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

On 2008-10-23 R A Brown wrote:
> 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.
You have that here in Sweden too, even here on the
(comparatively southern) West Coast.  I actually
thought that no young people in Bohuslän spoke
local dialect anymore until one day on the bus
I heard a little girl on the bus do just that,
and her father, younger than me, answer back in
like manner, while the teenagers on the same bus
spoke 'poshed-up' almost indistinguishable from
a Gothenburg middle-class accent.  I guess that due
to recent emigration from Gothenburg not all
teenagers know the local dialect, but that it
lives on in communication between family members
and close friends among those who descend from
local families.  When I grew up I spent my
summers with my grandmother in the country
and had friends speking local dialect, and
I picked up their way of speaking -- thus
marking myself as a peer-group member, thuogh
I was unaware of that at the time.  My grand-
mother objected to that in spite of both herself
and my father being competent code-switchers
depending on whom they were talking to. Maybe
she thought my dialect was impure and affected
rather than objecting to dialect as such.

/BP 8^)>
--
Benct Philip Jonsson -- melroch atte melroch dotte se
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
  "C'est en vain que nos Josués littéraires crient
  à la langue de s'arrêter; les langues ni le soleil
  ne s'arrêtent plus. Le jour où elles se *fixent*,
  c'est qu'elles meurent."           (Victor Hugo)