Question: Are regional accents dying out?

[rickenvox]

you can't control how languages change. it's all natural. has never stopped since the beginning of verbal communication.

 

[rhino]

If we did a barn storm where everyone got to hang out, I'm pretty sure y'all would think I talk funny, and I wouldn't care because I'd probably be drunk trying to get Gary to do another dead tune.

 

[shoeless]

Regional accents/dialects are not dying out, but they are moving around. Seems there are a lot of transplants everywhere I go around the Midwest, especially Minnesota and Wisconsin, where you don’t get as much of the local accents as you would expect, and a lot of those people moved there from other parts of the country.

Yah...you betcha.

 

[Bones McHorror]

you can't control how languages change. it's all natural. has never stopped since the beginning of verbal communication.

This is true of very trivial things in language, but not really for language in general.

Imperialism, genocide, government policies, colonialism, commerce, etc. have controlled how languages change and how many of them disappear. It's kind of like saying the mass extinction many species go through today is unavoidable because extinction is a natural process. It always happens so don't worry about it. It can be and has been like that, but that doesn't explain things now. Especially today where language extinction, like extinction in general, is accelerated a hundredfold. Not in the US as much, but through out most of the world and among indigenous peoples. The mere fact that you speak English is not really itself a natural fact. It had to be created by wiping out the Indians who lived on the continent. And creating a border between Mexico and California. And a lot of other things. Literature is not a natural fact, but controls how languages change. The printing press was not a natural occurrence, but changed language. The written word, the telephone, the internet, and everything else.

You also have things like Welsh and Catalan which are being consciously revived. Israel consciously revived and reshaped Hebrew.


Uptalk seems to be a different question than the more serious issue of language death, but I think it is just a social thing like saying please or thank you. Or not calling black people the n-word. And not a thing like prepositions or verbs which are imposed on the language. This means some will use them to create certain affects while others won't. Some people see uptalk as uncertainty, while other people arbitrarily see saying please as 'weakness'. It's just fewer today can say the latter because it is understood as a social grace. But things that are merely preference can easily be resisted in language.

I noticed it in the Julien Baker rig rundown. She studied audio engineering so she knows what she is talking about. But the thing is she talks in a way that encourages participation in what she is saying instead of just explaining 'how it is'. Especially to other people with similar interests and reference points. And some people, especially men, take that for feminine weakness or in general consider women to be stupider. But thing is, many women, and some men, just negotiate their conversations that way. They don't want it to be a one way street or to spell out every thought. They can use elliptical language that can be filled in by someone else's observations. People also forget that even using intonation in actual questions is entirely unnecessary since grammar accomplishes the same thing in many languages. Which is why we read standard questions fine in written form even without punctuation. We are just use to certain ways of question-forming being acceptable and others sounding very bad. The bad ones aren't even ungrammatical, or non-English, but just make you sound mean or not really interested or something like that. Some ways we use it are just laziness as in transforming statements into questions using the same syntax but raising intonation at the end. Which is also unnecessary for the most part.

Uptalk has become a permanent feature in some languages and dialects, though. For instance, Norwegian and Arabic both use it with no problem. Australian and New Zealand, as well as some parts of Northern Ireland, are using it widely with English. I don't think Swedish uses it at all, despite being otherwise mutually intelligible to Norwegian (from what I understand Swedes consider it to be overly happy or perky sounding; kind of like the way we hear Bjork talk). And there are a few dialects of Arabic that don't use it. So I think the best hypothesis is that takes hold in some cultures probably consciously at first and then becomes a way of marking a particular dialect over time. Right now I think Americans see it as a sign of personal individual weakness. Or maybe a subculture or generational issue. I think much of this comes from misogyny. A misogynistic culture might adopt uptalk, but only if it is not seen as being led by women. In our culture it is seen as being led by women, much like 'safe spaces' and 'trigger warnings', so there is major panic about it.

