Rate of Change

[Eduard Selleslagh]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Thomas McFadden" <tmcfadde at babel.ling.upenn.edu>
Sent: Saturday, July 07, 2001 12:34 AM

>> In modern times we have the opposite: notwithstanding rapid cultural
>> change, we see a lot of convergence due to greatly improved
>> communications and mass media, which act as linguistic role models,
>> much more than any Académie ever did. Here in Flanders, e.g. we see
>> the pretty fast breakdown of dialects, via a stage of 'intermediate'
>> language or seriously locally colored standard language. In the
>> Netherlands, by and large, this stage has already been passed.

[snip]

> so the crucial factor here is not exposure to normalizing media
> and education, but movement between dialect areas.  now, what this means
> for the very different dialect situations of europe is less clear.  the
> european dialects were of course much more diverse, and have clearly been
> weakened in the recent past, but it still seems that mobility would be the
> key.  another thing to consider is that many of the extinct or near
> extinct dialects of Europe were, in distinction to the dialects of North
> American English, not mutually intelligible with the standard language of
> the country in which they were spoken (listen to a local dialect of
> Austrian or especially Swiss German).  it may well be that such extreme
> variation can be threatened by much lower levels of mobility, because not
> just social interaction, but simple communication can be disturbed.  just
> a thought.

[Ed]

What you call American dialects would be considered to be locally colored
pronunciation, or different registers, by Europeans who live in language areas
where dialects are still in dayly use. Actual dialects are usually a lot more
different, even with partly different vocabulary and some grammatical features
(like 'strong' instead of 'weak' conjugation of some verbs, remnants of
declension or a different declension...), different phonology (e.g. Cockney
glottal stops...), etc.

Many European dialects could just as well be called 'closely related
languages'. Extreme African-American English might come close.

It's that kind of 'real' dialects I envisioned.

The unifying role of TV and radio (and school and administration) in places
like Flanders or S. Italy is absolutely clear: e.g. words from the standard
language that are not used in the various dialect areas concerned, are
introduced in everyday language and tend to crowd out local terms, while
pronunciation slowly changes in the direction of these models.

Having said that, I generally agree with your reasoning.

>> The biggest change in English, which makes Old English incomprehensible, has
>> of course been Norman French.

> the role that the influx of Norman French played in the massive
> morpho-syntactic changes that occurred between old and middle english is
> a matter of some controversy i think, and seems often to have been
> overstated.  vocabulary aside, there is actually some evidence that the
> influence of Scandinavian was of much more importance at that time.

[Ed]

That's REALLY hard to tell, because one of the bases of English (Anglian)
already had some N. Germanic traits, and the Scandinavians may only have
enhanced it, to the detriment of the Saxon component. The syntactic changes I
can think of (in a few minutes) are clearly not Germanic: they concern word
order. But I'm not a specialist.

Ed. Selleslagh