Thank you. I was having trouble parsing that statement.
Please tell me, how does a new dialect start?
If you would stop trying to be so clever and actually try to understand what people are trying to say here, you might learn something.
Almost all dialects are oral and they begin orally. Fine. So what’s the point?
The point is you said that “dialects are more oral in nature.” More oral in nature than what?
So, your statement is “dialects tend to be more oral in nature than standard language.”
That’s like saying “Fish tend to be more aquatic in nature than salmon.”
I believe that magellan01 was more interested in the “colloquial” origins of dialects than in their “oral” nature. Under the pattern that I think he would perceive, dialects spin off from “standard” language when people begin to include slang or to “take shortcuts” in the language. (He can, of course, correct me if i have misinterpreted his thoughts.)
I would counter that with the point that even the standard (or, as Monty has called it, the prestige) dialect changes without necessarily resorting to slang or short cuts.
To give magellan01 a supporting example, we have, in the last 30 (perhaps even 20) years begun to lose the past participle as an adjective. Few people say “that damned rain ruined the picnic.” They more typically say “that damn rain ruined the picnic”–and I have never seen any of the fussier language mavens such as George Will or William Safire bemoan the loss. Now, this appears to be an example of taking a shortcut (by dropping the -ed suffix). I do not know whether this is actually what happened, or whether some other activity was at work that was simply coincident to the dropped suffix.
On the other hand, the (initially) much reviled “hopefully” to mean “I hope” does not take any shortcuts in speech and actually requires more effort (more syllables and a break at the comma before the main thought). The Watergate excressence “at that point in time” still contiues in the language, pushing out the more concise and easier to say “at that time.” Changing “contact” into a verb replaced the simpler “touch” in many instances.
These and other changes have all made the Standard dialect more cumbersome to speak.
So what we see are speech patterns moving in both directions between simpler and easier or more complex and more difficult. There is no consistent direction for changes in dialect that can be characterized as “more colloquial” (or, heaven forfend, “lazier”).
The short answer is that a dialect begins when a group of speakers are sufficiently separate (by distance or class, for example) that their speech begins to accumulate minor changes in pronunciation, meanings of old words, and coinages of new words that are not overwhelmed by the ongoing influence of the original dialect. However, the changes are not limited to slang, colloquialisms, or verbal shortcuts. Lots of factors work to change language.
Hey tomndebb, do you think a part of contact changing is due to the influence of workforce related issues. policies and lawsuits due to sexual harassment? In other words, saying inappropriate contact seems more business like than saying inappropriate touching; and reduces the ick factor, if you know what I mean.
The reason I call it the prestige dialect because the so-called standard language is merely one dialect which has been elevated to the prestige level. IOW, it’s the “one that won.” Well, in the case of English, it’s the handful of dialects that have won. I would be amazed if it were the case that the prestige dialect is always (or even often) the precursor to all of a particular language’s dialects.
At the moment, I can’t think of any dialects at all that aren’t 100% oral as languages*. Here I include all the Sign Languages and their dialects as, functionally, gestural here does equate to ora. That actually brings up an interesting issue: how does one who thinks dialects form based on what’s easier on the mouth explain how Sign Language dialects form?
*Writing is a representation of a language, not a language itself.
It wasn’t your last sentence, it was your #4, and it was meant to be a little snarky. I perceived a similar attitude–I thought–in your prior post. If I read in to your post something that was not there (and looking at your other post that could very well be the case), my apologies.
What do you consider to be the distinction between “language” and “dialect”? It is my understanding (as per this thread) that “language” could be used both as a synonym for dialect and as the “umbrella” under which a related set of dialects might reside. Is that not your understanding?
What the hell are you talking about here? My post, to which this is response, simply asked: “Please tell me, how does a new dialect start?” I don’t see how you could interpret that as an attempt to be clever.
By the way, did you have to work to craft a statement bursting with such arrogance? Or is such blind, brazen self-righteousness second nature?
TWEEEET!
Observations about other posters’ attitudes or inferences about what they might really believe are not necessary and will do nothing to promote the discussion.
Everyone needs to stick to presenting their own remarks and refrain from making comments about the other posters or asking rhetorical questions that are intended to demonstrate the intransigence or other negative qualities of the poster of whom the questions are asked.
I think that is well put. To gild the lily, I’d say that changes come from two directions: “adaptations” and “shortcuts”. Adaptations are those things that come from other tongues, popular culture, or government speak (which William Safire comments on often), etc. Shortcuts are those changes that come from making things easier on ourselves, whether due to efficiency, difficult pronunciation, or laziness.
Thanks for giving new words to what I’ve been attempting to communicate.
