Dialects. Northern area

Northern United States is sometimes referred to as general American English.

It corresponds to Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, Michigan, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wisconsin, Wyoming, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Washington, Nevada, California, Utah, Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Alaska and Hawaii.

The northern area can be divided into two subdialects: Northern and Western. At the same time, they are divided into New England, Hudson Valley, New York city, Inland Northern, Upper Midwestern, Rocky Mountain, Pacific Northwest, Pacific Southwest, Southwestern and Hawaii.

Some of the most important features are the following:
In New England R's are often dropped, but an extra R is added to words that end with a vowel. A is pronounced AH so that we get "Pahk the cah in Hahvuhd yahd" and "Pepperidge Fahm remembuhs.
In New York, When an R comes after a vowel, it is often dropped. IR becomes OI, but OI becomes IR, and TH becomes D as in "Dey sell tirlets on doity-doid street" and fugedaboudit (forget about it). This pronounciation is particularly associated with Brooklyn but exists to some extent throughout the city.
In Inland Northern it’s combined elements of Western New England and Upper Midwestern. Marry, merry, and Mary are pronounced the same.
Some original Hudson Valley words are stoop (small porch) and teeter-totter.
Some words in the Western Dialects are adobe, beer bust, belly up, boneyard, bronco, buckaroo, bunkhouse, cahoots, corral, greenhorn, hightail, hoosegow, lasso, mustang, maverick, roundup, wingding, Many words originally came from Spanish, cowboy jargon, and even some from the languages of the Native Americans.
In The Rocky Mountain, some words are kick off (to die), cache (hiding place), and bushed (tired).
In The Pacific Northwest, a pidgin called Chinook Jargon was developed between the languages of the Native American tribes of this area.A word from Chinook Jargon is high muckamuck (important person), which is still used today.
Alaska is also influenced by the native american language. Some words are  bush (remote area), cabin fever, mush (to travel by dog sled), parka, stateside.
Pacific Southwest is influenced by the dialects of the Northern and North Midland. The people here are particularly fond of creating new slang and expressions, and, since Hollywood is located here, these quickly get spread to the rest of the country and the world. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, an extreme exaggeration of this dialect that ("Valley Girl" or "Surfer Dude") was popular among teenagers and much parodied in the media with phrases like "gag me with a spoon" and "barf me back to the stone age." Sean Penn in Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Whoopie Goldberg in her one women show are    two famous examples.
Southwestern: it was very influenced by Spanish people, because of the ten generations who lived here. Some local words are: caballero, cantina, frijoles, madre, mesa, nana, padre, patio, plaza, ramada, tortilla.

A special case is the dialect spoken in Hawaii,  There was a Hawaiian Creole developed from a pidgin English spoken on the sugar plantations with workers from Hawaii and many other countries. Some words are: look-see, no can, number one, plenty (very). It isn't widely spoken nowadays. Nonstandard Hawaiian English was developed from Hawaiian Creole, and it's spoken mostly by teenagers: aloha, hula, kahuna, lei…

Here, I'll show you a video of the movie mentioned above ''Fast Times at  Ridgemont High'' starring by Sean Penn.

That's all about dialects. I hope you've enjoyed it!
Source:
http://robertspage.com/dialects.html

By: Patricia Domínguez

Loan-words

Loan-words are words adopted by the speakers of a specific languagen in this case English, from a different language which is called source language. A loan-word also can be called borrowing. However, these two words are metaphorical because the borrowing words are not taken from a language and returned later, so they imply a proccess. 

Loan-wrods are the result of a cultural contact between two language communities. Borrowing of words can go in both directions between the languages in contact, but often there is a asymmetry, such that more words go from one side to the other. In this case the source language community has some advantage of power, prestige and/or wealth that makes the objects and ideas it brings desirable and useful to the borrowing language community.

Those who first use the word might use it at first only with speakers of the source language who know the word, but at some point the come to use the word with those to whom the word was not previously known. To thse speakers the word may sound 'foreign'. At this stage, when most speakers do not know the word and if they hear it think it is from another language, the word can be called foreign word.

The United States has a large number of loan words (if well it seems the opposite as a source language). This linguistic result was almost totally a consequence of the first period of settlement. In that early period, most of the words had been to do with new fauna and flora, or with notions deriving from contact with the Indian tribes. Now, there were many words from Spanish, French, German, Dutch and the other immigrant languages, which were increasingly becoming part of the American environment.

