Talk Elections

From my limited experience, no. Every language has its dialects sure, but what they speak in Switzerland is a whole different thing from how one speaks in Berlin. Plenty of German experts around. Fill me in.

Linguistically speaking, there are good reasons to regard German varieties like Swiss German and other varieties spoken in the German-speaking world as separate languages. Luxemburgish, for example, is considered a language in its own right even though it shares many similarities with dialects spoken in the west of Germany. A person from Berlin certainly doesn't understand a lot when he hears a Swiss speaker for the first time.

The answer to the question whether a certain variety is a language or a dialect is often political. Luxemburg, for instance, decided to grant its dialects the status of an official language. In Switzerland, however, there is a stable diglossic situation; High German is used in closely defined domains (e.g. education, certain television programs, Parliament), while Swiss German is used by nearly everyone in the German-speaking part in everyday life. The official language here is High German.

So, to cut a long story short: It's difficult to answer this question in a straightforward way. You can say "German" is only one language - that would be a political definition - or you can count clearly distinct varieties as separate languages.

A language is a dialect with an army and a navy. Switzerland and Austria have no navies, hence their (highly, in the Swiss case) divergent dialects do not count as languages. The Netherlands have a navy as well as an army, so even though their dialect is about as distant as the Swiss (clearly related, but not actually intelligible - indeed I'd say the three, with German, are about equidistant from each other) it counts as a separate language.A person from anywhere in Germany outside southern Baden understands almost everything when he hears a Swiss speaker for the first time. Then, a quarter of an hour into the conversation, he is made to comprehend that what he's been hearing so far is not Swiss German at all, but High German with a strong Swiss German accent, or what passes for High German in Switzerland.

You clearly don't know about Italian dialects.

The Austrian German I learned was serviceable when I went to Munich, but I'm sure they knew instantly that I was both American and learning Austrian German.

Yes that'd certainly be detectable. Austrian (except perhaps those from Vorarlberg) always works in Germany, for the most part.

At least Italians get recognized for their seperate languages on their wikipedia articles.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sicilian_language
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sardinian_language
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venetian_language
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friulan_language
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ligurian_(Romance_language)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piedmontese_language
German merely gets attention to the fact that there are "dialects." Even with my limited knowledge of German, I'm calling bs on that.

Of the Austrian dialects, Viennese is the most hilarious. Everybody sounds like a snobbish gay. :P

Ah well, when I was in trouble in Ober Bayern with my German, I spoke English. :P

Well, ok, I was in a family in which the Herr was lawyer in München, and the Frau was...hmm...a kind of crazy-slightly Peter Pan-kind of jewel or clothes creator who was about 10-20 years younger than him, she was nice though. Not really the kind of 'Grüss Got' people hidden in the mountains then. They once took me to some of those totally hidden though, to which you can only access by a road that seems to have 20% of inclination and which seems to be about 1m large, and on which you wonder how the f**k it would happen if an other car comes in the other sens, especially when you're in a big Mercedes that might be twice larger than the road (still didn't found out how it could happen, especially since it's like that on about several kilometers). And then you can find nice 'Grüss Got' farmers at the top of it, don't remember for which kind of food it was, but I'm not sure those speak exactly the same language, they seemed to understand each other though.

Ah France has a lot of dialects too (I don't mean regional languages, but patois), but I think most French speakers in France, Belgium, Switzerland, or African countries can understand each other without much problems. Hmm, for Québequois, once you pass the obstacle of the over big accent ^^, it would be quite accessible too, but as I said in the other thread, sometimes they can be quite different.

Well, it's nothing if compared to Arabic.

While we're playing that game, we may as well point out Chinese.

The fact that most Austrians I met the first time thought I was German says a lot about the strength of dialects.  Then when I was in Germany, they laughed at me because I used a lot of Austrian words and idioms and spoke with a sort of American/Austrian hybrid accent... they especially noticed it when I said the word interesting... or Österreich.. the native word for Austria.

But Austrian German is very much a dialect and not a separate language.  While it took me a while to get used to it, it's not even as difficult as it is for Americans to understand someone with a strong Scottish brogue.  At least in my experience.

