Posted on 01/29/2025 10:23:00 AM PST by CondoleezzaProtege
Good point. Languages evolve all the time. Latin was once the "official" language of the Roman Empire.
With the way languages work, 100 years from now, we may end up speaking Spanish. Or Spanglish
American English is relatively uniform because English began to be spoken here just over 400 years ago. In European counties there are often many dialects very different from the standard form of the language. I read somewhere that there are 45 dialects in Slovenia (a country of 2 million people).
In All Creatures Great and Small one of the vets finds it very hard to understand the local Yorkshire dialect.
An English-speaking woman went to live in a small town in Switzerland and became fluent in the local dialect of Swiss German. Then she moved to another town not far away and the local dialect was so different people made fun of her speech, so she pretended not to speak German at all.
“I thought English already was our official language”
It’s standard, but not official. It should be.
And then have everything printed in English only. Receiving five pages of gobbledegook when one will do is insane, and expensive.
In the Roman Empire Latin was widely used in the western provinces (and most of the earlier languages there died out), but in the eastern provinces Greek was more widely used. Latin speakers when visiting the east got annoyed when they had to press 1 for Latin on their phones.
Speling is gud to.
I was sent on a business trip to our company’s home corporate office in Hull which is in the East Riding of Yorkshire.
I flew from Philly to Manchester on a Saturday night red eye fight and had to take 2 trains to reach Hull.
On the train ride from Manchester to Doncaster, the train announcements were recorded and in “BBC” English and very understandable. But after changing trains in Doncaster the announcements were made by the train conductor and in a heavy Yorkshire accent.
I kept having to ask the person sitting next to me to tell me what had been said.
That being said, I loved Hull and Yorkshire and the people I met there. Although it was funny as that as soon as I spoke and they heard my American accent, several people asked if I was from Texas. LOL!
I grew up in PA and MD and have never been to Texas.
In All Creatures Great and Small one of the vets finds it very hard to understand the local Yorkshire dialect.
Monty Python - Four Yorkshiremen
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ue7wM0QC5LE
"Riding" lost an initial "th"--each one is one-third of Yorkshire.
York is my favorite English city. I could spend all day at the train museum there.
I hadn’t seen that one before. They didn’t seem to be using dialect forms.
Geographic isolation allows dialects to flourish. The advent of mass media (radio and television) have a leveling effect on the geographic isolation. The southern dialect of Welsh enjoys more exposure through the media. Consumers of media in Wales tend to pick up southern dialect constructs.
Tuscany is very far north compared to southern Italy. You would expect significant variation. The US has significant variation too. San Antonio and Dallas have unique "accents". Both are hugely different from New Jersey and Alabama.
Absolutely.
And my mother isolated herself when living among Southern Italians. Two totally different cultures.
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