Perhaps, except that “contact” was showing up in other contexts years before the flurry of sexual harrassment issues that began coming to the fore in the late 1970s. There are a lot of potential sources.
magellan: You have yet to prove “laziness” on the part of the speakers of a particular language. Oh, and good luck to you on proving that changes in a language are the results of just “adaptations” and “shortcuts.” Otto Jespersen discussed the Cycle of Negation quite ably, and without once asserting that it’s due to either of your identified “sources” of change.
And, before you try to say that you didn’t say those are the only two sources for language change, yes, you did.
Finally, a query for you: Why don’t you get that a prestige dialect isn’t necessarily the mother language? It’s just what its name implies: that dialect which has been elevated to the dominant status.
BTW, it was simply bad proofreading, not laziness, on my part in a previous posting which led me to not correct the misspelling of oral as ora. 
This has been a fascinating discussion … I didn’t know anything about Ebonics at all, and I’m enchanted to read about what is obviously a rich, flexible and culturally important dialect. One of the things I love about the Dope.
I think acsenray’s point is an important one. The issue arises in teaching indigenous students as well. Language and culture are so inextricably entwined, that to tell someone their language is “wrong” or “incorrect” or “lazy”, is tantamount to saying the same about their culture, their families and their experiences.
Engaging students is about respecting who they are, their cultural traditions and understandings. Expecting them to “fit in” because you assume that your dialect and culture are superior isn’t an approach likely to lead to good learning, only resentment and disengagement.
Even more so with with students who may already be hostile to school, have other disadvantages weighing against their potential for success, come from families which have good reason to resent the prevailing linguistic and cultural ethos, and may have limited access to a range of experiences which confirm the validity of their own experience in a positive way.
As I’ve been reading this discussion, what the school district seems to be suggesting is that there is more potential to engage students by acknowledging the validity and richness of their existing culture and language, and using the student’s own understandings to offer them a way into a more conventionally acceptable use of language, without expecting them to turn their backs on their own language.
It is this approach which has been more successful with Indigenous communities in Australia, where there is not one, but tens, maybe hundreds, of surviving languages spoken by different groups. In the past the assumption was made that Indigenous children needed to jettison their own languages and cultures (and tragically, families) in order to be “acceptable”, an approach which was not particularly successful and often tragic in consequence.
In any event, the “Standard Modern English” which seems to be upheld here as sort of linguistic touch stone, is really just a dialect that got lucky, and through a combination of history and geography got to replicate itself, and become the favoured dialect of industrialized Western nations.
Sorry. I went over the line.
Yes, that is my understanding. But under that definition, there is no way to contrast and compare “a language” with “a dialect of that language.” The two “objects” under discussion here are Standard American English and African-American Vernacular English. There is a third term that might be introduced called “the English language,” but it is not an object; it is merely a label. The English language is an abstraction in that it exists only to the extent that its dialects exist.
You cannot speak or write or otherwise use a language without using a dialect of that language. Any form of language that you can speak or write or otherwise use to communicate with others and that has consistent vocabulary, grammar, etc., is a dialect.
“The English language” is merely a label for the set of all the dialects of the language (some might say all the mutually intelligible dialects of the language). “The English language” is not a separate object that can be compared against any of its dialects. Your notion of a “mother tongue” simply does not exist.
Thus, the English language cannot be more or less oral or anything else as compared to one of its dialects, because the English language is its dialects. Some dialects are more formal; some are more colloquial. Some are used more often orally; some are used more often in writing.
A statement like “Dialects to be more oral than formal language” is nonsensical, because formal language itself is a dialect. This is the statement that is logically equivalent to “Fish tend to be more aquatic than salmon.” Salmon is a type of fish. How can you compare a member of the set with the label of the set it belongs to?
In order to give that sentence meaning, you’d have to say something like: “Colloqual, oral dialects tend to be more colloquial and more oral than formal, written dialects,” and then you’ve got nothing but a tautology.
Is this helpful?
A language that evolves with a higher volume of simplified colloquial expressions is not moving in a consistent direction? Popularity matters.
Granted it goes both ways, tomndebb, but I can think of waaaaay more instances verbal shortcuts becoming the norm in colloquial American English than the comparatively fewer spoken phrases made deliberately more cumbersome and less concise in popular expressions. This has been with us since the Saxons told the Normans, "Fuck you. I’m not sayin’ ‘fornicate.’ "
Also: why this huge reluctance on you and Monty’s part to characterize some dialect speakers as being lazy? Lazy is a pretty accurate characterization for people who always prefer to speak under every circumstance (or worse, refuse to code-switch) a dialect that’s been stigmatized by (usually) the larger society or refuse learn to speak a standardized (or if you prefer, prestige) dialect. I suspect if either of you actually had to teach American English to a classroom of school age children of a socioeconomic / ethnic / religious class not predisposed to speaking SAE (an experience I suspect you two’ve never had) you’d be singing a different tune.