I lucked out though because my friends came from all over... Vorarlberg, Vienna, Tyrol, South Tyrol, Carinthia, and especially Upper Austria... and also from eastern Berlin, Hannover, Cologne, and Stuttgart... so I had to learn to understand a variety of dialects.

But when my friends from South Tyrol would converse with, say, someone from Upper Austria.. they used the same words for the most part.. just had slightly different accents.

However, most of the Germans would speak completely understandable Hochdeutsch.

I knew two brothers from Upper Austria and one of them went to school in Salzburg, the other in Munich and only after a year at university, the brother in Munich had pretty much switched over to speaking high German except for the word "nicht", which he still pronounced "net".  His brother that stayed in Austria spoke with a full Upper Austrian dialect.

So I don't know what to make of that.  If the guy in Munich had treated the language there like a foreign language, you'd think he'd speak high German there and then come home and speak in his normal Austrian German... but his dialect and accent actually changed... like if an American were to move to Scotland and live there for years.. he'd probably have an obvious bit of a Scottish accent when he returned to America.

I know what you mean. A good friend of mine since middle school is now studying medicine in Vienna (already for 5 years now) and when he comes back into town during the summer or during christmas holidays and we go for a drink or playing pool, he has adopted (very slightly) this Vienna dialect. Of course in university you only talk standard-German, so it's normal that your dialect at home changes a bit. I like to correct him once he uses something very Viennese in our discussions. But once he starts saying Uber-Viennese things like "Ur-leiwand" or "hoggn" for work, I'll probably punch him in his face to remind him where he's from ... :P ;)

No idea about the two I snipped, but Friulan is definitely a language, Sardinian is a language (or at least a highly divergent dialect cluster), and Sicilian and Venetian have old literary traditions and a history of administrative use before being replaced with Italian. That's not true of any German "dialects" except Low German.

So let's compare different German dialects with concrete examples. I made up the following Standard High German sentence and would like to have it translated into different German varieties. Maybe some other German-speaking users will help me and write how the sentence sounds in their dialect. The sentence just serves the purpose of comparing some varieties - don't look too much at the content. ;)

The English translation of the following sentence is something like "I'm staying at home today because I got sick yesterday."

Standard High German: Ich bleibe heute zu Hause, weil ich gestern krank wurde.
Swiss German: Ich blib hüt dihei, wil ich geschter chrank worde bi.

Isch bleib heut [or heit] dehaam, weil isch krank geworde bin gestern.

Sounds wrong without some filler word before "krank". Of course, hessian orthography is not something that any sort of standard exists on. "ei" in bleib and weil could probably be rendered as "a" instead. Americans would strenuously deny the existence of an r in "geworde". etc. Thank God the sentence has no [ʒ]... there's really no way to render it in German orthography and Hessian is chock full of it.

Oh, and the final b of bleib might slur into a w, with the following h lost. We take purely phonetic voiced/voiceless contrasts to a new level. :)

A friend's uncle was a politician in Austria. He had to have an interpreter in certain places to communicate with the locals when campaigning.

Lol, what ?

Was the guy from Vienna and wanted to campaign in Vorarlberg ?

Because I don't see how anyone from the other 8 states would beed an interpreter in these states other than maybe Vorarlberg.

Unless the uncle was a foreigner and not capable of the Austrian-German ...

Zell am See German:

I bleib heit dahoam, waö I gestan kronch woan bi.

Dictionary I found:

English-Pinzgauerisch-German

()

PS: Pinzgau is the name of the Zell am See district.

As has already been noted on this thread, the question of what's a "language" as opposed to a "dialect" of a language doesn't have a clear, objective answer.  Many people make the distinction based on mutual intelligibility--if people speaking and/or writing can understand each other, then there's one language, if they can't, there isn't.  But even mutual intelligibility has problems.  What if speakers of one thing and speakers of another can understand 50% of each other's speech?  Do they speak the same language or not?  Obviously the speech of the two groups isn't "mutually intelligible" in the sense that, say, Standard American and Standard British English are.  But neither are they mutually unintelligible in the sense that English and Japanese are.  So the definition of mutual intelligibility itself is arbitrary--how much comprehension in necessary for two forms of speech to qualify as a language? 