Here, we have a table with several examples of words and phrases come from other languages which are used in American English: 

LANGUAGE	WORDS
Indian languages	Chipmunk, hickory, how!, moccasin, moose, opossum. Papoose, pemmican, pow-wow, racoon, skunk, tomahawk, totem, wigwam.
Dutch	Boss, caboose, coleslaw, cookie, snoop.
French	Bayou, butte, caribou, cent, chowder, crevasse, gopher, levee, poker, praline, saloon.
German	And how, cookbook, delicatessen, dumb, frankfurter, hoddlum, kindergarten, nix, no way, phooey, pretzel, sauerkraut, spiel.
Italian	Capo, espresso, mafia, minestrone, pasta, pizza, spaghetti, zucchini.
Spanish	Bonanza, cafeteria, canyon, coyote, lassoo, loco, marijuan, mustang, plaza, ranch, rodeo, tacos, tornado, vamoose.
Yiddish	Gonif, kosher, mazuma, mensch, nosh, schmaltz, shmuck, schnoz, scram, shlemiel, Enjoy!, You should worry!, Get lost!, Crazy she isn’t!

Sources: http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~kemmer/Words/loanwords.html
"The English language" by David Crystal.

By Estefanía Benítez Sánchez

Origin of American English Language

The origin of the English language in United States took place in the last decades of the sixteenth century, with the arrival of the expeditions commissioned by Walter Raleigh to the ‘’New World’’. The First venture was a failure. In 1584 the first group of explorers landed near Roanoke Island, in what is today called North Carolina, and established a small settlement. But conflict with the Indians followed, and it proved necessary for a ship to return to England for help and supplies. By the time those arrived, in 1590, none of the original group of settlers could be found. The mystery of their disappearance has never solved.

The first permanent English settlement dates from 1607, when an expedition arrived in Chesapeake Bay, and called the settlement Jamestown, after James I. Then, in 1620, the first group of Puritan settlers arrived on the Mayflower ‘’The Pilgrim Fathers’’, searching for a land where they could found a new religious kingdom ‘purified’ from the practices which they found unacceptable in the English Church of the time. They landed at Cape Cod, in Plymouth, Massachusetts, and established a settlement there. By 1640 around 25,000 people had settled in the area.

It’s important to appreciate that these two patterns of settlement resulted in different linguistic consequences. The southern explorers came mainly from the West Country, and brought with them the characteristic west-country accent. In contrast, the Puritans came mainly from East Anglia and the surrounding countries, and their accent was quite different.

The separateness of the colonies remained for much of the seventeenth century, but during this time increasing contacts and new patterns of settlement caused the sharp divisions between accents to begin to blur. New shiploads of settlers brought people with a variety of linguistic backgrounds. By 1700, the immigrant population of the continent had increased to around a quarter of a million.

In the early eighteen century, there was a vast wave of immigration from northern Ireland. By the time Independence was declared in 1776, it is thought that no less than one in seven of the American population was Scots-Irish. They were seen as frontier people, with an accent which at the time was described as ‘broad’.

There are many mixed dialect areas, and ‘pockets’ of unexpected dialect forms. But the mains divisions of North, Midland and South are still demonstrable today.

An important aspect of American life, its cosmopolitan character, was present from the beginning, and this had linguistic consequences too. The Spanish had occupied large areas in the west and south-west of the country; the French were present in the northern territories around the St. Lawrence, and throughout the middle regions (French Louisiana)as far as the Gulf of Mexico. The Dutch were in New York and the surrounding area. Large numbers og Germans began to arrive at the end of the seventeenth century, settling mainly in Pennsylvania. And there were increasing numbers of blacks in the south, as a result of the slave trade from Africa.

During the nineteenth century, these immigration patterns increased: Large numbers of Irish came following the potato famine in the 1840s; German and Italians came, escaping the consequences of the failure of 1848 revolutions; And  as the century wore on, there were increasing numbers of Central European Jews.

The chief linguistic result of this multilingual setting was a large number of loan words from Spanish, French, German, Dutch and the other immigrant languages. Words such as boss, caboose, coleslaw (Dutch), bayou, cache, poker (French), mafia, capo, espresso (Italian), cafeteria, canyon, coyote (Spanish), dumb, delicatessen, no way (german)…

Source:

''The English Language'', David Crystal.

http://courses.nus.edu.sg/course/elltankw/history/American_files/image005.jpg

By: Patricia Domínguez.

Dialects. Southern area

For geographical, historical, cultural and other reasons we recognize another regional dialect of English in America called ‘’Southern’’.

