End of ADS-L Digest - 25 Nov 1993 to 26 Nov 1993

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There are 2 messages totalling 70 lines in this issue.



Topics of the day:



 1. diversity of accents (2)



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Date:  Sat, 27 Nov 1993 12:19:49 -0600

From:  Tim Frazer <mftcf[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]UXA.ECN.BGU.EDU>

Subject: Re: diversity of accents



I just logged onto the system and landed in the middle of this

discussion, so I missed some things. Dennis, could you or someone else

please cite for me the newspaper article which treats "decline of dialects"?

Or enter it, better yet, on the system so I can print it off? I also get

angry at journalists who print crap like this, but wehave to remember

that the very journalists who perpetuate this myth are part of a

cultural superstructure which has existed for more than a century. It is

so common that most literatre people take it for granted. It is the

result of a regional group which established economic and cultural hegemony

after the Civil War and which has dominated higher education and

publishing since. For this reason, Inland Northern dominates textbooks,

pronunciation guides (e.g, the NBC Handbook of pronunciation) and many

dictionaries. Rudy: I have on my desk a primary school textbook called

IMPROVINMG YOUR LANGUAGE. It dates from 1951. It has this entry:

say: pen

make it rhyme with: Ben

Do not say: pin



This book does the same for GET, TEN, etc.



I have a long discussion of this in my book, out this week, HEARTLAND

ENGLISH; the intorduction touches on journalistic myths and chapter 4

touches on Yankee domination. See also chapters by Preston, Donahue,

Sledd, and Riney.



On TV influence: somewhere I have read about a deaf-and-dumb couple who

gave birth to two normal children. They decided the kids would learn to

talk "normally" by watching lots of TV. By kindergarten they had not

learned to talk. I would guess from this that language learning is

an interactional process (and so is dialect acquisition); watching TV is

not interaction.



--Tim Frazer