I think that politics and objective linguistic differences both play a role in whether something is considered a language or a dialect, although the former is usually more important.

I voted yes to German being one language for two reasons.  One is that it's not clear what is meant by "German."  Some people use the word to refer only to Standard German, and that's a reasonable definition.  Secondly, it's true that the regional varieties of German (for example, Swabian) usually aren't mutually intelligible with each other, as far as I know.  But at the same time, most of them form part of a "dialect continuum" where speakers of neighboring dialects can understand each other well, but speakers of far apart dialects cannot.  It would therefore be unclear where to draw the line between many of these dialects in order to divide them into separate languages.  And this continuum doesn't extend, except for certain border areas, into non-Germanic neighbors like France or Italy.  The dialects can therefore be considered one big continuum of "German" even if many of the individual speakers wouldn't be able to understand each other--and of course, virtually everyone in Germany speaks Standard German today anyway, so this is not the case.

No, he's an Austrian. I think he was from Vienna. I couldn't tell you where the interpreter was needed though - it was somewhere.

Gus, while you're here I may as well turn the table on you. I've heard the argument that Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish should be classified as one Scandinavian language. Fair or no? And I don't buy the requisite literary precedent argument for the defintion of a language. Most languages in the world have little to no extant literature.

Aren't all dialects difficult to understand when you're not used to them? I speak Dutch with a Flemish accent (well, a Limburg accent to be exact, which is different yet from a mainstream Flemish one, though not as different as it would have been if I was born in Dutch Limburg), yet I don't understand much from anyone who speaks the dialect of West-Flanders.

Well...it's more or less fair. Swedes, Danes and Norwegians can pretty much understand each other if they try.

I think the intrinsic differences are certainly a lot smaller than within German or Chinese, to give examples that have been discussed here.

Of course, since they have different countries they do have different written languages and so on.

By definition, yeah. Not always just the words either, although I suppose what makes German especially tricky in this regard is the fact that so many dialect words have survived. Mind you, see Alan Garner on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. (http://alangarner.atspace.org/times4.html)

I don't know how to spell out the various Austrian dialects... but what I heard would sound like what I write below in this situation..

I bin heit dahoam g'blieben, weil i geschtern kroank g'worden bin. (I'm not 100% sure on the word "krank")

Another friend from Südtirol always said "wir haben das gemacht" as "mi' hoan desch g'mocht."

It's funny how the Austrian/Swiss dialects are closer to English with the zu Hause/daheim thing... an English speaker would never say "I am at the house"... always "I am at home"...

So when my friend would say "Ich gehe nach Hause".. it was "I geh hoam" (I go home).

Norwegian and Swedish have different spellings, but they're pretty close to one another. I'm sure verbally they sound basically the same. Danish is definitely different though. Would you speak Swedish if you visited another Nordic country or just English?

Fellow German posters, try to translate these 2 dialect-sentences into Standard-German:


I'll give you one tip:


This is a brutal example of why our dialect could be its own language ... ;)

Of course by mentioning 'Norwegian' in the context of a dialect thread... ah...

Well, this is a complex question.

First of all, in written terms Danish and Norwegian are identical. I mean, seriously. What little difference there is can be ascribed to the Norwegians doing silly spelling reforms stuff when that sort of thing was really trendy a century ago and they gained their independence.

When it comes to the spoken language, Danish is a very, very muddled language. As in I believe (and obviously this is a convenient myth to be pushed here in Sweden, but I think it might actually be true) it takes longer for Danish kids to learn to speak because the language is so hard to listen to.

It's quite removed from the spelling with a lot of letters "swallowed down". As an effect, Danish is very easy to read for a Swede (as in I can pretty much read Danish without any trouble) but if it's spoken fast it's hard to keep up. I often have to ask a Dane to repeat things a bit slower.

With Norwegians it depends a lot more on the dialect. Standard Norwegian is not at all hard to follow for a Swede.

In terms of what language I use when going there, it varies a lot. I like to use Swedish since I think it's silly to use English with my Nordic brethren. On the other hand, sometimes it seems a bit arrogant, as if I was one of those continental European idiots who go abroad without knowing English and expect everyone to know French/Italian/Russian etc.

