Free Republic

AUSTIN --Although stories of der Cowboy and die Stinkkatze mayno longer get told in Texas, Germanic linguistics professor Hans Boas wants to make sure nobody forgets them.Boas, an assistant professor at the University of Texas, is the founder and manager of the Texas German Preservation Project. Every month or so Boas ventures forth from his campus office in Austin to small towns like Boerne, Fredericksburg and Crawford to conduct interviews with the dwindling number of old-timers who speak the odd mixture of English and 19th-century German.It's a dialect unique to the Lone Star State, and most of the 8,000 or...

Many Brits make it in the US - not all keep their accents By Megan Lane BBC News Magazine A cut glass English accent can fool unsuspecting Americans into detecting a "brilliance that isn't there", says Stephen Fry. So is a British accent - of any variety - the route to success in the United States? "Gee, I just love your accent." Any Brit crossing the Atlantic will have heard that line many times. Like the rest of us, Americans are rarely immune to the charms of an accent different from their own. Go on, say "shagadelic"... There's the...

It's started. Rising inflection at the end of the sentence. Sometimes several times in a sentence. Very. Short. Staccato. Statements. As yet no use of "like" four or five times in a sentence, but occasionally once or twice. Meike, once the vocalisation of Laura Ashley prints and the only girl at her inner-London primary school who never dropped any consonant, let alone an aitch, is starting to speak with an American accent. Perhaps not quite an accent, yet, but the rhythm of her speech has changed in a decidedly US direction. The rest can't be far behind. We have been...

E-mail Author Send to a Friend Version January 27, 2006, 8:23 a.m. You Go, Girl! A missing consonant and the race card. By Mark Goldblatt Something about that clip of Hillary Clinton insisting, in front of a predominantly black audience on Martin Luther King Day, that Republicans were running the House of Representatives like a "plantation," had been gnawing at me for almost a week, and even after replaying the video over and over again — ah, the curse of the Internet! — I couldn't quite put my finger on it. I knew it wasn't the comparison of congressional...

If you've been listening to coverage of Katrina's devastation on the radio, you've no doubt heard the distinctive New Orleans accents of victims, officials, and rescue workers alike. Some of them speak with a familiar, Southern drawl; others sound almost like they're from Brooklyn. Why do people in New Orleans talk that way?

Ever been baffled by the bard? Vexed by his verse? Or perplexed by his puns? London's Globe theatre thinks it has the answer: perform Shakespeare's plays in Shakespeare's dialect. In August the theatre will stage an "original production" of Troilus and Cressida - with the actors performing the lines as close to the 16th century pronunciations as possible. By opening night, they will have rehearsed using phonetic scripts for two months and, hopefully, will render the play just as its author intended. They say their accents are somewhere between Australian, Cornish, Irish and Scottish, with a dash of Yorkshire -...

Black identity has become a hot item in the movies, on television, and in the schools and colleges. But few people are aware of how much of what passes as black identity today, including "black English," has its roots in the history of those whites who were called "rednecks" and "crackers" centuries ago in Britain, before they ever crossed the Atlantic and settled in the South.  Saying "acrost" for "across" or "ax" for "ask" are today considered to be part of black English. But this way of talking was common centuries ago in those regions of Britain from which...