 

[rickenvox]

This is true of very trivial things in language, but not really for language in general.

Imperialism, genocide, government policies, colonialism, commerce, etc. have controlled how languages change and how many of them disappear. It's kind of like saying the mass extinction many species go through today is unavoidable because extinction is a natural process. It always happens so don't worry about it. It can be and has been like that, but that doesn't explain things now. Especially today where language extinction, like extinction in general, is accelerated a hundredfold. Not in the US as much, but through out most of the world and among indigenous peoples. The mere fact that you speak English is not really itself a natural fact. It had to be created by wiping out the Indians who lived on the continent. And creating a border between Mexico and California. And a lot of other things. Literature is not a natural fact, but controls how languages change. The printing press was not a natural occurrence, but changed language. The written word, the telephone, the internet, and everything else.

You also have things like Welsh and Catalan which are being consciously revived. Israel consciously revived and reshaped Hebrew.


Uptalk seems to be a different question than the more serious issue of language death, but I think it is just a social thing like saying please or thank you. Or not calling black people the n-word. And not a thing like prepositions or verbs which are imposed on the language. This means some will use them to create certain affects while others won't. Some people see uptalk as uncertainty, while other people arbitrarily see saying please as 'weakness'. It's just fewer today can say the latter because it is understood as a social grace. But things that are merely preference can easily be resisted in language.

I noticed it in the Julien Baker rig rundown. She studied audio engineering so she knows what she is talking about. But the thing is she talks in a way that encourages participation in what she is saying instead of just explaining 'how it is'. Especially to other people with similar interests and reference points. And some people, especially men, take that for feminine weakness or in general consider women to be stupider. But thing is, many women, and some men, just negotiate their conversations that way. They don't want it to be a one way street or to spell out every thought. They can use elliptical language that can be filled in by someone else's observations. People also forget that even using intonation in actual questions is entirely unnecessary since grammar accomplishes the same thing in many languages. Which is why we read standard questions fine in written form even without punctuation. We are just use to certain ways of question-forming being acceptable and others sounding very bad. The bad ones aren't even ungrammatical, or non-English, but just make you sound mean or not really interested or something like that. Some ways we use it are just laziness as in transforming statements into questions using the same syntax but raising intonation at the end. Which is also unnecessary for the most part.

Uptalk has become a permanent feature in some languages and dialects, though. For instance, Norwegian and Arabic both use it with no problem. Australian and New Zealand, as well as some parts of Northern Ireland, are using it widely with English. I don't think Swedish uses it at all, despite being otherwise mutually intelligible to Norwegian (from what I understand Swedes consider it to be overly happy or perky sounding; kind of like the way we hear Bjork talk). And there are a few dialects of Arabic that don't use it. So I think the best hypothesis is that takes hold in some cultures probably consciously at first and then becomes a way of marking a particular dialect over time. Right now I think Americans see it as a sign of personal individual weakness. Or maybe a subculture or generational issue. I think much of this comes from misogyny. A misogynistic culture might adopt uptalk, but only if it is not seen as being led by women. In our culture it is seen as being led by women, much like 'safe spaces' and 'trigger warnings', so there is major panic about it.

Need to sort out some of your multiple topics here. Spoken language is the language linguists study. Written language is only a byproduct of that, and a poor representation of the sounds of spoken language. Language changes constantly. As soon as a dictionary is published it's outdated. It's just a snapshot at a point in time. New lexical entries begin everyday. Except dictionaries are even further behind because they wait for usage to occur in writing or literature before validating new coinages. Again that's backwards, but probably avoids confusing everyone by being inundated with new lexical entries every year. Not sure why you're linking English to events in US history. I guess you're saying Americans wouldn't be speaking it if not for political events that took place here (??). Brits would so I'm not sure what the point is. English has elements of French and German and a couple other languages as a result of conquests in Britain and mixing with other peoples. English does not currently have a large influx of words from other languages, but English words are being adopted around the world, esp in Asian languages. Attempts by the French government to freeze and preserve French grammar are also unsuccessful (except in the writings of academics and scholars). Otherwise how people speak in the streets and in their own communities is constantly evolving. Your brain only acquires language in one way for 1st or native languages. Things/changes we adopt as adults only become cemented into the language when we raise kids and their natural acquisition process picks up all of our new and old lexicon elements. Governments don't control language unless they prohibit them (as with African slaves in the US), and even then you haven't removed it completely until other generations are born with no exposure to it.

