IDEA International Dialects of English Archive | free dialect and accent recordings for the performing arts IDEA International Dialects of English Archive A whole nother language Lauren Collins, the New Yorker writer who profiled Benjamin Creme in the Nov. 29 issue, described the London-based spiritual leader as — among other things — “ruddy-complected.” I’ve grown accustomed to seeing the occasional typo, as well as the occasional F-word, in the magazine, but complected — that was a bit of a shock. Wasn’t that a word to avoid in polite company, hardly better bred than irregardless and ain’t? Complected, our teachers told us, was a misbegotten monster. Still, if complected had been a favorite of Jane Austen and Emily Bronte, it might be the standard form today. Does its New Yorker debut mean complected is finally getting some respect? The mavens at Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage are (as usual) more tolerant. But much as I admire Merriam-Webster’s usage research, this seems to oversimplify. But the label “Americanism” no longer embarrasses American writers. BBC News, on the other hand, has an entire stylebook section on Americanisms.
The Cambridge Online Survey of World Englishes We want to document the range of variation in World Englishes. The map below shows an example of what we are interested in. Do you say pop or soda? pop (39%) soda (37%) coke (18%) soft drink (1%) Would you like to submit your own answers? Or if you are only interested in the results, you can find a summary here. This article by Ben Zimmer explains the relationship between the surveys on this site and the dialect maps that have recently received much media attention.
Which variety of English should you speak? Ahead of UN English Language Day on 23 April, English language and linguistics specialist Dr Urszula Clark presents research on variations in the use of English and what these could mean for education policy and teachers of English. Her live-streamed British Council seminar is later today from 19:00 to 20:00 BST. You are what you speak: place of origin most important identity factor My research took place in the West Midlands region of the UK and looked at variations in the use of English in creative spoken performance such as comedy, drama and poetry, as well as in written texts such as letters to local newspapers, stories and poems written in dialect. The results suggest that people are increasingly and deliberately using English in a way that identifies them with a particular place. They do this by incorporating into their speech a set of linguistic features drawn from a particular variety of English. Is there a ‘correct’ variety of English? Which variety of English should we teach?
Words in English :: History A Brief History of English, with Chronologyby Suzanne Kemmer © 2001-2005 Pre-English | Old English | Middle English | Modern English The language we call English was first brought to the north sea coasts of England in the 5th and 6th centuries A.D., by seafaring people from Denmark and the northwestern coasts of present-day Germany and the Netherlands. These immigrants spoke a cluster of related dialects falling within the Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family. Their language began to develop its own distinctive features in isolation from the continental Germanic languages, and by 600 A.D. had developed into what we call Old English or Anglo-Saxon, covering the territory of most of modern England. New waves of Germanic invaders and settlers came from Norway and Denmark starting in the late 8th century. The Norman Invasion and Conquest of 1066 was a cataclysmic event that brought new rulers and new cultural, social and linguistic influences to the British Isles.
How Y’all, Youse and You Guys Talk Just Deserts Claim: A person who gets what he deserves is said to have received his "just desserts." Example:[Collected via e-mail, December 2009] In your Fair Shake article, which was the New Urban Legend earlier this week, you have a link to other legends that include a thief or other wrong-doer getting a proper comeuppance. Unfortunately, the link is title "just deserts", and while some of the tales may indeed take place in the Mojave or the Sahara, you probably intended to link to legends involving "just desserts"; that second S makes all the difference. Origins: Sometimes it doesn't matter whether you use language correctly, because people will think you're wrong even when you're not. For example, when we established the "Crime and Punishment" section of this site, we created a category for tales about criminals whose punishments were meted out in unusual ways. You spell "Dessert" wrong in this link. I think your intention is to refer to metaphor using the term for after dinner snack.
How Far Back in Time Could a Modern English Speaker Go and Still Communicate? | by Kathy Copeland Padden | Human Parts Past Is Prologue The transition from Old English to Modern English was a process, not an event Changes in language don’t occur overnight, though slang terms come in and out of use relatively quickly and new words are invented while others fall into disuse. The rules of grammar you learned in school are the same ones your parents were taught and what your own kids will (or do) use. A few new words are tossed in the mix every few years to keep things interesting (remember the uproar when “ain’t” was added to the dictionary?). The transition from Old English to Middle English to Modern English was a process rather than an event — the rules didn’t all suddenly change on May 24, 1503. Hwæt! I’m completely lost. Modern English translation as follows: Listen! Yeah, not even close. Let’s bump it up a bit to Chaucer’s time at the turn of the 14th century, when Middle English was in use (circa 1100 through 1450). No walk in the park, but not completely indecipherable like Anglo-Saxon Old English.
