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Re: American (was Re: Cants)

From:Gary Shannon <fiziwig@...>
Date:Tuesday, December 16, 2003, 15:43
--- "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