Also pitch in English has no bearing on meaning, whereas in Asian languages the same two words with one having a rising pitch at the coda form minimal pairs, or determine a different meaning.

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[shoeless]

If'n y'all has a problem with the way I talk, theirs nothing I can do about it. I ain't even gonna try.

 

[Bones McHorror]

Need to sort out some of your multiple topics here. Spoken language is the language linguists study. Written language is only a by product of that, and a poor representation of the sounds of spoken language. Language changes constantly. As soon as a dictionary is published it's outdated. It's just a snapshot at a point in time. New lexical entries begin everyday. Except dictionaries are even further behind because they wait for usage to occur in writing or literature before validating new coinages. Again that's backwards, but probably avoids confusing everyone by being inundated with new lexical entries every year. Not sure why you're linking English to events in US history. I guess you're saying Americans wouldn't be speaking it if not for political events that took place here (??). Brits would so I'm not sure what the point is. English has elements of French and German and a couple other languages as a result of conquests in Britain and mixing with other peoples. English does not currently have a large influx of words from other languages, but English words are being adopted around the world, esp in Asian language. Attempts by the French government to freeze and preserve French grammar is also unsuccessful (except in the writings of academics and scholars). Otherwise how people speak in the streets and in their own communities is constantly evolving. Your brain only acquires language in one way for 1st or native languages. Things/changes we adopt as adults only become cemented into the language when we raise kids and their natural acquisition process picks up all of our new and old lexicon elements. Governments don't control language unless they prohibit them (as with African slaves in the US), and even then you haven't removed it completely until other generations are born with no exposure to it.

Also pitch in English has no bearing on meaning, whereas in Asian languages the same two words with one having a rising pitch at the coda form minimal pairs, or determine a different meaning.

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It's not true that linguists only study spoken language (that's a digression anyway, though). Nor that written language is an imitation of spoken language.

The point is that creating a writing system changes language. And was not a natural occurrence. There are tons of examples of things that change language like that, disproving the claim that 'it is all natural'. The part about dictionaries -- I don't know what it has to do with what I said. But dictionaries themselves standardized spelling which was an unnatural occurrence. Which then changed how language is used. It increased the ability for large numbers of people to read the same texts. Creating a large language community has a huge effect on how language then works. It has an effect on national identity, too. Having a body of canonical literature, like the Bible or Shakespeare, has a big effect on language. Somebody did that. And it wasn't some act of nature. I don't see how any of this controversial.

Written language is also not a thing just by itself. For instance, writing a play or film script is something then spoken out loud. Literature brings metaphor and other things into spoken language. It invents words and concepts and other things every year. Mathematics is a written language. Science is often written ages before anyone talks about it. It doesn't require something to exist in spoken first that it then just records. So the claim that it is imitation is false. As much as the opposite claim, that spoken only imitates writing, would be false. Language is language, whether it is written, signed with hands, or spoken.

Governments do plenty to control language. Not just preventing but setting policy. For instance, if you are not allowed to learn your native language in a school setting, or it has no use in courts or other institutions, but have to learn a colonial language instead that is a government imposed control of language. Governments doing the opposite... trying to revive languages, as some countries have done, is also government having a role in language. Many countries around the world have huge numbers of languages (the US included) but only give preference to an official language and maybe one or two other co-official languages. Much of this is influenced by colonial history, whether the settlers live there still or not. National borders are also imposed on people effecting how people use language. Being born in Texas vs. being born a few miles away in Mexico will have a huge outcome on your language use. Many governments reform language themselves like Turkey, France, Germany, China, Norway, and many others. Which then changes how government uses it. Which changes how people use it. And this doesn't get started on the really nasty stuff like censorship which is prevalent throughout the world.

