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In-Reply-To: <1688@tdat.teradata.COM> swf@tools3teradata.com (Stan Friesen)

TITLE: Re: English/American

> In article <1h5nflINNeog@pith.uoregon.edu>, delancey@darkwing.uoregon.edu (Scott C 
DeLancey) writes:
> |> In article <1992Dec21.171713.13930@dcs.qmw.ac.uk> tariqh@dcs.qmw.ac.uk (Tariq Ha
mid) writes:
> |> >The world media system. For instance the English spoken in the U.S.A would
> |> >have split in various sub-languages if it were not for televison and radio 
> |> 
> |> In only 300+ years?  That would be a pretty amazing rate of divergence,
> |> for dialects that are, after all, still spoken in a geogrphically
> |> contiguous area.
> 
> Not really - considering that that is about how long it took for the major dialects
> of Anglo-Saxon to diverge, and they were more divergent than the *major* dialects
> of modern English.

I agree that 300 years is on the short side for such a divergence,
but there are other factors than simply time.
1) The physical separation of different speech communities is
potentially much greater. (We're a bit short on deserts in England,
and our mountains are on the small side, too!)
2) With a lot of mixing with native and non-Anglophone immigrant
populations, there's the potential in the early stages for the
devlopment of regional diversity much more quickly than in the much
simpler mixing which related from the Anglo-Saxon invasion of
Britain.
3) It only needs a couple of radical sound changes to cause
communication problems regardless of contiguity. If this is
compounded by some sort of creolization, the effect would be even
stonger.
4) A central government imposing particular language choices will
counteract *any* divergence, regardless of the media, as long as the
central authority is either powerful enough or sufficiently respected
not to be ignored. If Charlemagne could enforce standards in the 9th
Century (albeit in Latin), the influence of the media is not
necessarily the critical factor in the 20th.
5) The presence of writing is crucial, too. But it need not prevent
divergence. Swiss departed phonologically from Central and Southern German
dialects about 500 years ago and is now *completely* incomprehensible
to most German Speakers (it's subtitled on TV) in spite of the fact
that the Swiss read and write the same German (more or less) as
everyone else. Whether this could happen now with groups with a much
higher level of literacy and an obviously common literary culture is
of course much more debatable.
So I'm not sure I agree that 300 years is necessarily that amazing in
principle, though of course given the *actual* history of the US it
would be rather implausible in this instance.

Peter

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Peter Christian               peter@gold.ac.uk
                              petex@cix.compulink.co.uk
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