USASE: dialect neutralisation (was Re: German+Hungarian question)

On Sat, 03 Sep 2005 11:12:31 -0400, Henrik Theiling <theiling@...>
wrote:

> By moving around in Germany, my spoken language's dialectal colour has
> vanished a bit, because some expressions were weird to other people
> and you just change your language when people are surprised each time
> you say some perfectly normal word.  It's disturbing and unnatural, so
> it changes.  So my language is more Standard High German now that it
> was 13 years ago.
I agree. My dialect was originally the koine of Milton Keynes, England
(largely but not entirely derived from north and east London, as well as
rural Buckinghamshire), and after living in North Carolina for five years
I've lost most of the terms unfamiliar to the locals, and even my accent
is changing -- sometimes assimilating to the local (I'm fairly rhotic now,
and have /4/ for some alveolar stops), and sometimes dissimilating (I
think I have /Vj/ for original /Aj/, presumably to keep from slipping into
the local /a:/).

Anyone else living with this phenomenon? I think it has implications for
modeling the interaction between conlangs and condialects on a larger
scale.




Paul