 

[CST]

The southern accent is alive & well. When we go out in public, we try to get uppity & pronounce the g on the end of words, as in fixing to, going to, etc. It takes a conscious effort, believe me.

 

[shoeless]

The southern accent is alive & well. When we go out in public, we try to get uppity & pronounce the g on the end of words, as in fixing to, going to, etc. It takes a conscious effort, believe me.

I actually miss hearing "fixin' to". I have been away from home so long that it's lost in my vernacular.

 

[rickenvox]

It's not true that linguists only study spoken language (that's a digression anyway, though). Nor that written language is an imitation of spoken language.

The point is that creating a writing system changes language. And was not a natural occurrence. There are tons of examples of things that change language like that, disproving the claim that 'it is all natural'. The part about dictionaries -- I don't know what it has to do with what I said. But dictionaries themselves standardized spelling which was an unnatural occurrence. Which then changed how language is used. It increased the ability for large numbers of people to read the same texts. Creating a large language community has a huge effect on how language then works. It has an effect on national identity, too. Having a body of canonical literature, like the Bible or Shakespeare, has a big effect on language. Somebody did that. And it wasn't some act of nature. I don't see how any of this controversial.

Written language is also not a thing just by itself. For instance, writing a play or film script is something then spoken out loud. Literature brings metaphor and other things into spoken language. It invents words and concepts and other things every year. Mathematics is a written language. Science is often written ages before anyone talks about it. It doesn't require something to exist in spoken first that it then just records. So the claim that it is imitation is false. As much as the opposite claim, that spoken only imitates writing, would be false. Language is language, whether it is written, signed with hands, or spoken.

Governments do plenty to control language. Not just preventing but setting policy. For instance, if you are not allowed to learn your native language in a school setting, or it has no use in courts or other institutions, but have to learn a colonial language instead that is a government imposed control of language. Governments doing the opposite... trying to revive languages, as some countries have done, is also government having a role in language. Many countries around the world have huge numbers of languages (the US included) but only give preference to an official language and maybe one or two other co-official languages. Much of this is influenced by colonial history, whether the settlers live there still or not. National borders are also imposed on people effecting how people use language. Being born in Texas vs. being born a few miles away in Mexico will have a huge outcome on your language use. Many governments reform language themselves like Turkey, France, Germany, China, Norway, and many others. Which then changes how government uses it. Which changes how people use it. And this doesn't get started on the really nasty stuff like censorship which is prevalent throughout the world.

Yes linguists study language, all forms. I didn't say they don't study written language so please don't misquote me. But innate language acquisition for children only exists for spoken language. There is no built in functionality for learning writing systems even your own.

Now setting that aside I don't think there's much use in me bringing current thinking in the profession on how languages evolve and change and you sharing your speculation on the subject. So I'll leave it there.


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[baimun]

Iiiiitss liiiiiike totes replaaaaced byyy vooocaaaal frryyyyyy.....

 

[rickenvox]

The southern accent is alive & well. When we go out in public, we try to get uppity & pronounce the g on the end of words, as in fixing to, going to, etc. It takes a conscious effort, believe me.

There is actually no [g] sound at the end of those words, it's an engma. Which is a velar nasal. The 'ng' sound which is made with air passing through your nose like an [n] or [m], but with the blade of your tongue against the velar portion of the roof of your mouth.

I like the southern 'fixin' with the x substituted for a tap (the soft [d] like sound that most Americans use when saying "batting"). Almost like 'fittin' or 'fidden'.


