Why no English dialects?

[dropzone]

@Mangetout

I can’t imagine how anyone could live in Britain and think that there wasn’t a huge variation in accent/dialect; a person from the highlands of Scotland can be speaking English, but his speech may be completely unintelligible to a person from the South of England.

Heard a Scottish fellow on the radio once telling of when he first moved to London. He needed a room and went to negotiate rent. The landlady was Cockney and her husband was rural Irish. They negotiations had to be done in sign language.

But no, English doesn’t have dialects.

[Johanna]

@Popup

For an example of the opposite, look at France. The rule has been centralised to Paris for almost a millenium, and the Parisian dialect has become the norm all over the country. (Sure there are still other dialects in places like Brittany and Marseille, but not at all to the same extent as in e.g. Germany.)

I disagree with this about French dialects. The dialects in the South of France are quite different from standard Île de France French. Occitan is more similar to Catalan than to northern French, and in the southwest, Gascon is divergent from the southeastern Occitan dialect. As for Brittany, the language there is named Breton and it’s Celtic, not French at all. Most people in Brittany nowadays speak standard French (the Gallo dialect of French is also spoken in eastern Brittany), but Breton is still spoken. True, French government has long been centralized from Paris, and they even have the Académie Française to standardize the language, but even that is not enough to eliminate regional dialects. Picard is a northern French dialect that is different from the standard. Northern French dialects (langues d’oïl) include Franc-comtois, Walloon, Picard, Norman, Gallo, Poitevin, Bourguignon, Champenois, and Lorrain.

[Doobieous]

@Jomo Mojo

So several posters have weighed in on the question of mutual intelligibility of German dialects, but no one has addressed the Italian dialects. Italian’s being ignored again. Minghia, am I the only Doper out of all the thousands of Dopers who can speak up for Italian?

You know, instead of complaining about this (which i’ve seen you do in a couple of threads), why don’t you just bring it up. I saw no one mention Spanish in this thread, but do you see me complaining? No, because gee, I don’t know, maybe people just didn’t think to bring it up?

[ouryL]

@GorillaMan

That doesn’t make sense. Norwegian and Swedish are considered different languages.

On the other hand, I spent an hour listening to a tape of an old Suffolk guy before I had any idea what he was talking about. And I grew up here.

Surprise, surprise!! You guys have finally figured out that what constitutes a language is influenced by politics.

Cantonese and Mandarin are certainly different languages as are a few other dialects of Chinese.

For Christ’s sake, Norway and Sweden were once the same country!!

:eek:

[Popup]

@Jomo Mojo

I disagree with this about French dialects.

Sure, there are French dialects. - Just not as pronounced as in e.g. Germany. It would have to be a very remote village in the Pyrenneans where a Parisian can’t understand (albeit with difficulties) the locals normal speach.
On the other hand, if you go to any small German valley, the patois is difficult to understand to anyone else. (Or at least that’s my experience. Maybe it’s worth pointing out that my French is much more current than my German…)

From what I’ve understood, French school teachers are more-or-less forced to move around for the first few years of their careers, and this means that kids will be exposed to a more standardized version of their language during a very formative stage in the development. If you look at the French spoken in e.g. Belgium and Switzerland (and I suppose Quebec), where this is not the case, it seems to me as if there is much more local ‘colour’.