On the melding of speech in the uk. Not sure i can completely agree with that. Being a native scot, i grew up near glasgow and had relatives in edinburgh. They used words i never used and at times did not understand. And those two cities are only 45 min apart. And then there are the english. No one understands them, lol. Also having lived in nashville for 9 years, whenever i go home i notice the regional differences even more. Ofcourse you were talking about a tv show where most of the words will be properly spoken and not mangled by region, lol. I mean even amy pond does not get all that much slang in there, lol
Graham Sent from my HTC on the Now Network from Sprint! ----- Reply message ----- From: "Raymond E. Feist" <[email protected]> Date: Wed, Nov 9, 2011 13:24 Subject: New "get to know you" question To: "feistfans-l" <[email protected]> On Nov 9, 2011, at 9:57 AM, Earl Borah wrote: >> A language is a living, evolving thing, and could change rapidly before it >> became "fixed" by print. >> >> Best, R.E.F. > > How much has modern media (radio, television, movies) helped "fix" > language? When an entire country - or even much of the world - is > watching the same television shows and movies, does the pronunciation > and dialect from Hollywood help minimize the local variances we'd > otherwise have? > > Specifically -- while I recognize there's still a difference in > southern speech and New York speech compared to what I hear every day > here in Oregon, are those differences less than they'd otherwise be > due to the prevalence of audio media? How does that effect compare to > the effect of print media? > > What happens when a show like Doctor Who becomes popular in the US -- > does it affect our speech patterns much? How big a deal is American > television/movie to the rest of the English-speaking world -- are we > affecting their speech patterns? > > Not that I expect anyone to have a definitive answer, they're just all > questions I find interesting. > Very good point. First radio introduced Americans to "mediated speech" which was more or less eastern, upscale (even among some broadcasters sort of a "Mid-Atlantic" half US/half British, witness someone like Alistair Cook) which is a bit like monied Americans like FDR spoke. That evolved into what is now modern "Mediated American Speech," which pretty much is a bit of a broad midwestern twang toned down a great deal and softened, witness Walter Cronkite or Tom Brokaw. If you go to cities like Atlanta, you don't hear the broad southern accent you here in more rural parts of Georgia. If you go to San Francisco or L.A. among non-ethnic neighborhoods, you hear a westernized melding of accents from all over the nation. Yes, media is making us all slowly sound alike. Importing shows from Britain has little effect. Ironically, a much smaller nation, there's almost nothing like the melding of speech we have in the US. Perhaps it's due to there being more of a connection between accent and class and neighborhood in the UK? I don't know. Best, R.E.F. ---- www.crydee.com Never attribute to malice what can satisfactorily be explained away by stupidity.
