From: Rick McCallister
Message: 61288
Date: 2008-11-02
> From: tgpedersen <tgpedersen@...>Maybe Bush might but no one else would. In the US, there are more than 300 languages. However, the only native Anglic language besides English is Gullah.. Southern, Appalachian, New Yorker, Bostonian, Burghese, etc. are not languages, they are variants of English.
> Subject: [tied] Re: Learnin' 'em good (was Labiovelars versus Palatals + Labiovelar Approximant)
> To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com
> Date: Sunday, November 2, 2008, 6:18 PM
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Rick McCallister
> <gabaroo6958@...> wrote:
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > --- On Sun, 11/2/08, tgpedersen <tgpedersen@...>
> wrote:
> >
> > . . .
> >
> > I disagree. On the whole, Americans don't have
> problems with
> > regional accents.
>
> Exactly. Accents. The general use in the USA is to call any
> non-written variety of English (they all are) an
> 'accent'. In the
> South people speak with a Southern accent and in Germany
> people speak
> with a German accent. As a consequence Americans think
> Europeans
> 'speak English' (somew of them, that is, of
> course!) and are shocked
> when they discover they don't.
>We just have a problem with cunning linguists
> Linguists are a kind of Europeans. Most Americans don't
> trust them.
>You missed the boat and sank like a Thor stone. If no one in Bangladesh or Ghana speaks English as a native language, then there cannot be a Bangladeshi or Ghanian English.
> > 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."
>
> Those dialects (in the European sense) are not written;
> that's the big
> difference.
>Yet Germans refer to Bavarian as a "dialect" rather than a language. All the Bavarians I've ever met call it a "dialect."
> > 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.
>
> That depends. In Bavaria people people either speak
> Bavarian, which no
> one else understands, or some citified version of it which
> is closer
> to Standard German.
>