Posted: Mon May 14, 2007 9:11 pm Post subject: Standard form of English spoken in the Anglo World
In the last two hundred years, most countries have undergone some form of a national standardization in many ways, including speech. This especially pertains to countries like the U.S., which is nation made up of immigrants, so that enforcing a national standard became very important.
Yet, I often wonder why some regions of the U.S. do not speak a "dialect" more in line with Ulster Scots, such as in the Appalachian region, settled by Scots-Irish immigrants, who were isolated in the mountainous regions, and were unedcuated, thus avoiding assimilation and influnence from speakers of English-English, while also avoiding a standard enforced on them through the public school system, since there were no public schools in the backcountry of the wild frontier. _________________ Operation Northwoods - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods
Favorite languages = English/Spanish
Followed by Italian/French/Dutch
Well, one thing that should be remembered is that there are many areas, such as the Upper Midwest, where a very large portion of the population historically effectively learned English as a foreign language. For instance, here in Wisconsin, the only real native English-speakers of any consequence which settled here are early settlers from New England and later settlers from Ireland who were already English-speaking. The rest of the population, a majority thereof, was composed of Germans, Scandinavians, Poles, Italians, and like, who did not speak English before coming to the US. Consequently, they did not bring any native English dialect features with them but rather learned rather generic sorts of English which had spread internally within the US. Of course, they left their own imprint upon such, particularly with respect to pronunciation but also with respect to some particular usages, but such was definitely less than the influence that English and Scots dialects had upon the speech in, for example, the Appalacians.
Yet, I often wonder why some regions of the U.S. do not speak a "dialect" more in line with Ulster Scots, such as in the Appalachian region, settled by Scots-Irish immigrants, who were isolated in the mountainous regions, and were unedcuated, thus avoiding assimilation and influnence from speakers of English-English, while also avoiding a standard enforced on them through the public school system, since there were no public schools in the backcountry of the wild frontier.
But people in the Appalachians DO have an odd & distinctive accent. I remember my parents having a whole collection of the Foxfire books, which were sort of an ethnographic series. (I just read the ghost stories, actually, but even in the those, the dialect was very strong, and of course the ghosts were all called "haints" -- the local permutation of the word "haunt".)
As for the western frontier, most of the settlers who moved west were of northern stock (hence the eventual Civil War, as western expansion failed to expand slave territory at the same pace as free territory), and therefore unlikely to speak unusual dialects in the first place. Although I was flipping through Across Five Aprils a few weeks back, and I was surprised to see that the southern accent extended as far north as southern Illinois. The author points out that although you would normally think of Illinois as completely northern/midwestern/pro-union (think Chicago), the southern part was both geographically and economically quite different, and many of its residents were of Kentucky and Missouri stock, which divided their loyalties between the Union and the Confederacy.
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I remember my parents having a whole collection of the Foxfire books, which were sort of an ethnographic series. (I just read the ghost stories, actually, but even in the those, the dialect was very strong, and of course the ghosts were all called "haints" -- the local permutation of the word "haunt".)