Celtic influence

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

In a message dated 3/14/99 10:11:38 PM Mountain Standard Time,
iffr762 at utxvms.cc.utexas.edu writes:

>Except in the rest of world and the rest of history where standard languages
of stratified societies are always class dialects.>

-- That's simply not so.  In the US, dialect is regional rather than class-
based.  "Standard American" or "NBC News English" is simply a regional Midland
dialect.  I hear a dozen different regional dialects of English every week,
and they have no correlation to class at all.

The 19th and 20th-century British situation, where the upper classes speak a
class dialect and the lower a series of regional ones, is historically a very
rare phenomenon.

Standard languages are usually simply a regional dialect

Eg., the Border ballads show laird and crofter speaking the same dialect...
because that's exactly what they did.  Prior to the 18th century, squire and
tenant in England also spoke the same regional dialects.

There's absolutely no reason to assume that the situation was different in
Anglo-Saxon times; thegn and peasant and thrall (unless imported) all spoke
various regional dialects of Old English; nor is there any reason to suppose
that the standardized written tongue of the Wessex kings' scribes was much
different from the spoken language.  Perhaps a bit more conservative, but
then, contemporary written English is more conservative than the spoken
language as well.