When Did Americans Lose Their British Accents? There are many, many evolving regional British and American accents, so the terms “British accent” and “American accent” are gross oversimplifications. What a lot of Americans think of as the typical "British accent” is what’s called standardized Received Pronunciation (RP), also known as Public School English or BBC English. What most people think of as an "American accent," or most Americans think of as “no accent,” is the General American (GenAm) accent, sometimes called a “newscaster accent” or “Network English.” We’ll focus on these two general sounds for now and leave the regional accents for another time. English colonists established their first permanent settlement in North America at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607, sounding very much like their countrymen back home. As for the “why,” though, one big factor in the divergence of the accents is rhotacism. Across the pond, many former colonists also adopted and imitated Received Pronunciation to show off their status.
The Biases We Hold Against the Way People Speak Katherine D. Kinzler’s “How You Say It” addresses how people sound when they talk and its effect on how they are perceived. This area overlaps considerably with the subfield called sociolinguistics, whose worldview is well represented by Kinzler. What makes sociolinguistics a subject worth engaging with are the surprises, and Kinzler’s book is full of them. Kinzler’s main interest, however, is in linguistic discrimination. The latter point is key: As with so much discrimination, linguistic bias is often subconscious and intertwined with other kinds of prejudice. Black earnings decrease to the extent that one has a perceptible “blaccent.” How the English Failed to Stamp Out the Scots Language Over the past few decades, as efforts to save endangered languages have become governmental policy in the Netherlands (Frisian), Slovakia (Rusyn) and New Zealand (Maori), among many others, Scotland is in an unusual situation. A language known as Scottish Gaelic has become the figurehead for minority languages in Scotland. This is sensible; it is a very old and very distinctive language (it has three distinct r sounds!), and in 2011 the national census determined that fewer than 60,000 people speak it, making it a worthy target for preservation. But there is another minority language in Scotland, one that is commonly dismissed. What Scots really is is a fascinating centuries-old Germanic language that happens to be one of the most widely spoken minority native languages, by national percentage of speakers, in the world. Scots arrived in what is now Scotland sometime around the sixth century. Scottish power was wildly diminished. Amid all this, Scots is defiantly still here.
Why do people, like, say, ‘like’ so much? | Language I’m listening to BBC Radio 1, where they are interviewing the 26-year-old actor and singer Dove Cameron about her globally successful hit, Boyfriend. The DJ, Melvin Odoom, asks her, “Do you think that your acting career has helped you with, kind of, like, your music career?” “For me they’re, like, the same energy,” replies Cameron. It’s the most predictable celebrity interview exchange ever uttered, remarkable only for one word that repeats and repeats. “It’s a really funny one,” says Fiona Hanlon, who has worked at the station for more than 10 years, including producing Nick Grimshaw’s breakfast show and Maya Jama’s weekend show. Why do people have such a problem with “like”? By the time I was at secondary school in the early 2000s, “like” was just a natural part of speech. Politicians, educators and business leaders have complained it makes speakers sound stupid. Why is it so detested? The first point is that “like” isn’t just a filler word. “Consider the following,” he writes.
Where do people say that? An interactive word map of the 100,000 most common words in America — Quartz When Amazon first premiered its dystopian sci-fi thriller The Man in the High Castle—a TV show about a world in which the US lost World War II and is ruled by both the Nazis and the Japanese—the show truly felt like an alternate universe. In our world, it was 2015, same-sex marriage had just been ruled legal, the US had a progressive black president, and neo-Nazism was the farthest thing from most Americans’ minds. The show’s second season debuts today in a drastically different political environment. The alternate reality manifested in the show doesn’t seem so far off when churches in California are being vandalized with swastikas, the “alt-right” movement has legitimized white-nationalism, and people feel comfortable enough to gather in Washington, DC to give Nazi salutes and shout: “Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory!” Which is kind of the point. Dick’s original message comes through more clearly now than ever before, whether intentionally or not.