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[CST]

There is actually no [g] sound at the end of those words, it's an engma. Which is a velar nasal. The 'ng' sound which is made with air passing through your nose like an [n] or [m], but with the blade of your tongue against the velar portion of the roof of your mouth.

I like the southern 'fixin' with the x substituted for a tap (the soft [d] like sound that most Americans use when saying "batting"). Almost like 'fittin' or 'fidden'.


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Are you fucking kidding me? Fucking with a g sound at the end.

 

[rickenvox]

Are you fucking kidding me? Fucking with a g sound at the end.

g sounds like 'guh'. there's no 'guh' sound at the end of 'fucking' in the way anyone would normally say it.
The 'ng' sound has the same place of articulation as 'guh', but air through the mouth is stopped and comes out of the nose when the tongue blocks it against the roof of the mouth (or velar). When you say 'guh' air is also blocked but quickly released through the mouth making a "stop" sound. The [k] sound or 'kuh' sound is exactly the same except it is not "voiced" (vocal cords are not vibrating, the noise is all in the mouth). The [g] sound is voiced, the vocal cords are vibrating and generating the sound.

You can add a 'guh' sound after the 'ng' nasal release of fucking, but that's not the way people say it conversationally. That would be "fucking-guh"

But thanks for playing. People often imaging they're pronouncing every letter they see in the spelling of a word, but they're not. And then some people over pronunciate words for the same reason. Like 'often' is usually pronounced [awfun], but some people think they are correctly pronouncing by clearly making the [t] sound. Unfortunately the history of the English language has left over letters that are no longer pronounced. Like the 'kn' in knight. It was actually pronounced [kuh-nee] in Middle English, but now the [k] sound has been dropped altogether.

 

[LeftyTom]

tell me where you were raised and I'll tell you all of the words you pronounce incorrectly

North Carolina

There is actually no [g] sound at the end of those words, it's an engma. Which is a velar nasal. The 'ng' sound which is made with air passing through your nose like an [n] or [m], but with the blade of your tongue against the velar portion of the roof of your mouth.

I like the southern 'fixin' with the x substituted for a tap (the soft [d] like sound that most Americans use when saying "batting"). Almost like 'fittin' or 'fidden'.


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I proudly enunciate x's in words, none of that 'fittin' or 'fidden'.

 

[Pine Apple Slim]

I like them french fried taters and mustard.

 

[Jbird]

g sounds like 'guh'. there's no 'guh' sound at the end of 'fucking' in the way anyone would normally say it.

unless you're Kevin Cronin singing REO Speedwagon songs. I've noticed he over-emphasized endings of words sometimes when he sang.

 

[Bones McHorror]

Yes linguists study language, all forms. I didn't say they don't study written language so please don't misquote me. But innate language acquisition for children only exists for spoken language. There is no built in functionality for learning writing systems even your own.

Now setting that aside I don't think there's much use in me bringing current thinking in the profession on how languages evolve and change and you sharing your speculation on the subject. So I'll leave it there.


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"Spoken language is the language linguists study. Written language is only a by product of that, and a poor representation of the sounds of spoken language."

"you can't control how languages change. it's all natural."

You specifically made two indisputably wrong statements. You said spoken language is the language linguists study. Wrong. And that you can't stop how language changes 'it's all natural'. Also wrong. You then moved the goalposts arbitrarily and are still wrong. Even the part about written language being a byproduct was super wrong.

You are not sure what you are arguing anymore it seems. Or are going in circles. No functionality of learning writing systems only proves my point, if anything, that language is not entirely natural. Writing changes considerably and is a part of language. You moved the goal posts to talking about one person's acquiring language. While the topic is a language itself. Which does change whether an individual acquires it or not. And language changes after you acquire it too for entirely non-natural reasons. Such as building a vocabulary and imitation. Something that applies to spoken and written language equally.

