Should German count as only one language?

[ilikeverin]

I am heartened by the fact that not only are our European posters not ashamed to admit that they have a dialect but openly boast about theirs and discuss it publically.  I wonder if dialect-shame is a concept unique to the US

[ilikeverin]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welsh_Not

Oh my goodness, that's the saddest thing

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welsh_Not

A bit extreme as an example, as that's not even an issue of dialects. But even in England (and other English speaking areas) the idea that there is a correct form of English and that dialects were corruptions of something pure was a major part of the education system until quite recently. It's not uncommon to find people (usually over fifty) who switch their accents and grammar when talking to someone in a formal setting. And, obviously, it hasn't totally disappeared.

Wow. That's crazy. Didn't know about that. But I remember something vaguely similar from my high school French class about how the French government used to ban the Breton language in schools or something like that.

Oh, derp, France completely slipped my mind somehow.  Yeah, they're probably even worse than English-speaking countries in some ways.

You must be logged in to read this quote.

Eh, I would say American dialects are further apart than you'd think.  And the pace of regionalization is increasing.

[ilikeverin]

It's not school that did them in - school used to try for ages but failed. It's tv and the transportation revolution.

It's actually almost certainly not TV; every study trying to link TV to language change (e.g., one looking at the influence of EastEnders on Glaswegian English) has found only very sparse evidence that mass media contributes anything. (Again, the US is a good counterexample: regional changes are accelerating despite the strong media here.)  Changes in transportation and mobility are definitely the key.

[ilikeverin]

An article on the influence of EastEnders on Glaswegian English? I do hope that the people who did that did not receive any funding to do so...

Why not?  Did you take a look at the article?  Glaswegians are starting to front "th" like speakers of Cockney English (saying "fink" for what most people have as "think"), and linguists are unsure why the sound change would travel as it has.  One of the most popular canards is that the influence of English mass media (as exemplified by the supposedly Cockney-glorifying EastEnders) has brought Cockney patterns of speech, such as th-fronting, into prominence across the UK, and that speakers of Glaswegian English are adapting the speaking norms of the south because of that influence.  The paper in question tests that hypothesis by seeing whether there's any relation between how fervently Glaswegians follow and obsess over English programs (such as EastEnders) and how often they front "th", and found that there wasn't much of a relationship, indicating that exposure to English mass media is probably unrelated to this sound change in progress.  (The limited relationship they did find seems to have something to do with the fact that people who are obsessed with EastEnders in Glasgow just seem to like everything about England better than people who don't, and have more contact with people who live around London in general.)

I mean, it is a sociolinguistic study, so I can't defend it too much.  The impossibilities of making sociolinguistics truly scientific are why I'm not very interested in sociolinguistics.  But they tested a hypothesis that people repeat over and over and over again without much evidence at all, found it lacking, and presented evidence to that effect.  Not too much out of the ordinary there.

[ilikeverin]

Why not?

Waste of money that could have been spent on worthwhile projects. Even in the same subject area. The answer was obviously going to be 'no', and the sort of 'no' that would not exactly elucidate...

That's easy to say in hindsight, and I disagree. Indeed, I think the hypothesis that the mass media and, for example, popular television programs have a considerable impact on language is quite plausible. The fact that this study shows that there is probably no such influence in the case of EastEnders suggests that this hypothesis may have to be rejected - even though one has to keep in mind that more research has to be done, of course.

Exactly.  I mean, you saw the hypothesis made that mass media affects dialects already in this thread, and it's expressed all over the place.  I'm not sure how results to the contrary are "obvious" and not "worthwhile".

[ilikeverin]

You must be logged in to read this quote.

Oh no, not this again...

Okay, okay, gratuitous attacks on correlational designs aside I think the debate here is more about whether the topic is a valid and interesting topic to study, and I don't really see how it's not.