Re: My version

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Brian M. Scott" <BMScott@...>
wrote:

> 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.

In order to reach some more solid conclusions as to whether or not
the varieties of European-American English you refer to can be
termed as 'dialects' by full right, I think it would be necessary to
quantify the amount of grammatical divergence from standard American
English in each of them, grammatical divergence being, in my
opinion, the decisive factor in assigning a variety of spoken
English the dialect status. If differences of accent and/or
vocabulary largely prevail over grammatical differences, I wouldn't
call those varieties of European-American English 'true' dialects.
See again Chambers and Trudgill's definitions and discussion in
paras 1.1, 1.2 and 1.3 of their book _Dialectology_, available in
(limited) preview at

http://tinyurl.com/bu24hs

> > And, in addition to that, their formation is so
> > 'ridiculously' RECENT!
>
> Must have been true of every dialect at some point.

The problem with all American varieties of English is that they are
soon doomed to death due to the rapid and inexorable diffusion of a
de-individualized standard form of American English vectored all
over the country by the all-conditioning television, movie industry,
press etc. They are already converging toward a far more unified
speech model, and will probably be demised all over the U.S. in the
course of the present century. This problem affects all the
countries of the Western world, but the history of the European-
American varieties of English (some of which may have been
incipient 'dialects' at some point in time in the pre-mass media
epoch) is so short-termed, that by the end of their linguistic
history they won't have succeeded in acquiring all the features of
a 'true' dialect simply due to 'lack of time'!

Best,
Francesco