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Are dialects dying?
Walt Wolfram
Is shared popular culture wiping out dialects, in America and elsewhere? Can new dialects appear in today’s world? Do you speak a dialect?
How do you say the word ‘bought’? In the United States alone there are at least four distinct regional pronunciations of the vowel, from
‘awe’ to ‘ah’ to a rural southern version that sounds almost like ‘ow’
to the ‘wo’ used by comedians to lampoon dyed-in-the-wool New Yorkers (as in ‘cwoff ee twok’).
Is the carbonated beverage you drink pop, soda, tonic, co-cola—or maybe even the older Appalachian mountain term dope? When you take the highway circling a city, do you drive on a beltline, a beltway, a loop, or a perimeter? And do you get cash at a bank machine, an automated teller, a cash machine, or an ATM?
Everyone notices dialects—we can’t help it. But most of the time, we notice them in other people. ‘We don’t speak a dialect where we live, we speak normal English.’ Speakers from Boston to Birmingham (Alabama and England) and from Medicine Hat to Melbourne (Florida and Australia) all echo the same sentiment.
Of course, they do this while pronouncing the vowel in words like bought and caught in quite diff erent ways. Or while using diff erent names for the same sandwich—a sub, a grinder, a hoagie, or a hero.
Dialects are everywhere, not just in those regions—like Appalachia, Liverpool, or the Outback—that seem to get the most dialect press. Th e fact of the matter is that it’s impossible to speak the English language without speaking a dialect, some dialect.
Everyone has an accent. When you pronounce the vowel in bought or caught (or was that baht and caht?) you’ve made a dialect com-mitment—you can’t help it. We are all players in the dialect game, whether we like it or not.
But isn’t this a diff erent world? a global community where people move fl uidly, travel frequently, and speak to each other by cell phone? Aren’t dialects dying out, thanks to mobility and the media? Th ink again! Dialectologists counter the popular myth that dialects are dying by showing that major U.S. dialect areas like the North, Midland, and South remain very much alive—as they have been for a couple of centuries. But the dialect news is even more startling: Research shows that Northern and Southern speech in the U.S. are actually diverging—not becoming more similar. Blame those shift y vowels, which in large Northern cities like Buff alo and Chicago are acquiring sounds diff erent from those we hear in other regions. So coff ee becomes cahff ee, lock sounds almost like lack, and bat sounds more like bet. Have you noticed? Don’t worry if you haven’t. Th e change is pretty subtle, and a lot of it fl ies under the impressionistic radar. But it’s very real—and it’s gradually making the speech of Northern U.S. cities quite diff erent from that of the South and West.
How can this be? In today’s compressed world it seems illogical that dialects could continue developing and diverging the way they did when language communities were more isolated. But language is always changing, and sometimes behaves as though it has a mind of its own. Yes, we all watch the same TV programs;
Are dialects dying? 181
but most of us don’t model our accents on TV newscasters—that’s way too impersonal. We follow the lead of those we interact with in our daily lives—they’re the ones who judge how well we fi t in with the community.
And there remain plenty of regions where encroaching global culture is held at bay by a strong sense of community that includes local dialect. So working class Pittsburghers are proud to root for the Pittsburgh Stillers—instead of the Steelers; go dahntahn—instead of downtown, and put a gum band around their papers—instead of what other Americans would call a rubber band and Britons would call an elastic band. Part of being a Pittsburgher is speaking Pittsburghese.
But aren’t some dialects dying?—like the ones once spoken in isolated mountain and island communities now fl ooded by tour-ists? Some may be, but there are also rural communities that (like Pittsburgh on a smaller scale) keep their dialects alive as a way of fi ghting back, and ensuring that they won’t be confused with what they call ‘furriners’.
Perhaps the most surprising news of all is that some areas of increasing prosperity and cultural infl uence—like Seattle and Northern California—are starting to express their new regional identity by developing dialect traits that didn’t exist before.
So some traditional dialects may be disappearing, but they’re being replaced by new dialects, in a process that can seem like the carnival game ‘whack-a-mole’. Th e famous words of Mark Twain apply well to English dialects in America and elsewhere: rumors of their death are greatly exaggerated. Dialects remain alive and well—and an important part of the regional and sociocultural landscape.
About the author
Walt Wolfram, William C. Friday Distinguished Professor of English Linguistics at North Carolina State University, describes himself as a dialect nomad. He has studied dialects ranging from African American
varieties in large metropolitan areas to the speech of small, isolated island and mountain communities. He has authored more than twenty books and two hundred and fi ft y articles, in addition to producing a number of TV documentaries. More information on Dr. Wolfram’s media productions is available at: http://www.talkingnc.com and http://
www.ncsu.edu/linguistics
Suggestions for further reading
In this book: dialects are discussed in chapters 3 (dialects versus languages), 18 (English in Britain, America, and elsewhere), and 26 (U.S. Southern English). Language extinction is discussed in chapters 2 (languages of the world), 24 (language death), 25 (revitalizing threat-ened languages), and 50 (Latin). Chapters talking more generally about how languages evolve include 7 (language change), 8 (pidgins and creoles), 11 (grammar), 41 (dialect change), 48 (origins of English), and 51 (Italian).
Elsewhere:
Labov, William, Sharon Ash and Charles Boberg, Th e Atlas of North American English: Phonetics, Phonology and Sound Change (Mouton de Gruyter, 2006). A major new work on the dialects of North
American, based on the pronunciation of various vowel sounds. It is mostly intended for the dedicated scholar.
Wolfram, Walt, and Ben Ward, eds. American Voices: How Dialects Diff er from Coast to Coast (Blackwell, 2006). Th is collection contains brief, popular profi les of major and minor dialects in North America. Both dying dialects and new dialect traditions of American English are included in the presentations by major researchers, as well as descrip-tions of sociocultural varieties of English.
Web site:
http://www.ling.upenn.edu/phonoatlas
A more accessible overview of some of the results from the project Th e Atlas of North American English: Phonetics, Phonology and Sound Change, listed above, can be found at the TELSUR (telephone survey) Web site.