When talking about aspects of spoken language it is also not a given that it has anything to do with innate properties of grammar. I gave the examples of saying 'please/thank you' and rising intonation in questions. Things that are simply imitated or considered socially correct but have nothing to do with grammar (innate or otherwise). And may have no actual use other than convention. Something like uptalk exists in some English speakers and not others, so the issue of being innate or natural is entirely off the table. Something changed (in some speakers) without a natural cause. This is not speculation but just common sense. Speculation is around where it came from or why exactly people use it, which hasn't been solved definitively at all, but those are very separate issues.

 

[rickenvox]

"Spoken language is the language linguists study. Written language is only a by product of that, and a poor representation of the sounds of spoken language."

"you can't control how languages change. it's all natural."

You specifically made two indisputably wrong statements. You said spoken language is the language linguists study. Wrong. And that you can't stop how language changes 'it's all natural'. Also wrong. You then moved the goalposts arbitrarily and are still wrong. Even the part about written language being a byproduct was super wrong.

You are not sure what you are arguing anymore it seems. Or are going in circles. No functionality of learning writing systems only proves my point, if anything, that language is not entirely natural. Writing changes considerably and is a part of language. You moved the goal posts to talking about one person's acquiring language. While the topic is a language itself. Which does change whether an individual acquires it or not. And language changes after you acquire it too for entirely non-natural reasons. Such as building a vocabulary and imitation. Something that applies to spoken and written language equally.

When talking about aspects of spoken language it is also not a given that it has anything to do with innate properties of grammar. I gave the examples of saying 'please/thank you' and rising intonation in questions. Things that are simply imitated or considered socially correct but have nothing to do with grammar (innate or otherwise). And may have no actual use other than convention. Something like uptalk exists in some English speakers and not others, so the issue of being innate or natural is entirely off the table. Something changed (in some speakers) without a natural cause. This is not speculation but just common sense. Speculation is around where it came from or why exactly people use it, which hasn't been solved definitively at all, but those are very separate issues.

Simply put I've been tested on this topic and related topics at one of the top linguistic grad schools in the country for the past year and a half with a 4.0 GPA. So I do have correct answers based on the current state of the field. I will repeat my same point again because it addresses everything you're saying if you can connect the dots: spoken languages are acquired and not learned by children. There's already an innate capacity for that acquisition. Written language is learned and not acquired, no innate capacity. It takes drilling and practice. In your example of Israel, the decision to revive Hebrew was not natural. The first Israeli occupants who began speaking it were speaking it as a 2LA or second language, not acquired naturally during the language acquisition years between infancy and 8 years old. Hebrew did not become a natural language in Israel until the children of those original occupants acquired it naturally with minimal input (Hebrew didn't have words for everything in modern day life as it was a dead language). When the first generation children acquired it naturally it immediately changed as their capacity to acquire and generate language filled in some of the missing blanks from the dead language. So the decision makers who consciously made Hebrew the official language never became fluent 1LA speakers, their children did. If you're truly interested in the subject and not just thoughts bouncing around in your brain read up on Nicaraguan sign language. It's an incredible story. Sign languages are acquired exactly the same as spoken languages and share many of the same features and syntax.


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[rickenvox]

You moved the goal posts to talking about one person's acquiring language. While the topic is a language itself. Which does change whether an individual acquires it or not. And language changes after you acquire it too for entirely non-natural reasons.

This you're wrong about. People adopt new words in their lexicon their entire life. People can imitate certain trends in intonation and other elements of prosody. They only change language when a child acquires them naturally. Then it sticks. And there are new novel words that stick, shortcuts in grammar that stick, but they stick across a wide range of speakers within the language group and over generations. If some novel trend starts in our lifetime we have no way to gauge if it's going to change English or not. We're not in control of that. That's why the gender pronouns debate is so heated. You can't change language by edict. That's not how languages change. Even a dictator won't live long enough to see if language edicts stick or not.