What is the acrolect and basilect in your country?

**Most middle class people tend towards regional standard English. For example, I live in the North West where there are many people who do not have recognizable local accents but have more a more standardized accent. There are differences between this and RP as few people here use the "ah" sound of the South East ( and RP) in glass and bath, but stick to the original short vowel sounds**

I agree with this - speaking as a Scot though as we're discussing a situation that is practically confined to England. There IS a general standardised accent in England that can be found more or less all over down there and it IS related to middle class reasonably educated status.

Listen to any phone-in program on the national radio channels (a good example is BBC Radio Five Live - a middle class station that mixes serious/semi-serious current national/world affairs discussions and phone-ins with sport) and this standardised accent predominates. Many of the callers seem to have identical accents but they ring in from all parts of England. It's a sort of middle-of-the-road accent which is definitely English but without much in the way of regional speech patterns to give some indication as to which part of England they are located. All presenters tell you where they are calling from anyway.

That does not mean a fair number of callers don't have clearly defined accents because they do and you can tell from which part of England they're calling from without the presenters' introductions.

It's only when callers are from Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland that it's a different situation.

Different radio stations cater for distinct classes of listeners and this is reflected in the phone-ins they have. eg: TalkSport Radio which, as the name suggests, is very much sports based. Mornings (10:00 - 13:00) and late-nights (22:00 - 06:00) are devoted to phone-ins (some really wacky) and this is when accents like Estuary, Cockney, Scouse, Brummie, Glasgow/Ethnic etc come to the fore. So it's definitely a sort of "class/education level" based scenario.

I've never heard "beating a dead horse" used so it may well be American. It must mean wasting your time on a hopeless cause and my guess it comes from horse racing circles - a dead horse is unlikely to go much faster however hard you beat it.

<< I've never heard "beating a dead horse" used so it may well be American. It must mean wasting your time on a hopeless cause and my guess it comes from horse racing circles - a dead horse is unlikely to go much faster however hard you beat it. >>

Interesting...it probably is just American.

<<I really like this saying... is it sa typical American one or is it known throughout the English world?

'would just be beating a dead horse'>>

<<I've never heard "beating a dead horse" used so it may well be American. It must mean wasting your time on a hopeless cause and my guess it comes from horse racing circles - a dead horse is unlikely to go much faster however hard you beat it.>>

Yeah, it does convey the meaning pretty well, I think.

<<Interesting...it probably is just American.>>

Could be. I'm not aware of the phrase's origins or where else it's used in the English-speaking world--it was just the first thing that came to mind while I was typing that response.

According to wikipedia:

<< In American English, "beating a dead horse" is an idiom which is most often used as a retort used to make clear that a particular request or line of conversation is already foreclosed, mooted, or otherwise resolved. In Australian English and British English, the phrase is more usually rendered as "flogging a dead horse".

The linguistic roots of this phrase draw on an allusion to literally "whipping" or "beating" a deceased horse in order to make it get up and go. Such efforts, of course, would be utterly fruitless, as dead horses no longer move under their own power.

Likewise, when one is "beating a dead horse", one is flailing at a dead or useless idea.

This term is different from "shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted" which refers to not taking action until after a problem has already occurred. Rather, "beating a dead horse" is about the futility of one's complaints or actions.

When one "shuts the stable door after the horse has bolted" it does not return the bolted horse, but it does keep other horses from escaping the same way. However, when one is "beating a dead horse", no amount of action or argument is going to change the facts or the situation. >>

Damian,

I wouldn't say that the regional standard english accents are restricted to England. I know many Scots who speak standard English with regional overtones- at least that's how I would describe it. If you think, for example, how Sean Connery sounds in the Bond films.........Standard English with a splash of South East Scottish- shaken not stirred!!

" I've never heard "beating a dead horse" used so it may well be American"

I've heard of it, trying to get something work when it obviously can't. I don't think the "proverb" is restricted to the US.

Here in Brazil,

1.
acrolect (''prestigeous form'') exists only in its written form, used only in formal, written contexts, but almost never in the spoken form (unless you are reading a formal text or a law aloud). it is 19th century Continental Portuguese with Brazilian vocabulary and spelling (but the grammar structure is that of Continental Portuguese). this is the official language, but mostly a written code only, never used in speech. It's called official language of Brazil or simply PORTUGUESE

2. mesolect (wide accepted in speech, from informal to formal, and in informal and semiformal writing). It is the language middle class (and upper class) Brazilians use when they speak. There is certain ''geographic'' preference for accents of Brazilian Southeast (Brasília, Vitória, Belo Horizonte, São Paulo, Rio). it is a language used in Brazilian soap operas, sitcoms, movies; the language you encounter in the lyrics of Brazilian songs (from Maria Monte to Caetano Veloso) as well as in dialogs of modern Brasilian prose. This language is called BRAZILIAN PORTUGUESE, by linguists

3. basolect (used by rural population of Brazil and lower classes). It's a simplified and creolized form of mesolect, and it is called BRAZILIAN VERNACULAR, by linguists.