Southern United States corresponds to  Florida, Georgia, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, Delaware, Alabama, Kentucky, Mississippi, Tennessee, Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Texas.



French and the African languages spoken by the people brought over as slaves had an important influence on Southern United States.
The English of the southern United States may be the most studied regional variety of any language.

An important feature of Southern English is its differential politeness. Forms of address in general are described over and over as being different and more significant than elsewhere. ‘’Sir’’ and ‘’ma’am’’ are among the most frequently mentioned of the forms of address with particularly southern uses. The use of ‘’sir’’ and ‘’ma’am’’ to one’s parents as required element of the answer to a yes/no question, is widespread in the south. It’s used to express friendly solidarity, to emphasis…

Another important feature is the use of conditional syntax, an strategy for indirectness: Full if-then constructions as well as conditional clauses alone, are used to hedge assertions.

Another characteristic is speaking at a higher level of generality, as well as the frequent use of formulas such as ‘’I don’t mean to pry’’, before requests for information and ‘’I wish’’, to introduce requests for action.

Also, the use of question intonation.

They tend to drop Rs the way New Englanders do, but they don't add extra Rs.
Some local words are: boogerman, funky (bad smelling), jump the broomstick (get married), kinfolks, mammy, muleheaded, overseer,tote, y'all, big daddy (grandfather), big mamma (grandmother), Confederate War (Civil War), cooter (turtle), fixing to (going to), goober (peanut), hey (hello),mouth harp (harmonica), on account of (because).


Also, I have some videos related to this:

Source:

http://robertspage.com/dialects.html 

English in the Southern United States Nagle, Stephen J. Sanders, Sara L. Aarts, Bas



By: Patricia Domínguez

Spelling Bee

A spelling bee is a competition where contestants usually children are asked to spell words. This concept and the competition  are thought to have originated in the United States, though spelling bee events now held in many countries in the world.

The term Spelling Bee has never been a term satisfactorily accounted for. Those who used the word assume that it was the same word as referred to the insect. But in recent years scholars have rejected this explanation, suggesting instead that this bee is a completely different word. One possibility is that it comes from the Middle English word bene which means ‘a prayer’ or ‘a favor’. However, this is not really clear.

English spelling is seen as a chaotic mess, but this is not really true; the question is how chaotic is it? It is very difficult to establish what we consider words indeed, a single word or related words as plural forms. The point is that we must not exaggerate the problem; English spelling is much more regular than the traditional criticisms would have us believe.

Children are told they must learn spellings off by heart, of course, and they are rigorously tested in them. In order to understand the spelling system of English, children need to be given reasons for why the spellings are as they are, but the essential point is to hear the difference between vowels which are very short in length. It then emerges that the consonant sound is spelled with a double letter if the verb contains one of the short vowels, and it is kept single if the verb contains a long vowel. However, obviously there are exceptions.

The origins of success for these children to join in these competitions are reading, keeping a ·great words” journal every and interesting word that they find; designating a spelling wall in your home and scouring the dictionary in search of words to stump your parents or teachers. Thanks to all these keys, children may win these competitions which are a great pride for all who are around them. 

Sources: http://spellingbee.com/

"The English Language" by David Crystal

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xarqIQ9S64U

By: Estefanía Benítez Sánchez

Evolution of Communication

Communication between people has change over time. Everybody wrote letters but this has gradually replaced by sms. It means "Short Message Service" and it was created to transmit a message using the fewest number or characters posisible, that is why, the use of abbreviations.

            

Words in full                                Abbreviations or sms language

          As far as I remember                                             AFAIR    

                      LOVE                                                              LUV

                      Thanks                                                   THNX or THX

                      Today                                                               2day

                      before                                                               B4

           Have a nice day                                                       HAND

                      see you                                                             CU

                       Great                                                               GR8

             at the moment                                                       ATM

             as soon as posible                                                  ASAP

             Oh my God                                                              OMG

             Hugs and kisses                                                      HAK

Also a single letter can replace words, for instance: be becomes b, you becomes u, why becomes y, okay becomes k or kk. Single digits can replace words; won or one becomes 1, to or too becomes 2, for becomes 4, ate becomes 8.

Another example is a single letter or digit can replace a syllable or phoneme: to or too becomes 2, great becomes gr8, late becomes l8, wait becomes w8.

