Re^7: Inclusion of Raku on PerlMonks

You will hear "zwo" pretty everywhere, it's mainly used to sound more colloquial or to be easier distinguished from "drei" (three). (I just learned that it originates from the female form of "zwei" which lost that grammatical function)

For the same reason people will say Juno instead of Juni to hear the difference to Juli (June & Juli).

Most dialects nowadays are very watered down or even extinct. The original language of Hamburg was actually the stereotypical Low German, a literature language on its own.

The normative source for German pronunciation nowadays is a news show called Tagesschau which is produced in Hamburg.

That's why people from the north think they speak the best German. But there is no legaly binding norm defining the best accent. Germany doesn't have a culturally dominating center. (It's even not really clear what Germany is.)

And the more south you go the more "resistance" (to phrase is politely) against this northern standard.

For comparison, I've been told that the accent from the Midwest is considered very trustworthy in the US because many news speakers originated from there.

[Your Mother]

Indeed. I think the US would have descended into 3 or so dialects of American English by now were it not for radio and television (update: and air travel). I believe the ideal US accent is approximately Midwest or a modified Canadian (no “aboot” or “sorerry” allowed) because whatever accent is hardest to pin down—the most neutral being the least specific—comes off the most “American.” A talented linguist can tell you which state you’re from still but the average listener… Then again, I’ve had two linguists guess I was from Philadelphia—I’ve been accused of being Canadian more than once too—and until recently, I’d never been more than a few miles East of the Rio Grande.

[LanX]

To avoid misunderstandings, accent and dialect are often confused.

An accent is heard when pronouncing the same text.

A dialect is a language variety which has different words and grammars.

You might be interested in this Dialect Map of American English, though the author doesn't seem to follow his own advice and often explains dialects by accents.

The term, accent, is often incorrectly used in its place, but an accent refers only to the way words are pronounced, while a dialect has its own grammar, vocabulary, syntax, and common expressions as well as pronunciation rules that make it unique from other dialects of the same language.

Unfortunately the word "dialect" is of political importance since the French Revolution invented the nation state and is emotionally overloaded.

From a linguistic perspective do all Dutch, German, Afrikaans and Yiddish dialects belong to the same dialect continuum, like Portuguese, Castilian, Catalan, Occitan French, "proper" French and Italian do.

Making this statement too carelessly will at best end you up in a pub fight, at worst start a war.

> for radio and television

the Sunday sermon had this function in medieval days

I have to say I really love dialects and accents and I consider them part of high culture!

But I wouldn't object if some key figures of the Perl community would bother to be understood at conferences.

[Your Mother]

Oh, sure. I was being too loose—or more properly, too lay, :P—with the word dialect.

That dialect map, however academically correct it may be, is pedantic to the point of being bonkers. If there is zero grammatical variation and no chance of having vocabulary misunderstood then, to me, it cannot be considered dialect. Washingtonians and Floridians speak exactly the same English. Just because sofa and couch or soda and pop may be preferred… they are understood and nearly no one bats an eye to have them mingled. I cannot see local vocabulary like geoduck (a giant clam in the Northwest) or dolphin (a game fish in the Southeast) changing that either. It would be like considering placenames dialect. The idea that New York City English is as much a dialect as Gullah (a real dialect so localized that most Americans live and die never knowing it exists) is risible. Almost everything I wouldn’t argue about is like that: extremely limited and self-contained geographically. When I said three dialects before I was thinking Northeast, Western, and Southern/Southeast, basically falling along the major surviving meta-accent divisions.

This does return to a more interesting (in US terms, the European stuff you’ve been writing about is quite interesting) topic that I wish I knew more about: American dialects of foreign languages. You wrote about the Pennsylvania Dutch [sic] before.

There are multiple French dialects in the US, including an imported Hatian creole I only know about because a local radio station does an hour long show on Monday nights in it. The Spanish spoken in Northern New Mexico and Southern Colorado has all kinds of 400 year hold-outs from the Conquistadors and contains quite a bit of English for modern words because the dialect itself was evolving too slowly. This map is extremely fun for me.

Anyway, anyone reading these discussions should probably prefer your definitions to mine. :P