Re: dialectal diversity in English

While I agreee that dialects in England do show even
wider/wilder variation than American dialects, some
American dialects rate pretty low for mutual
intelligiblity with my dialect.  I speak Dallas
dialect which is much closer to "General American"
than what most people think of when they think Texas
dialects.  Cajun English can get pretty dicey and
thats just one state over.  Ozark English has been
analyzed as ergative.  Some of those Appalachian
dialects are well nigh incomprehensible to me.  I'm
almost willing to say Appalachian English is a
misnomer.  Call it Apalachian Scots. *g*  Subtitles
are a real help.

But then there's Gullah and Hoitoid they really are
jibberish without subtitles.  Now if I spent any
significant time around them they'd probably become
understandable pretty quickly but as someone who
hasn't spent time around those dialects they are HARD
to get much of anything out of.  It's much easier to
understand the Sichuan Mandarin two of my co-workers
(sisters) speak to each other at the office.

ADam


--- Daniel Ryan Prohaska <daniel@...>
wrote:
> >
> > The dialects from South Carolina are closer to
> being a seperate
> > language than are the ones from West Virginia. :)
>
> I would never consider any of the American spoken
> varieties to be any
> thing approaching separate languages, not even some
> of the more
> conservative Appalachian varieties. As far as I can
> tell, American
> dialcets are all still fairly close to, well not
> exactly standard
> English, but some kind of "general" English. Only
> the phonology and
> vocab. Varies to certain extent.
>
> In England English dialects can be radically
> different from the
> standard. I'd still call them dialects as opposed to
> languages, but they
> is (or rather was, as the dialcts are dying out
> rapidly) much more
> dialectal diversity in England than in the US and
> Canad put together (in
> the English language that is).
>
> I consider Scots to be a separate language.
>
> Dan

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