Especially with Danes it can seem hypocritical since I often can't understand them that easily. Then again, I often meet Danes/Norwegians in international contexts where everyone speaks English anyway, or the kind of people who have learnt to communicate with Swedes. I have a half-Swedish half-Danish friend, for example, and she speaks a Swedified version of Danish with me that I can understand very easily.

There's always the classic British idiot abroad method as well: SPEAK ENG-LISH LOUD-LY AND SLOW-LY.

... no chance. I only get "Vorgestern (?) am ... haben wir, weil wir ... waren, nach dem/den ... mein ... auf beiden (?) Seiten grün gefärbt (?)" - maybe. :P

This is correct.

I'll give you another tip:

"Vofeascht" means "2 years ago".

It comes from "feascht", which means "last year".

And "Vo-" in front of it means "before" last year.

I don't think there is a word for this in Standard-German, without using "Jahr". Maybe "Vorletztes Jahr" ?

The same with the word "znaxt", which means "a timespan of about 1-3 weeks ago". You can maybe translate it with the Standard-German "neulich" or "vor Kurzem" ... ;)

A few other good examples:

"driving backwards": aschleng foan (dialect), rückwärts fahren (standard-German)

"bridge railing": Bruggnglanna (dialect), Brückengeländer (standard-German)

"cranberry marmelade": Granggnmarmalad (dialect), Preiselbeermarmelade (standard-German)

"talk": Hoagascht (dialect), Unterhaltung/Gespräch (standard-German)

"pickaback": Bugglkrax (dialect), Huckepack (standard-German)

"native": doega (dialect), Einheimischer (standard-German)

"groundhog": Manggei (dialect) - Murmeltier (standard-German)

"pointless": lafeschdeg (dialect) - zwecklos/sinnlos (standard-German)

"poor guy": heita-mandl (dialect) - armer Mann (standard-German)

"sand avalanche/mudflow": bloak (dialect) - Mure (standard-German)

and a ton of other words that have nothing to do with standard-German ... ;)

Another great word is "babysitting".

Almost everyone in Germany has already taken over this English word into the German mainstream. I cannot think of another word than "Kinder betreuen" for it.

Here in dialect we just say "kinzn" for babysitting. So, while the rest of the German-speaking areas have introduced this English word, in dialect it is not used. Only if you write it lets say in the newspaper: Babysitter wanted. Because there is no noun for it.

Ha, yes. I'd say though that one can often expect people to know English. I got pissed at the airport security in Brussels when they didn't (I know enough French to get by anyway but I found it unprofessional).

But if you're like, Italian, what do you expect?

Don't go to Spain then.

Well, the second sentence is easy. Schau dir an, wie das bei den Weibern ankommt.

The first though.... uh. What?

You got the 2nd sentence right.

OK, here's the translation:

Vofeascht = vor 2 Jahren

am Bachötog = am Weihnachtstag/24.12.

hobi ma = hab ich mir

waö ma zoch woa = weil mir langweilig war

nochn zwogn = nach dem Duschen/Baden

mein Iaxnboscht = meine Achselbehaarung/meinen Achselbart (lol)

huseg = schnell

auf iappeda Seit = auf beiden Seiten

grea gfarbb = grün gefärbt

...

And now in English:

"Two years ago on Christmas Day, out of boredom, after taking a shower I quickly colored my armpit hair on both sides green. Let's see how this works out with the ladies."

;)

I've been to Barcelona. Loved the Gaudi architecture. It fits my bourgeois taste.

Häsch das würkli gmacht?

(Have you really done that?)

lulz. My point is, don't expect English when travelling through airport security in Spain. I was lucky in that most of my "incidents" involving security took place after spending a year there.. but not all. Fun times.

When you say 'Brussels' do you mean Charleroi (what those Ryanair charlatans call 'Brussels-South) or Zaventem?  I just can't imagine Zaventem staff not knowing enough English to help you, even Charleroi staff is hard to conceive as not speaking English (,though I can vouch one shouldn't count on them knowing Dutch).