Combinations of the above can short a single or multiple words: your and you're become ur, wonderful becomes 1drfl, someone becomes sum1, no one becomes no1, any one become any1 or ne1,see you becomes cu or cya, for you becomes 4u, easy becomes ez, enjoy becomes njoy, adieu becomes +u.

Source:

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS_language#General_effects_on_society

By: Sandra Barranco Aguilar

 

Dialects. Midland Area.

Some Dialectologists (for instance, Hans Kurath) have differentiated three different regions, in which it’s spoken different dialects: Northern, The Midland and Southern, although there are some of them who distinguish just two different regions, northern and southern.

First of all, I’m going to define the concept of dialect: A dialect is a variety of a language that is distinguished from other varieties of the same language by features of phonology, grammar, and vocabulary, and by its use by a group of speakers who are set off from others geographically or socially.

In this entry, I’ll focus on the Midland area, which corresponds to Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Connecticut.

So few scholars have addressed the question whether the Midland dialect actually exists. Midland dialects does, in facts, exist. The scholars Primer(1890) and Hempl (1896) appear to have been the first to use Midland as a label for a dialect or for a dialectal area in the United States. A Midland which separates the North from the South.

As I mentioned above, Hans Kurath has widely contributed in this investigation. Kurath divided this region into two discrete subdivisions: the "North Midland" area, and the "South Midland".

The Midland does not show the homogenous character that marks the North and The south.

Some general dialectal features of American Midlands are the following:

Midland speech is firmly rhotic.

In South Midland, A ‘’TH’’ at the end of words or syllables is sometimes pronounced ‘’F’’, and the word ‘’ARE’’ is often left out of sentences as in Black English. An ‘’A’’ is usually placed at the beginning of verb that ends with ‘’ING’’, and the ‘’G’’ is dropped; an ‘’O’’ at the end of a word becomes ‘’ER’’.  ‘’T’’ is frequently added to words that end with an ‘’S’’ sound. 

Some words are: bodacious, heap, right smart (large amount), set a spell, and smidgen. 

A well-known phonological difference between the Midland and the North is that the word on contains the phoneme /ɔ/ (as in caught) rather than /ɑ/ (as in part). In some areas, words like "roof" and "root" (which in many other dialects have the GOOSE vowel /u/) are pronounced with the FOOT vowel /ʊ/.

A common grammatical feature of the greater Midland area is so-called "positive anymore": It is possible to use the adverb anymore with the meaning "nowadays" in sentences without negative polarity, such as ‘’Air travel is inconvenient anymore’’.

Many speakers use the construction need + past participle, as in the car needs washed, where speakers of other dialects would say needs to be washed or needs washing.

A peculiar dialect is the spoken in Pennsylvania, which is widely influenced by a dialect of German spoken in this country. We can see sentences like "Smear your sister with jam on a slice of bread" and "Throw your father out the window his hat." They also invented ‘’dunking’’ from the German "dunken" (which means to dip).

Here, I'll show you a video related to this:

In the following entries, I will talk about the Southern and Northern areas of United States.

I hope you have learned something with this.Sources: 


http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/dialect


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midland_American_English


http://robertspage.com/dialects.html


http://www.evolpub.com/Americandialects/AmDialMap.gif


Language Variation and Change in the American Midland : A New Look at ‘Heartland’ English
Murray, Thomas E. Simon, Beth Lee

By: Patricia Domínguez Anaya.

American English vs British English

The English language was inserted to the Americans by British colonization in the early 17th century and it propagate to many part of the word beacuse of the power of the British empire: Over the yearsm English spoken in the United States and in Britain, started diverging from each other in various aspects. This led to two dialects in the form of the American English and the British English.


Between American English and British English there are a lot of differences in spelling, vocabulary and phonology but there are also in certain grammatical cases.


As we all know American English is the form used in the United States and British English is the form used in the United Kingdom, both are included all English dialects of their respective zones.
American and British English diverged from a common predecessor and the evolution of each language is linked to social and cultural factors in each land, cultural exchange also has an impact on language.

British English uses the accent known as Received Pronunciation, or RP and also known as BBC English or Queen´s English, which has been considered as proper English “correct English” and comes from the cultured English spoken in South East England. British English is the English which taught in schools. And American English uses the accent known as Midland American English. In United States,the vocabulary and pronunciation are uniform due to the influence of mass communication and socio-geographic mobility.

Let's start with the differences, the three major differences between between American and British English are:


Pronunciation: differences in vowels and consonants, as well as stress and intonation.


Vocabulary: differences in nouns and verbs, especially phrasal verb usage.


