Re: American (was Re: Cants)

--- "Thomas R. Wier" <trwier@...> wrote:

<snip>

> If you're going to point to real
> instances
> of geographic change in the US, the place to look is
> the vowel-shifts
> underway in the Northern and Southern US. Both are
> chain-shifts,
> but are proceeding in the *opposite* direction.  We
> won't really
> know for several centuries whether this actually
> causes a
> geographical divergence in dialects.
<snip>

I would think that mass media and the increasing use
of audio chatting over the Internet would have a
strong tendancy to blur, or even eventually erase
regional differences.  It seems to me that the wisdom
of the past applies only to the past where a few
hundred miles on the ground represented a significant
distance both physically and linguistically.

And at even greater distances, is there any evidence
that, for example, Australian English and American
English are either converging or diverging in the last
20 to 30 years?  Since the present communication
environment is unprecidented in all of history and
pre-history it's likely that the only thing that can
be safely said is that we have no idea whatsoever what
the liguistic map will look like in a few hundred
years.

Of course, having no liguistic training myself, this
is all idle speculation.

--gary