English has strong regional dialects like France and Germany - what happens next

It depends on what part of the country, Midwesterners have lost diversity but I can tell someone from Minnesota or the Dakotas from someone from Kansas, for example. And the plethora of New England accents, even just within Boston, is still around.

True, and it's not to say accents are dying in the US, but I do think they're conglomerating to an extent. Case in point, ages ago one could tell the difference between somebody from Charleston and somebody from Savannah, despite such a short distance 'tweenst them, or between Manhattan and the Bronx. What we've seen is super-state collections of accents mixing and merging (some disappearing, and some sticking around) into dialectal continua. The distance one has to go to hear a distinct dialect within the same state or two has grown wider, partially I think due to greater facility of travel and overall development spreading things around. And of course, the media does have a role to play here in terms of established "standards" of "News"-speak arising to seek maximum intelligibility in various regions.
 
so we established this is otl, then maybe change this to: the us has strong regional dialect like the european countries. maybe even with some distinct influences from other languages.

(where i live in the netherlands you pretty much have a new dialect every 25km)
 
True, and it's not to say accents are dying in the US, but I do think they're conglomerating to an extent. Case in point, ages ago one could tell the difference between somebody from Charleston and somebody from Savannah, despite such a short distance 'tweenst them, or between Manhattan and the Bronx. What we've seen is super-state collections of accents mixing and merging (some disappearing, and some sticking around) into dialectal continua. The distance one has to go to hear a distinct dialect within the same state or two has grown wider, partially I think due to greater facility of travel and overall development spreading things around. And of course, the media does have a role to play here in terms of established "standards" of "News"-speak arising to seek maximum intelligibility in various regions.

Of course, but I will say having more local news broadcasting helps mitigate the merging somewhat, at least in very diverse areas. I can still tell when someone from Knoxville comes to West Tennessee, for example, but in areas like Nebraska I imagine that is much less distinguishable.
 
Of course, but I will say having more local news broadcasting helps mitigate the merging somewhat, at least in very diverse areas. I can still tell when someone from Knoxville comes to West Tennessee, for example, but in areas like Nebraska I imagine that is much less distinguishable.

In other words, the more populated an area is, the more a regional accent can be maintained and resistant to outside shifting. I'm just trying to connect the dots between the experience here in North America, and that of Britain.
 
map for britain:
dialects.png


and the main coloured areas most likely have considerable difference within it
 
East Midland's dialect

Here in the best part of the UK, The East Midlands we have a very strong dialect. It its fading away, what with the we fangled inventions such as the Television and the Radio but it is still here.

To start off we have the pronouns.

Theirn - Theirs
Arn - Ours
Yourn - Yours.

Then we have:

Yussen - Yourself
Messen - Myself
Ussen - Ourselves
Thersen - Theirself

It's also not unusual in the town I used to live to hear some of the older folk use thee and thou.

More info here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Midlands_English
 
Here in the best part of the UK, The East Midlands we have a very strong dialect. It its fading away, what with the we fangled inventions such as the Television and the Radio but it is still here.

To start off we have the pronouns.

Theirn - Theirs
Arn - Ours
Yourn - Yours.

Then we have:

Yussen - Yourself
Messen - Myself
Ussen - Ourselves
Thersen - Theirself

It's also not unusual in the town I used to live to hear some of the older folk use thee and thou.

More info here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Midlands_English

I'm not sure if this is the case anymore, but didn't the East Midlands also have a greater-than-usual Norse influence on vocabulary as well?
 
My milk tounge is the New Orleans accent known as "yat", which is more like brooklynese or a working class Boston accent--45 miles to the west of where I grew up, cher, dem Cajuns sure are going after dem halligator, yeah....

My wife is from jones county Mississippi, and has a totally different way of speaking (I want to get her together with a friend of mine in Edinburgh, just to see them understand each other)
 
People also slightly change their accents to match the person they are speaking with.
I once worked with a Glaswegian. Now my accent is mostly south-eastern (British English) so it took a while for us to understand each other. Once we did however we could have long conversations where everyone surrounding us had no idea what we were saying :D
 
Even though I've lived in Tennessee my whole life and I don't have a Southern acccent (raised by two New Englanders), I can still pick out regional dialects even in the US South. People in Tennessee don't talk like people from the Carolinas and definitely not like people from Texas (any part of Texas).

I think the main thing here is you have to somehow establish all the English dialects as separate languages. It would be easiest to do this for Britain and not the US (or elsewhere), but as far as I know, only Scots is ever considered a separate language (and it just looks like a phonetically spelled Scottish accent to me). Maybe you need to reduce centralisation at all costs in the Middle Ages to do this, it seems difficult to do this--Italy and Germany had centuries of political fragmentation. Even in France with more centralisation, Picard, Gallo, Norman, are all considered separate languages despite being closely related to French.
 
I'm not sure if this is the case anymore, but didn't the East Midlands also have a greater-than-usual Norse influence on vocabulary as well?

Yes, there certainly is a large Scandinavian influence on the EM dialect. Our famous greeting of ayup comes from the Norse se upp.

One thing someone told me recently but I'm not too sure about is is that the EM dialect is the basis of modern English. The trade routes all ran through the EM and traders used the dialect as everyone could understand it. The rich traders moved down to London as that became the centre for trade and their dialect became the standard.
 

GdwnsnHo

Banned
I think the main thing here is you have to somehow establish all the English dialects as separate languages. It would be easiest to do this for Britain and not the US (or elsewhere), but as far as I know, only Scots is ever considered a separate language (and it just looks like a phonetically spelled Scottish accent to me). Maybe you need to reduce centralisation at all costs in the Middle Ages to do this, it seems difficult to do this--Italy and Germany had centuries of political fragmentation. Even in France with more centralisation, Picard, Gallo, Norman, are all considered separate languages despite being closely related to French.

Obligatory Quote

"A language is just a dialect with an army" - Max Weinreich

Now that I'm done being facetious, I think that oddly enough, the Regional Languages of France aren't taught as languages, in the same way as French, or the various forms of Spanish. They are defined as such to distinguish that they are different from French, or Academy French. Which is Prescriptive, rather than the more Descriptive Oxford dictionary for English. This could fulfill the OP if the UK had a similar institution. The British Language Institute could be set up, handling the job that Oxford, Collins, Webster, etc have been doing informally for centuries. That would then define a single way to speak English.
 

Thande

Donor
As t'previous posters have chuntered on about, tha's describing OTL. Nar I'm not sure I'd tek the notion that th'Americans have also got quite the gradely levels of linguistic diversity that us'n in Inglund are blessed with, I can't really picture some fella from Alabama saying speak up cloth-ears I can't understand a word tha's saying to a bloke from Minnesota, which is summat that still happens in th'UK. Ter be honest at t'meetup t'other day I had to ask Geordie to repeat himself once or twice and that's onny a distance of an 'undred miles.
 
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