Spelling: differences are generally found in prefix and suffix forms.
For these three sessions, I will inform in detail in the following post but now I inform about some differences in general.
For example, an important difference is the use of Present Perfect: the concept of the use of this tense is the same but there are some shades:

- British English: “I have eaten a pizza”

- American English: “I eaten a pizza” (In American English this phrase is also possible, but in British English would be considered incorrect)
Others differences:

- American English generally prefers the singular for collective nouns and British English is backwards. Ex: AmE: “ the parliament is...” and BrE “ the parliament are...”

- “Get” verb: The past participle of the verb “get” is “gotten” in American English and in British English is “got”.

- Possession: to express possession in English we use “Have” or “Have got”. Both forms are correct but the British use “Have got” and the American use “Have”.- Prepositions: some prepositions are also different, for example:

AmE - on the weekend BrE - at the weekend
AmE - on a team BrE - in a team

I hope you have found interesting this introduction, To be continued...!


Sources: "The English Language", David Cristal.
http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/British_and_American_English and

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_American_and_British_English

By: María Durán Martínez.

African American Vernacular English

By the term African American Vernacular English (AAVE), we mean the dialect spoken by those people of black American ethnic group from the United States. Before we talk about the African American Vernacular English, we must know who are the African American for a better understanding in the development of African American Vernacular English.

 Background

      African American are citizens from the United State of America who had a partial or total ancestry from any of the native populations of Sub- Saharan Africa. Most African American people are descendents from African who were taken to English colonies as slaves to work in the New World.

    Originally, African American  were settled in the South  (from Texas in the West to the Carolinas in the East), where they provided a labour force for the plantaions of the whites in this region.

With the arrival of the industry in the United States, there were a migration from the south to the north producing a notable increase of African Americancs who were settling in the north and north east, industrial centres.

African Americans suffered decades of slavery, inequality and injustice. These circumstances were changed by Reconstruction, development of the black community, participation in the great military conflicts of the United States, racial segregation, and the Civil Rights Movement.

Let's go to start

We can use different terms to refer to the African American Vernacular English. For example African American Language, African American English, Black English, Black Vernacular, Black English Vernacular (BEV) and Ebonic.

 There are two main views on the origin of African American English:

1) Creole Hypothesis: According to linguistic Derek Bickerton, it's considered that creole languages develop when language learners do not have sufficient contact with native speakers of Standar American English. These people are forced to create a language based on their native languages in combination with language that they don't know. 

2) Dialect Hypothesis: According to Cleanth Brooks '' The slaves  learned their own new language

by ear and oral tradition and thus preserved what they had heard.

To be more clear, in the first theory the African Americans  develop their own language, in other words, a pidgin language which consists of using English and some West African vocabulary and it is applied  to the grammar rules of their native tongue. And in the second one, the African Americans develop the language with an exclusion of African influence.

Source: 

http://www.uni-due.de/SVE/VARS_AfricanAmericanEnglish.htm

http://dooku.miun.se/engelska/englishB/languageprof/Student%20work/VT07/First%20final%20drafts/Toini%20Rydgren.htm

http://www.pbs.org/speak/seatosea/americanvarieties/AAVE/creole/

By Sandra Romero Ferrández

Colloquial English

         During our entire academic life, we all are taught standard English. This is okay if we want people to understand us but we don't really get, in schools, the English people use in their daily life. This post is dedicated to the English teachers don't teach us and, probably, the most spoken in an English society. 

         How can we get these sayings and expressions? From my humble opinion, the best way to get them is to enjoy a society where the language stablished is English. This blog is about American English and so will be the examples I will post here. I got them from an linguistic ex-change I met at the university so I think they will work.

        A good example of this colloquial American English is "duh". Americans use it all the time and it is like saying "yeah" or "of course". for example, imagine someone asks you "-Wanna hang out tonite?". If it is obvious that you do want to, you would just say "-Duh!".

      They also say "the bun is in the oven". A bun is a type of bread and it is a methaphoric way to say that a woman is pregnant. There are another ways to say it like "She is knocked up" and "she is expecting".

     Also, there are expressions that are used specially by young people. for example, they say " What's up?" and "What's new?" just to say "how are you?". It is very popular and it is used a lot in the street with friends, relatives or, as I said before, young people. This gruop of society, also say "he/she is wasted" or "he/she is trasked" to mean that someone is drunk.

   

     There are more sayings and colloqial terms I will post soon. I hope you liked it.

By: Francisco Manuel Alfonso Sámchez.