Celtic influence

[Rick Mc Callister]

>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.

	There are very strong class accents in many parts of the US.

	Here in Mississippi and in much, if not most of the South, the
middle and upper classes [at least those under 50 or so] speak a dialect
very similar to Midwestern English but they still use "y'all". Older upper
class white women around here tend to drop final -r and speak very
differently from lower class white women. Lower class whites speak a
dialect similar to Appalachian English [with final /-r/ and leveling of
/ae/ & /E/ to /ey/].

	Have you heard "Burghese" in and around Pittsburgh?

	Have you noticed that on the East Coast that in the suburbs people
tend to sound like they're more from the Midwest than from the East Coast?
My friends in college from Moorestown NJ & Bucks Co PA didn't sound
anything like Rocky.

	Very few of my daughters' friends in her MA prep school who are
from Boston sound anything like Will Hunting. The only ones who do are from
ethnic families who moved out to the suburbs.

	Have you noticed that in much of the Midwest, the West and the
Northwest, working class whites often sound like they're from Appalachia?

	Have you noticed that upper-class African-Americans often have a
distinctively class-based accent that is recognizable as African-American
--e.g. the older woman in the Disney commercial. Friends of mine have
referred to this as an "AME accent".

	There is a very definite class diglossia in the US in which
regional accents tend to be much stronger among the lower classes. It is
not a sharp divide but it's noticeable.