'Brussels - Charleroi' is great. Like having... oh... how about 'Cardiff - Rhondda', except that you could never build an airport up there. 'Leeds - Barnsley', perhaps?

Is Charleroi really that far from Brussels? It's the same distance as Baltimore Airport is from Washington.

It's the culture shock that's funnier than the distance.

Nothing will ever beat "Frankfurt-Hahn". It's actually closer to Luxembourg.

It's awful. Just really awful. As is Ryanair.

LOL. no.

:P

Pics or it did actually happen. >:D

While we're complaining about airport distances, London's Stansted is quite a distance out as well.

Ah well, you can't pay 20€ to do 1.000 km and land on the roof of the building to which you go...

Stansted is on the far outer edge of the contiguous London metro, the only place a major airport has any business whatsoever being.

New York has two major airports in the city limits. Plenty of other major airports are in or near the center city. Voldemort National Airport in DC. Logan Airport in Boston. We have the busiest cargo airport in the country (was in the world until Hong Kong passed us couple of years back) in my hometown. Why would you want an airport to be inconvenient?

I find a major airport in the middle of a city pretty damn inconvenient, thank you very much.

Inconvenient for what? Getting to the countryside?

Oh, quality of life, city planning, property values, the works.

When I visited Berlin, I flew into Tegel. It was in the city. I stayed in a hostel that wasn't far away. And it was fine. I didn't see any quality of life issues caused by the airport. The same is true for many of the American airports I mentioned previously. While the Memphis airport is not in a nice part of town, I don't think the airport is to blame. It brings countless jobs to people who very much need them. Plus, middle class people are moving as fast as they can to the area just south of it, which is by far the fastest growing part of our metro. I don't see what the fuss is all about.

You didn't? Then you didn't go into the right direction from the airport. EastSouthEast, in this case.
Anyways, Berlin's a much more closely knit metro than London (for obvious historical reasons), no one's thinking about ever enlarging Tegel again, and the airport they're actually enlarging and trying to make into the main airport is further out. (Heathrow, of course, being the London airport where an issue exists. And being much closer in than Stansted, within Greater London, but also within a basically suburban part of it. Munich Airport, of course, is a similar distance from the city as Stansted, in a smaller though just as huge-interrupted-hard-to-define metro area. This is as it should be.)
Have a look around. Most major American airports have a splotch of suburban slum next door. I can't look into development histories, but I'd wager a bet most of them weren't laid out to be... at least not any laid out before the airport itself was built. It's pretty hard on homeowners if the place's worth halves. Especially if you've got a mortgage on it.

Such as train stations in European cities, which at 1st were out if the cities, and then they have been fully integrated to those so that now they are part of the center or close of it. Also, at least in France, train stations areas always had a bad reputation, and ironically it didn't change much since then, districts around stations use to be kinda rough, even if the station is now in the center or close, which also at least in France, use to be the part of cities with the less problems.

And the suburb thing is what is currently happening to Toulouse-Blagnac. Crazy how suburbs (that is lots of houses and residences but also all what goes with it, big supermarkets, big movie theaters and so on) grew there around the airport in the very last years, this going along the important development of this airport (which became the 4th French one), and well, to be precise it also went along with the last big developments of Airbus there, it seems to match with the A380 facilities coming.

So...Skane?

The neighbourhood of Roma Termini has a horrible reputation, IIRC. (And closer to home Brussels-Midi is located in the heart of the more problematic parts of the city.)

No, "Skånska" as they speak in Skåne is not easily understandable. :P

Haha! So, for the non-Swedish speakers that is Hamlet's monologue "To Be or Not To Be"

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 :P

No, on the grounds that it's not.

If I pick up 12 newspapers and it's about 12 people standing in 12 parts of German speaking countries, each newspaper will tell me that the people around them are speaking "German". If there was a need to classify the languages differently for mass consumption, it would have been done already.


put another way - no we should not on the grounds that we have not yet - IE it should not be a conscience decision, it would be an unconscience one.

Should Chinese count as only 1 language?

*ducks*

No, and it's not, which is why we have Mandarin (http://www.mandarinrestaurant.com/) and Cantonese (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canton,_Ohio#Notable_natives)

The *ducks* indicated that it was a wise-ass question.

