Accents, dialects, and eventually complete languages seem to develop in two different and often paradoxical ways.
They develop in isolation. This is because people never actually pronounce a word the same way twice – there is no such thing as complete speech accuracy. This leads to a kind of lingustic “drift”. For reasons of prestige (i.e. if people with a higher ranking in society start to speak differently by chance) others might begin to emulate the new kinds of speech. There have been all sorts of theories on the matter. One of particular interest is the “wave theory” in which neighboring groups emulate each other in sort of a wave that washes over a whole language or languages.
They are influenced by newcomers/outsiders. This is what happened in New York (Brooklyn was never an isolated village – especially not for the amount of time it takes to form new speech varieties!) The influx of immigration including Irish, Yiddish, Italian and other forms of speech added to the base dialect of the first English speakers in New York. In fact, this is not surprising because the majority of New Yorkers are of Non-English heritage, so their ancestors, who learned English as a second language, just passed on some of their own speech habits to their descendants.
Of course, in most cases accents/dialects develop as a mixture of both 1 and 2, it’s not a case of either-or.
As far a North American/colonial dialects in general, many of the differences today go back to the origins of the groups of English-speakers who first settled in the new areas. Southern U.S. English, e.g., goes back to another English dialect than New England and New York English.
i bet none of u have heard an indian talking english
indians have no accent
all the other ppl (americans english etc) have accents
its like india is the sun and all the other countries revolve around it
try being indian, u ijits
whats the sense of ur stupid accents?
and u americans better start pronouncing “z” as zed and not zee
Seriously, I was recently thinking about why Americans find Asian Indian accents to be humorous, compared to other ethnic accents. The onlt things I can think of is …
The relative “stiffness” and formality of Indian English compared to American English (i.e. “I am velly much in needing of some assistance please?” instead of “Could you give me a hand?”)
The combination of a stressed sound, which to some American ears sounds as if the speaker may be in pain, combned with the sing-songiness of the accent.
I noticed that when Americans try to imitate or make fun of a foreign language, they’ll use distinct sounds that are percieved to dominate a language, for instane making a bunch of guttural hacks for Arabic, bleeping and “ow” sounds for Chinese, and slow random sounds ending in “a” and “o” for Spanish. (Supposedly, Chinese speakers use a lot of hissing noises to create their version fake English.) If someone says a lot of random syllables punctuated with “beedee” every few syllables, it’s suppoded to represent Indian English.
Illiterate, maybe, but a vocab of only a thousand words? No way. Three year olds know more than that, and they can’t read (or can they? I don’t remember). Ten thousand is a conservative estimate on the small side. A college-educated person today knows (again, conservatively) about 30-45,000 words. Depends on how you define a word of course.
For instance, any European peasant in the 15th century would have a lexical knowledge of names and other words relating to plants and animals that we could only dream of. Take Cecil’s recently posted column about the meaning of “parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme” for example.
The “thousand words” estimate probably sounds plausible to most people because they assume that since they lived before us, and were pre-technological, they must have had less complicated lives.
Yep, placenames and words for local geographical features, and that’s about it. Same thing happened to the Native American languages when European languages came to America, and for pretty much the same reasons.
Also, nice exposition on the bug histories. Now what about “bugger?” hee hee
One of my favorite things in the world is to hear native speakers of other languages that don’t know English “imitating” it by talking English-sounding (to them) gibberish. Even British English speakers imitating American English will do. I love being able to “hear” what my own accent sounds like to others.
How much of your accent depends on who is listening? When I’m home (raised in The Bronx, Brooklyn resident for the last decade and a half) I’m told I have a slight Spanish accent. When I’m not at home, I’ve been told I have a New York accent. My black friends tell me I sound white.
Also, about the Brooklyn accent. There isn’t one. There are several. The one that someone like Sylvester Stallone has is very Italian. Rosie Perez sounds like a Spanish person. Jacke Mason is very Jewish. There’s also the LonGuyland variation. Add to this the over-all New Yorkese. Words like “inneresting” instead of interesting and “frinstnce” instead of for instance. The one thing I have never, ever heard a Brooklynite say is “toitytoid and toid”. I don’t care how many times some actor from California says this on T.V… People from Brooklyn may say “turd” instead of “third”, but never “toid”.
