Re: Of accents & dialects (was: Azurian phonology)

Michael Poxon wrote:
> You don't have to go outside England for weird dialects, by the way!
> Yes, there certainly are huge differences
> in both vocab and syntax just within England.
Quite so. Eldin is unlikely to have heard them from over the other side
of the Pond. You have be there among the dialect speakers.

In these days of universal education and mass communication, most people
in such places are 'bilingual', i.e. they speak dialect among those
around them, but in situations when a wide audience is aimed at then
they'll speak more or less standard English with some regional coloring
in pronunciation.

In my last job before I retired one of my colleagues came from the
Toxteth area of Liverpool. He spoke standard English with a marked
regional accent - he referred to it as "poshed up Scouse" - i.e. the
phonology was partially modified to smooth out, so to speak, the more
extreme differences between Scouse & RP (and the syntax and vocab were,
of course, standard). But his wife told me that when he's with his
brother then he's actually speaking Scouse and is almost
incomprehensible to us southerners.

> Yorkshire does often leave
> out (or adds a glottal stop to the previous phoneme,
> as in "trouble at' mill" /trub@l [? mil/ = 'trouble at the mill'.
> Often,
Somewhere buried away I have notes on the behavior of the definite
article in various English dialects. IIRC it's not even the same in all
parts of Yorkshire.

>> But as for English dialects (that is, dialects of the English
>> language, spoken
>> within parts of the nation of England), are there really big
>> differences in
>> syntax between one and another?  If so I've never heard of them.
Syntax, morphology & lexis, as well as phonology. As I said above, it's
not likely you would hear them across the Pond.

--
Ray
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Frustra fit per plura quod potest
fieri per pauciora.
[William of Ockham]

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