Of accents & dialects

On 2008-10-20 R A Brown wrote:
> Similarly, if we say someone is speaking with a
> certain regional accent, we mean that the person
> is speaking more or less standard English with a
> phonology characteristic of that region.
And that's what I meant with "accent". The line
noise between me and Lars was due to the fact that
the Scandinavian languages lack a term for '(regional
or social) accent' and generally use _dialekt_ to
cover that too, beside the same meaning which _dialect_
has in English.  There is a term _brytning_ (lit.
'breaking') for 'foreign accent' but that word
is **not** applied to native accents.

Linguists
and phoneticians of course have a term, viz.
_regionaluttal_ ('regional pronunciation')
but that has no currency at all in nonspecialist
language, and of course nonspecialists are
usually not aware that _dialekt_ actually
**has** a double meaning, or how different
traditional dialects actually are from
standard language with regional pronunciation,
unless they have some knowledge of a regional
dialect which still is vital and which differs
markedly from local standard Swedish -- though
of course it is mainly those markedly
different traditional dialects which are
vital at all.

I don't know if the situation
in Norway is markedly different, although my
hunch is that the slogan "speak dialect, write
Nynorsk" if anything makes the situation even
more confused; can a Southeasterner who writes
and mostly reads only Bokmål tell the difference
between someone speaking a Western or Northern
traditional dialect and someone from those areas
speaking standard Nynorsk?

I don't know anything at all about the situation in Denmark
either, bit it would seem that the status of traditional
dialects there is even worse than in Sweden, and much
worse than in Norway.  I do know that a nortn Jutish
traditional dialect is easier for me to follow than any
accent of standard Danish because I have some knowledge
of a traditional dialect from right across the
Skagerrack, but OTOH I can't tell different accents
of standard Danish apart.

On 2008-10-21 R A Brown wrote:
> In the colloquial English of West Sussex when i was a lad in the
> 1940s & 50s, present tense was regularized in that all persons ended
> in -(e)s, not just the 3rd singular, e.g. I goes, we goes, they goes
> etc.
Incidentally standard Swedish, Norwegian and Danish all
have extended the old 3rd singular _-r_ ta all persons
of both numbers, while some traditional dialects retain
more or less of the old person-number endings. OTOH I once
heard a wan speaking dialect-influenced standard Swedish
use _-r_ in the imperative too, which sounded quaint to
me. Unfortunately the situation wasn't such that I could
ask which part of the country he came from, but he sounded
like he came from the North, where traditional dialects have
lost most or all unstressed final syllables, so it may have
been a hypercorrection.



/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)

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