not at all like his and includes several foreign
words.
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