From: Rick McCallister
Message: 61228
Date: 2008-11-02
--- On Sun, 11/2/08, tgpedersen <tgpedersen@...> wrote:
. . .
>
> I remember as a kid at the age where everything has to be
> correct and
> everything else is intensely embarrassing I went to Sweden
> with my
> parents, and people talked to and I read signs in shops and
> I could
> barely understand some of it; I remember the conflict I had
> between
> the impulse to set people right as I would have done
> remorselessly
> with someone who spoke a ridiculous dialect of Danish, and
> my more
> adult restraint that these were people over whom I had no
> say to
> correct them. The idea that other people's related
> speech is in some
> fashion just as good as your own is something that is
> forced upon you
> if you are a speaker of a small language, one's
> immediate reaction is
> to deny it and continue the shibboleth behavior which comes
> natural to
> you. Speakers of languages with many speakers can afford
> that, also
> the general tendency today to despise restraint as a sign
> of weakness
> reinforces that behavior.
>
>
> Torsten
I disagree. On the whole, Americans don't have problems with regional accents. And remember that English is much more inclusive than many "smaller languages" in that it includes what in Scandinavia et al. would be considered a collection of different languages I've been to Caribbean Central American and to San Andrés, Colombia where people speak an "English" that for the first 2 days was almost completely unintelligeble, yet it's still considered as "English" by its speakers and by all English speakers other than linguists, who call it Costa Rican English Creole and San Andres English Creole and see it as a sibset of Western Caribbean English Creole. I work with Africans who pronounce English as if it were West African Krio but no one challenges what they speak as "English." I work with people who come from countries where English is not a first language for anyone (AFAIK), such as Bangladesh and Ghana (where I'm told there is no English Creole), yet
their heavily accented English is readily accepted as "Ghanaian English" and "Bangladeshi English."
I'm told that German and Italian "dialects" as a whole are more divergent than Continental Scandinavian as well, yet the speakers are considered as speaking the national language.