BTW, “forfend?” Heaven help us…
ascenray: You make a good point: The English Language >> Dialects >> Standard American English >> Ebonics (aka Black English, African American Vernacular English, etc.) Try this re-written sentence:
“Oral dialects tend to conform more to colloquial expressions and deviate significantly from the formal, standardized forms of the language(s) they are derived.”
Oh, for the love of Pete, can we please get it out of our heads that AAE is somehow derived from standard/prestige English?
There are three main theories as to how AAE came about, and none of them have it as a derivative of standard/prestige English. There’s the creolist hypothesis, which suggests that AAE came about from a creole of English and West African languages. There’s the Anglicist hypothesis and Neo-Anglicist hypothesis that maintain that AAE developed alongside European American dialects. Then there’s the Substrate hypothesis, which states that “even though earlier AAE may have incorporated many features from regional varieties of English in America, its durable substrate effects have always distinguished it from other varieties of American English.”
Notice none of these talk about AAE coming from standard English. The dialects most often associated possibly with the development of AAE are Gaelic English and Irish English and various vernacular Southern Englishes.
I got these summaries from Wolfram and Schilling-Estes, American English: Dialects and Variation. I didn’t want to bring in these theories because I was afraid it would confuse things, but I figured it couldn’t hurt now.
Um… I didn’t say it AAVE was derived from SAE. I said tend dialects follow oral traditions and deviate from the formal, standard languages… whatever they may be.
Surely the English written and spoken by the landowning class of America in the 16th and 17th was the formal language of its time before Noah Webster got ahold of it in the 18th and 19th?
Well, it might be laziness or it might be defiance, even if misplaced. And to demonstrate “laziness” you will need to be able to demonstrate that they have genuinely had the opportunity to learn it–meaning a good instruction program designed to demonstrate code-switching techniques rather than an arbitrary imposition of rules that make little sense to them and against which their natal dialect provides psychological interference. We are discussing the best method to teach such code-switching and you are assuming that that has occurred.
Laziness is a moral judgement. (Sloth being one of the seven deadly sins.) If one insists on characterizing the speech patterns of a group as laziness, then you are, indeed, placing a moral judgment on them.
Had your sentence I quoted ended in this way “Lazy is a pretty accurate characterization for people” you might get away with that in this discussion. This was a point magellan01 was making earlier. My response to that, however, in terms of dialect and speech is that no one grows up hearing “going to” and lazily changes it to “gonna.” Most of us grow up hearing people say “gonna” and we incorporate it into our speech until someone tells us to enunciate differently in formal settings. I suspect that a person who grew up hearing only “going to” would not slip into “gonna” unless they heard it as a new locution and imitated it to be funny or to try out the sound the way some people like to try out new accents.
Now, once a kid is in a class and is being instructed in formal SAE, it may, indeed, be laziness for them to slip back into their natal vernacular in that class. The issue is determining the point at which they have learned sufficient SAE that we know that their slippage is laziness and not simply misunderstanding.
Note that everyone in this thread holds out SAE as the object of education. The only discussion is the best way to get there. While it might be legitimate to say to a student who has demonstrated a mastery of SAE and slips back into natal vernacular in class that they are being lazy and must pay better attention, none of this discussion has gotten to that point of detail, so the hurling of the epithet “lazy” at an entire class of people is factually wrong, morally wrong, and pedagogically bankrupt.
For my part, I do not see why there is so much insistence on the part of some people to keep “laziness” in the discussion, at all.
We can argue for hours about whether immerison, bi-lingual education,or ESL models are the most effective without once trying to stigmatize an entire group with a moral declaration that (some large portion of) the group is “lazy,” so why continue to drag it into the conversation?
At the beginning of this thread, there was some confusion between AAVE and the street slang that was perceived to be AAVE. I hope (and believe) that we have gotten past that misunderstanding. As part of that discussion, we wrestled with the rules or lack of rules that occur in all dialects and specifically AAVE. Again, we have established that there are rules in AAVE and that speakers of all dialects, including AAVE, can violate those rules, so there is no reason to hammer on that point. Since then we have moved toward a discussion of “best approach,” except that new participants occasionally bring up old points, (sending us back to re-hash those points) or long-time participants refer to older points in ways that demonstrate that they did not fully understand the point that some other poster had made. These events have dragged out the thread to a pretty great length, but I think we’re making some small progress.
(What do you have against “forfend.” It is a word with a specific meaning and connotation that conveys better what I meant than any other word. Surely you are not too lazy to pick out that meaning?) 
Well, then, I must have misunderstood this sentence from your previous post :
“Oral dialects tend to conform more to colloquial expressions and deviate significantly from the formal, standardized forms of the language(s) they are derived.”
Which, on second perusal, I honestly don’t know what you’re trying to say. I’m not trying to be a smartass; I’m trying to understand your terms “formal” versus “colloquial.” I think my definitions of those things from my linguistics training deviate significantly from your definitions, and I think we’re talking past each other.