plausible?

[Aaron E. Drews]

> On Tuesday, October 05, 1999, Andrea Vine <avine at NETSCAPE.COM>
> wrote:
>
>>Interestingly enough, it looks like dialects in the media are
>> on the rise in
>>Britain.  It seems people in the BBC are increasingly retaining
>> their native
>>dialects, or at least a standard version of their native
>> dialects, e.g.
>>Scottish, Irish, and Indian.  I have yet to hear Welsh, West
>> Country, Yorkshire,
>>or Cockney, though, so I suspect there are limits.
>
> Nice, isn't is? I think this has been going on for at least a
> couple of years. There are even news readers with non-Empire
> accents appearing.

(A bit behind... sorry)

On BBC UK-wide news, there is a distinctly Welsh newsreader at 6 o'clock,
and a Scot on the morning news.  The BBC-Scotland news always has the
local/regional standard and sometimes RP (which is part of the dialect
continuum).  I would assume it's the same of the BBC regional broadcasts all
over the UK.  I doubt we'll ever hear Cockney or Broad Scots or urban
Birmingham any time son.

FYI, BBC Radio 4 is starting a 12-part series next Friday on English in the
past 1000 years, and will be looking at the rise and fall of local dialects.
I'm intending to record it for myself and my students.  I don't know if
those of you who get BBC World Service will get this or not, but I'll try to
remember to record all twelve parts, for anyone interested.

--Aaron




 =======================================================================
Aaron E. Drews                               The University of Edinburgh
http://www.ling.ed.ac.uk/~aaron          Departments of English Language
aaron at ling.ed.ac.uk                                      and Linguistics

 "MERE ACCUMULATION OF OBSERVATIONAL EVIDENCE IS NOT PROOF"
  --Death