Varieties of English 2

KLAM.6185.cp02.019-036 5/17/06 5:25 PM Page 19 Varieties of English 2 CHAPTER PREVIEW Chapter 2 establishes a context for the discussions of English structure in later chapters by viewing English as a continuum of dialects and styles that contrast with each other in pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar. Regional, social, and international dialects reflect who speakers are and where they come from geographically and socially. CHAPTER GOALS At the end of this chapter, you should be able to •Notice language differences in everyday usage. • Understand the difference between regional and social dialects. • Recognize that Standard American English provides a relatively uniform speech variety. Prior study of English grammar has usually left students with the impression that English is or ought to be uniform. Teachers and textbooks have often given students the idea that, in an ideal world, everyone would speak and write a uniform “proper” English, with little or no variation from an agreed-upon standard of correctness. We do not want to give you that impression, for in fact it is the normal con- dition of English and of every other language to vary along a number of dimen- sions. Efforts to put the language (or its speakers) in a linguistic straightjacket by insisting on conformity at all times to a uniform standard are doomed to fail, for they go against the very nature of language: to be flexible and responsive to a variety of conditions related to its users and their purposes. ISBN: 0-558-13856-X 19 Analyzing English Grammar, Fifth Edition, by Thomas P. Klammer, Muriel R. Schulz, and Angela Della Volpe. Published by Longman, a Pearson Company. Copyright © 2007 by Pearson Education, Inc. KLAM.6185.cp02.019-036 5/17/06 5:25 PM Page 20 20 CHAPTER 2 There are, in fact, as many varieties of English as there are groups of speakers, and the word used for such varieties is dialect: a variant of a language spoken by a group of people sharing the same time (historical period) or space (geographical or social environment). All native speakers of English speak a dialect that identifies them as ■ living in the twenty-first century (compare your way of speaking with Shakespeare’s: “Thou shouldst not have been old till thou hadst been wise,” from King Lear); ■ residing in a specific country (in the United States, the luggage carrier in a car is the trunk; in England it is the boot); and ■ belonging to a specific socioeconomic group—people sharing similar cultural backgrounds, income levels, and amounts of education (some speakers usually pronounce the initial sound of words like this, these, and those as if they began with d rather than th, while other speakers sel- dom use this pronunciation). In addition, their speech varies depending on their psychological state at the moment and whether they are speaking to people of the same sex, age, interests, religion, or profession. There is, in fact, hardly any aspect of our social existence that is not reflected to some extent in the way we speak—in our choice of words, our selection of grammatical structures, our pronunciation. Because each of us belongs to different social groups, we each speak a language variety made up of a combination of features slightly different from those characteristic of any other speaker of the language. The language variety unique to a single speaker of a language is called an idiolect.Your idiolect includes the vocabulary appropriate to your various interests and activities, pronunciations reflective of the region in which you live or have lived, and variable styles of speaking that shift subtly depending on whom you are addressing. As a speaker of English, you react—sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously—to variations in the language used around you, and you vary your own language in response to your environment. As a person educated about language, you will want to be aware of how you and others respond to variation in language and to ensure that your own responses are based on rea- son and not on stereotype. Consider an example of how you make judgments based on the varieties of language you observe. You make guesses about where speakers are from based on their regional dialects. For instance, for Southerners, words like park and pork may sound alike, whereas for Northerners, they have different vow- els. What’s more, Southerners may use the term roasting ears to refer to what ISBN: 0-558-13856-X Americans from other regions call corn-on-the-cob. You also make judgments about speakers’ socioeconomic levels on the basis of their social dialects (for Analyzing English Grammar, Fifth Edition, by Thomas P. Klammer, Muriel R. Schulz, and Angela Della Volpe. Published by Longman, a Pearson Company. Copyright © 2007 by Pearson Education, Inc. KLAM.6185.cp02.019-036 5/17/06 5:25 PM Page 21 VARIETIES OF ENGLISH 21 example, attributing a lower economic or educational level to a speaker who regularly says I seen it rather than I saw it). Language also signals the speaker’s sex and age. Men and women differ in their language patterns; for example, research suggests that men interrupt women more than women do men (a find- ing that surprises most men but not most women). And different age groups— children, teenagers, middle-aged adults, and very old persons— each have dis- tinctive ways of using the language (such as calling parents Mommy and Daddy, in contrast to Mom and Dad or Mother and Father). The word dialect refers to any language variety spoken by people who form a subgroup of society (whether their affinity is based upon age or gender or shared interests, for example) who develop a way of speaking when they are together that identifies them as members of that group. REGIONAL DIALECTS The first English-speaking immigrants to what would become the United States brought with them from England their own seventeenth-century local British dialects. Local dialect diversity in England then, as now, was far greater than the regional diversity that came to characterize American English. In fact, his- torians of the English language in America agree that, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the dialects that the colonists brought with them underwent a process of leveling—that is, dialect differences in the colonies became less marked as the early Americans moved about and accommodated their speech to that of speakers of other dialects. At the same time, diminished communication with England and a growing interest in having an American language different from that of England encouraged the development of pronunciation and vocabulary distinct to the New World. Another influence on American English came from the language of West African slaves, who, according to current research, spoke a version of English (sometimes called Plantation Creole) that had evolved from the pidgin English (a simplified form of English) used to conduct African trade, including the slave trade. In contact with the English spoken by whites, Plantation Creole gradu- ally evolved into the dialect today called Black English Vernacular (BEV) or African-American Vernacular English (AAVE). The centuries of contact also influenced the language of whites and had an especially great impact on the southern dialect. During the nineteenth century, regional dialect differences in American English grew for several reasons. The eastern seaboard was in closer contact with England than the rest of the country and adopted some of the changes happening there; it was probably during this time, for instance, that the r-less pronunciation of coastal New England (pahk the cah) developed, following the British fashion. Settlement patterns as the nation spread westward tended to follow major geographical boundaries such as rivers and mountain ranges; these divide the chief regional dialects still today. And both geographical and ISBN: 0-558-13856-X Analyzing English Grammar, Fifth Edition, by Thomas P. Klammer, Muriel R. Schulz, and Angela Della Volpe. Published by Longman, a Pearson Company. Copyright © 2007 by Pearson Education, Inc. KLAM.6185.cp02.019-036 5/17/06 5:25 PM Page 22 22 CHAPTER 2 cultural differences between the South and the North, such as the influence of Black English on Southern White English, fostered growing differences between the speech of the two regions. Today, most linguists describe three major regional varieties of American English: the Northern, Midland, and Southern dialects (see Figure 2.1), with boundaries based on contrasting patterns in pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar in the eastern half of the United States. In the western half of the country, settlers from all three regions mixed to a great degree. As a result of that mingling and of continuing mobility, the major dialects have blended in the west, with Midland features predominating. In most ways, the three varieties of American English are alike—that is, regardless of region, Americans tend to use the same words most of the time, to pronounce them alike, and to follow similar patterns of grammar. The dis- tinctions are noticeable to native speakers of American English, but in most cases, they are relatively minor when compared with how much of the language all Americans have in common. However minor they are, we do notice and respond to regionalisms in the speech of others. Thus, though most speakers of American English are probably unaware that they speak a regional dialect, they are aware of regionalisms in the speech of people from other areas. Judging by humorous dictionaries of regionalisms available around the United States, we not only notice differences, Eastern New Northern England North Midland New York City Eastern South Midland Virginia Western Eastern Southern Southern Central Southern ISBN: 0-558-13856-X Figure 2.1 Major Regional Dialects of American English1 Analyzing English Grammar, Fifth Edition, by Thomas P.

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