I wonder if teaching kids that how they speak at home is "wrong" is a concept unique to the US...

Hence the wise-ass links in the answer :P

God, no.

Teaching the kids of workers and peasants High German was one of the main duties of the public schools until 1960 or so.

So, I don't know the first thing about German schools. Please elaborate. I would sincerely like to know how things work over there. In America, we are taught in school to write "correctly." There is no mention of dialects or anything other than "right" or "wrong." And I get why having a standard is useful and necessary but I think "standard" and "non-standard" would be fairer and less judgemental. In  my hometown, most blacks grow up with their dialect, which really isn't that different than the standard, but is highly stigmatized. And he is told everyday how he speaks is wrong and that how the white people typically speaks is right. Of course he isn't told that directly, but it's very well understood. What happens with the kid in Bavaria?

I can't tell you much about Germany, but at least something about Switzerland. In our country there is an elegant solution; Standard German is what children are supposed to talk and write at school, while every native Swiss-German person speaks a dialect at home (diglossia). The usage of dialects is very natural and an important part of the Swiss-German identity, that's why the notion of dialects as "wrong speech" is not known at all here. On the contrary, dialects are valued highly, and the wealth of different dialects is considered an asset and a reason of pride by most.

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.

Linguistic imperialism is a common thing, of course, and it takes many forms. I can't say more than a couple words in my ancestral language, although my dad speaks it fluently.

I'm gonna go out on a limb as say it's because you grew up in the United States and he didn't...

I don't think even my cousins in Dhaka speak Sylheti.

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. The various American dialects are all pretty similar though. Nothing like in the UK and certainly not like in Germany. Maybe it's easier to hold the standard up as golden when everybody is so close to begin with.

Oh my goodness, that's the saddest thing :(


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


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

Why would they? They live in Dhaka, not Sylhet.

Really? I've been to nearly every state in the Union. Everybody speaks more or less the same. You may have a Great Lake Vowel Shift here and a country twang there, but it's nothing like Newcastle versus Cornwall.

I'll just note that dialect shame definitely exists in Sweden. There was even a big hit some years ago referencing someone getting rid of their stupid dialect to make it in Stockholm.

Dutch in Flanders does have a sort of weird status. On the one hand most people will shamelessly speak to one another in what's often been dubbed 'Verkavelingsvlaams', which is a sort of transregional Flemish spin on the Dutch language, notably with some for of 'Gij/Ge' (comparable to 'thou') rather than the standard 'jij/u' (informal and formal 'you' in Standard Dutch'). On the other hand, when we're expected to use Standard Dutch (in writing, in more formal contexts,..) we tend to use it in a more strict and grammatically flawless way than our neighbours to the North.

Historically the issue of Standard Dutch vs. 'Standard Flemish' has been a very active discussion within the Flemish Movement, with the greatest poet of the Flemish 19th Century, Guido Gezelle ('O krinkelend, winkelend waterding') notably on the side of a more typically Flemish language.

Far from the worst - just off the top of my head:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francoist_Spain#Nationalism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francoist_Spain#Nationalism) (Under the bit that says "Franco also used language policies". It's the reason why today in Catalonia practically everyone speaks Catalan (as the language of the house) but a lot of olds can't write it. The examples are infinite though, America is actually one of the better countries (historically).

I mean, I know men who come from villages around Butzbach or Bad Nauheim, commute to work in Vilbel, are only in their fourties, and who couldn't order a sandwich unassisted anywhere north of Frankenberg or south of Mannheim. But anybody from Frankfurt or Vilbel of whom you could say that is a farmer past the age of retirement.

You can rework the above post for just about anywhere in England.

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 (http://www.lib.gla.ac.uk/media/media_70544_en.pdf)) 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.

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.

Funny that you mention this - in a recent guest lecture by linguist David Britain at my university this study has been mentioned as well. He drew the same conclusions as you do. ;) (The general lecture course had a focus on "Principles of Language Change" and the guest lecture in question had the title "The Spatial Diffusion of Linguistic Innovations").

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".

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.

