--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Arnaud Fournet" <fournet.arnaud@...>
wrote:
>
>
> That concept of "ignorance of English grammar" is a fallacy anyway.
> Otherwise, dialects would be ignorance of the official norm.
>
> Some people do that. This is a raw linguistic fact.
> And it's frequent enough to be worth a comment in a dictionary.
>
> This is more "alternative" grammar and as such it's a particular
> (idio)dialectal feature.
>
> A.
>
You're probably right about that, being "alternative grammar". I used
"ignorance" loosely, trying to mean that they might have forgotten
their original grammar which was the same as standard U.S. grammar,
due to their relative isolation from the rest of U.S. society, and the
passage of time. In the sense that their divergence from the norm is
not due to lack of intelligence, which other English speakers often
assume, then these people could be said to have their own dialect. I
don't know what the "official" judgment is on the question of whether
such forms of English are dialects, or whether it has ever been
resolved firmly.
Andrew