Title: dialects & economics
Speech's Utter Dynamics (Los Angeles TIMES, June 24, 2002)
Despite the sameness of U.S. media, regional dialects refuse to blend. Instead, the continent is a huge quilt of evolving pronunciation patterns.
By MATTHEW BLAKESLEE, SPECIAL TO THE TIMES
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-44235jun24.story
comment: the article above was very interesting, even in terms of economics. The article makes two major points:
(1) contrary to most people's expectations, the various dialects of the English language in the United States are not going away (as suggested by very intensive research of areas outside the big cities). People expected that increased inter-communication (including national TV, etc.) would slowly make the difference between say, the Midwest dialect and "Southonics" disappear. This hasn't happened. In fact, though some local dialects are going away, the differences between major dialects are actually _intensifying_.
(2) the major explanation presented for this phenomenon is that the dialects have an inner coherence, a structure. For example, different dialects treat the main vowels differently relative to each other (as in the major vowel shift that separates Chaucer from Shakespeare and continental Europe from England). In French it's not just that "i" is pronounced "ee" (unlike in English where the hard form spells its name), but all the other vowels are differently than in English. In England, they all shifted together, relative to French. This gives the languages a structural rigidity: you can't change one vowel's pronunciation without changing all of them. If the English speakers saw the light and changed their pronunciation of "i" to "ee," they'd have to change their pronunciation of "e," also. Similar structural rigidity can be seen in English dialects.
What does this say about economics? The common expectation among neoclassical economists -- and also Marx & Engels in THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO -- has been that "free trade" and other peaceful and gradual economic interaction would lead to the homogenization of economic institutions around the world (as with point 1).
But this analysis ignores institutionalism (which includes Marx's more mature stuff [*]), which as in point (2) emphasizes the inner coherence or institutional rigidity of these institutions (getting beyond the individualism of NC economics). So except for institutions in small parts of the world, economic institutions will not go away quietly, falling when it turns out that alternative institutions are superior by competitive standards.
That explains why the homogenization of economic institutions is being done by coercion, by the CIA, the IMF, etc. I guess that's akin to the way the English imposed their language on the Irish.
I am not a linguist, nor do I play one on TV.
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
[*] Marx's more mature work saw capitalism as essentially an economic institution that has a inner coherence or logic of its own, that can't be reduced to tastes, scarcity, markets, the pre-existing distribution of assets, etc.