ROFL! I live in Reno, NV, and whenever anyone moves here from the Midwest, especially the Upper Midwest (Minnesota, Wisconsin, etc) we Renoites can spot it IMMEDIATIELY!
Why do Midwesterners insist on telling everybody they don’t have an accent, when it’s so thick you can slice it?
One thing that just occurred to me is that almost all these questions can be answered by reading Dr Suzette Elgin’s books. She is a renowned neurolinguist who used to be a professor at the UCSan Diego who worked with the world renowned Leonard Newmark.
If you ask a diction coach, or anyone in the acting profession, a “neutral” accent in America is called Standard American English. It’s most representative of West Coast America Speech, most definitely NOT Midwestern American, where short "o"s are pronounced in the nasal cavity, and long "o"s are tight and clipped, (very similarly to the Canadian).
In fact, like I said in my last post, Midwesterners here in Reno NV are spotted almost instantly because of the vastly different speech, and are sometimes mistaken for Canadians…
I suppose most of you are living in the Midwest, accounting for a little bit of regionalism in this post.
Jeremy Are you sure you can spot a MidWesterner? Not those pseudo-types from MN or WI, but someone from Ohio or Indiana? I was born and raised in Tidewater Virginia,and sometimes lapse into the Canadian speech you think that Midwesterners use. I don’t think the people in Northern Ohio have the accent which you think you hear. But I would be willing to be convinced otherwise.
That’s the traditional view, but not long ago I read a book by Irish linguist Loreto Todd which argues the possibility that English took more from the Celtic languages than is usually acknowledged. As an example, she cites the progressive tense, which doesn’t exist in any other languages the Anglo-Saxons of England would have been greatly exposed to, as well as numerous English words which are usually considered “origin unknown” but bear a remarkable similarity to Celtic-language words.
Back to accents: I’ve noticed a lot of similarities between certain regional American accents and the Dublin working class accent. Like Noo Yawkers, Dubliners with this accent would say “anudder” instead of “another” and “yous two” instead of “you two”. The Bostonite “pahk the caaaah” is also a strong feature of this Dublin accent. Given the heavy Irish populations of these two cities I do wonder if these similarities are more than just coincidence.
This reminds me of an interesting theory I heard once, I hope someone can back me up with a source.
Apparently linguistics experts believe that the British accent is actually nothing like the English that was spoken in the time of Shakespear. The closest thing to Shakespear English would be the accent of a College-educated American, typically from the east coast and with no trace of a southern accent.
I think it’s at least an interesting theory. Don’t know if it’s possible to research something like this properly, though.
— G. Raven
Yes, I’ve heard that about Shakespeare’s English before. Actually, there is no sure way of knowing just exactly how people of his time and place spoke. But many of the features of today’s British English are definitely much newer than that. Probably the best answer is that his English was something completely different from everything we know today, i.e. neither “American” nor “British” English. The biggest irony, I would think, is that lots of American actors put on approximations of English accents when they play Shakespeare. They might as well save themselves the trouble, and stop making themselves sound silly for no good reason. (Of course, some are actually good at it, but can save themselves the effort anyway.)
As far as the “toity toid and toid” accents are concerned, I have heard older Brooklynites (in this case Jewish, I believe) speak like that, as in “you goils is wonduh-full!” – a quote. It may be in the process of dying out, though.
This is interesting. I once heard a voice recording of King Edward, who I believe died in the 'teens. Funny thing: he sounded much more American than today’s Englishmen, and somewhat similar, indeed, to Bostonese English. More accurately, he sounded nearly identical to speakers from Southern Massachusetts (below Boston) who have a subdialect somewhat different from Boston.
With this in mind, it’s possible British English has been the dialect to change, not American English in its variations.
Seriously.