No, it's obvious to anyone who knows anything about Glasgow, and to anyone who (alas) has at least a passing familiarity with a dreadful soap (what my Grandad would have called ket) set in a mythical Bangladeshi-free East End (a soap that is, by the way, not generally noted for its accurate rendition of current or former working class London dialects).

In any case, who said we were talking about accents?

Of course the main thing, the main thing, would be the decline of traditional communities in a wider sense, obviously. Mass media played its part in that process though.

Egad, I accidentally edited my post instead of self-quoting. :( So the original is lost but here's the editted version reposted to the bottom of the thread.

I mean, I know men who come from villages around Butzbach or Bad Nauheim, commute to work in Vilbel, are only in their fourties, and who couldn't order a sandwich unassisted anywhere north of Frankenberg or south of Mannheim. But anybody from Frankfurt or Vilbel of whom you could say that is a farmer past the age of retirement.
[/quote]

Arnold Stadler on the dialect he learned as a kid (born near Meßkirch (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Me%C3%9Fkirch) in 1954. Well, born in Meßkirch but that's just because he was born in hospital rather than at home.)

In the beginning I was just matter, child matter, called die War. The word is not identical to German Ware [ware, merchandise] but dates back to proto-German and means the born (compare English to bear), ie all of a woman's live births. The word was preserved that long basically only in Schwackenreute, beyond the forest. But now it was retiring from circulation as we didn't understand it anymore, just like die Weiber [women] and other old words. Instead we were once again supposed to say Mädels, a nazi word, that had crept into standard language a second time via televison.
One day someone came back from the city and said "ich war" [I was]. And thus a false, superficial past tense had been introduced to us on top of everything else. Until then, that direction had been called "xai", Chinese as that may sound, "xai" - "ge-sein" rendered into standard orthography [ugh... "a-be"? "sein" is "to be", the infinitive form] , which meant anything not entirely lost to memory: I bi xai - "I am been".

What is the status of foreign language education in Europe? Is it normal for so many Europeans as we have on this forum to be fluent in English? In the US you are not expected to begin learning foreign language until age 11 or 12 and then it is only required for two to four years, and as a result most Americans do not speak a foreign language unless they have made a special effort or are in a peculiar circumstance.

In Western Europe, at least, most people would have attained a certain level of command of English, yeah. English really is crucial to fully participate in popular culture and to further one's career.

It strikes me that English is the greatest language of privilege in many places around the world, as are all lingua francas to some extent, but this one especially.

Of course, English is the lingua franca.

Essentially this (though there are some stubborn holdouts - like French in the Western Maghreb).


Not in Spain... (well, the thing about career is true but it is still a relatively recent development. In Madrid it was very rare to meet someone over the age of 30 who spoke English well or even at all - and I include quite professional people in this list, like civil engineers).

You're still not legally required to start learning a foreign language before the age of 10 here... though opportunities to do so have certainly been proliferated since my time... and it's still technically possible to avoid that language being English.
But you'll be starting a second foreign language two years later. And you'll be doing at least one of them until the day you finish school.
Third foreign language education, though, once the norm if you wanted to go on to university, is much in decay.

...fixed. That is France, Italy, Spain, Portugal.


...fixed too. I've always been amazed how some apparently classical citizens in DCR speak a so good French, including a very fluent accent, this is not the case to this point in other colonies from all what I've heard, ironically it is the former Belgian colony.


When I was a kid, it was also mostly the case, you officially start a foreign language at the 1st year of collège (middle-school), which uses to be 11. But for example the public elementary school in which I was had organized an initiation to English the year before middle-school. Then I was familiarized before some others, but still, it didn't prevent some pals who were with me in this initiation to be some of the worse at collège. The point was, you cared about it or not.

That being said, it kinda changed since then, for example my youngest bro had an initiation circa 6-8, I don't remind exactly, and this till collège, and not necessarily to English, he picked German iirc. And seems those kind of initiation are being more and more generalized nationally here.

2nd foreign language begins at the 3rd year of collège for everybody here, that is 14. And, classically, you can begin a 3rd one since the 1st year of lycée (high-school), but not all lycées provide it.

Here's a current example:
http://www.sheffieldtelegraph.co.uk/news/local/accent_on_pupils_talking_properly_1_4266351