Re: Norwegian languages

Quoting Arthaey Angosii <arthaey@...>:

> John Cowan emaelivpahr:
> >just as there is no standard spoken American.
> >(There's the way TV announcers talk, but people don't learn
> >that style unless they want to go into some related profession.)
>
> There aren't different dialects (that I'm aware of, besides the supposed
> Appalachian English) in the US, just different accents. A Southerner speaks
> the same American English as a Californian, only with slightly different
> (but entirely understandable) pronunciation. From the original post about
> Norweigan languages, it sounded like two distinct languages were being
> discussed, not two accents.
You have obviously not listened to any of these "accents". :)
In all seriousness, America *does* have significant dialect
variation; it simply does not have as much as, say, Germany
or China.  I live in an area in which many African-Americans
live, and a large number of them speak the so-called African-
American Vernacular English.  I remember vividly eating at
a local restaurant once, and sitting at a table next to a young
couple with a child.  I was separated from them by no more
than five feet, and yet for the life of me I couldn't understand
most of their conversation.  They were clearly speaking some
dialect of English the whole time I listened, and speaking
loud enough that I should have understood them, but I could
understand only about every other word.  I think they were
also diglossic, since when the waitress approached them to
take their order, they all of sudden became entirely
intelligible.  What made this all the more curious is that my
own native dialect shares a number of features with AAVE
(use of y'all, /ai/ --> /a:/ shift, optional dropping of
all subject NPsm, etc.).

Your opinion of America "having no dialects" is true only for the
Western half or so, and that only in the sense that the dialects
are sociolinguistically, not geographically, conditioned.  When you
travel along the East Coast, there are *lots* of regionalisms
present.  One vivid one that comes to mind, present in parts of
the Carolinas, is the idiom "it come up a cloud", meaning "there's
going to be a thunderstorm".  This would not at all be intelligible
to me if it weren't for the fact that my friend who uses it in his
native dialect is bidialectal.

 =========================================================================
Thomas Wier
Dept. of Linguistics  "Nihil magis praestandum est quam ne pecorum ritu
University of Chicago sequamur antecedentium gregem, pergentes non qua
1010 E. 59th Street   eundum est, sed qua itur." -- Seneca
Chicago, IL 60637

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