At 7:43:34 PM on Friday, February 20, 2009, Francesco Brighenti wrote:
> I realize that my views on what 'true' dialects have
> represented throughout the medieval (and part of modern)
> history of Europe cannot be applied to what some of the
> members of the List want to call 'American dialects'. By
> now, it should be clear to anyone that to me those are not
> 'dialects' at all, but rather 'accent varieties'.
It isn't just phonology, you know. To quote Raven I.
McDavid, Jr., in 'Dialect Differences and Social Differences
in an Urban Society':
A dialect, in the sense in which American scholars use it,
is simply an habitual variety of a language, set off from
other such varieties by a complex of features of
pronunciation (/drin/ vs. /dren/ "drain"), grammar
(_I_dove_ vs. _I_dived_) or vocabulary (_doughnut_ vs.
_fried_cake_).
DARE (Dictionary of American Regional English) is largely a
compendium of lexical variation. Grammatical variation is
for the most part much smaller, but it certainly exists,
even ignoring AAVE: as an example, I live on the edge of a
region in which 'The car needs washed' is grammatical.
I'm not arguing that differences amongst U.S. varieties are
comparable to those amongst Italian varieties, but I do
think that you may be underestimating them.
> And, in addition to that, their formation is so
> 'ridiculously' RECENT!
Must have been true of every dialect at some point. It has
been argued that some differences, especially along the
Atlantic seaboard, can be traced to settlement patterns.
Brian