When acrolect is not used by any speaker of one country in its spoken form, and it is only learned in school as if it were a foreign language; we have a situation called DIGLOSSIA: German language in Switzerland and Portuguese language in Brazil are diglossic languages. There are no native speakers of (acrolect that is) standard language in these countries, so there you have a big difference between spoken (''native''?) language,and written (''imported'') language. Why is that German in Switzerland and Portuguese in Brazil are diglossic and German in Germany or Portuguese in Portugal are not? Well, you can find people in Germany who have ACROLECT as their native tongue (people from Hannover and Hamburg at least), they don't have to ''learn'' it at school. The same is true of some people in Portugal (LIsbon and Coimbra people have acrolect as their mother tongue), France (Paris), Italy (Florence) and so on.

You cannot say Swiss people speak lousy German or Brazilians speak lousy Portuguese. Both Swiss and Brazilians speak local vernacular and they are proud of it. It is their mother tongue, and it is understood throughout the country. Acrolect is kept as ''the official language'', used in formal writing only, because of tradition.

Here in Greece, the Athenian accent is the most favoured and the Cretan accent is probably the most disfavoured.

I'm quite familiar with the term flogging (beating) a dead horse- my Mum says it all the time. I'm pretty sure the "flogging" alternative is also used in the US.

**Standard English with a splash of South East Scottish- shaken not stirred!! **

Hee hee.....nice one RICK...I like it.

I understand what you say about Standard English - Scottish style. You're right up to a point....maybe the people concerned are those Scots who have "emigrated" to England :-) ...or elsewhere. The true home grown Scottish accent gets a wee bit diluted once they've been away from home for a long time.

I read an article (or heard it somewhere...not sure offhand which now) about Sean Connery (who HAS been away from Scotland a long long time and his diluted accent reflects that). However, every time he comes home he miraculously takes on a stronger Lothians accent again and you'd think he'd never been further than Dunbar in his life and even then only on a day trip to the seaside.

Tatyanne, to be a bit of a pedant, the situation linguistically in Germany is somewhat more complex. For starters, the historically native language of the north of Germany is not German, but rather Low Saxon, besides in a few limited areas where East Frisian or North Frisian were/are spoken, and some areas in eastern northern Germany where Upper and Lower Sorbian are spoken and where Polabian was once spoken. At about the start of the 1800s, Low Saxon existed in a diglossic relationship with German in northern Germany. However, since then, Low Saxon has not only been increasingly replaced by German, but also many aspects of the Low Saxon that is spoken by people have been germanized, ranging from vocabulary (many native Low Saxon words have been replaced by Low Saxon-ized German words) to grammar (such as many people forming the imperative in a German-type fashion rather than a Low Saxon-type fashion, and the changing of the formal second person singular nominative from "ji" (German "ihr", Early Modern English "ye") to "se" (German "Sie")). Often, individuals basically end up speaking a very heavily germanized Low Saxon, with effectively simply Low Saxon-ized German words being spoken within a primarily Low Saxon grammatical framework. This kind of thing is why Low Saxon is heavily threatened, as while Low Saxon has a quite large speaker population on paper (probably a larger one on paper than even West Frisian), at the same time its very often being impoverished native vocabulary-wise, and furthermore often people do not necessarily fully learn its grammar or confuse its grammar with that of German, as shown by people often not forming imperatives by German rather than Low Saxon rules in places.

I myself know less about the dialect situation in the south, but from what I have at least heard, Allemanic and Austro-Bavarian dialects are doing far better, overall, than Low Saxon is. Note that while these can at least be categorized as High German, unlike Low Saxon, which is separate altogether from such and which has more in common with Dutch than with such, the crossintelligibility of many Allemanic (including Swiss German) and Austro-Bavarian dialects, especially the more "upper" ones, with standard Hochdeutsch can often range from quite limited to none at all; the reason why such are really called "German" is simply that they are all "high", and also share the same standard language with all other High German dialects, even if they themselves may not be very understandable by the speakers of many other German dialects. And of course, these Allemanic and Austro-Bavarian dialects exist in a diglossic relationship overall with standard Hochdeutsch, even though the standard Hochdeutsch used in some areas, such as Austria or Switzerland, may vary from that generally heard in Germany. On a more personal level, with respect to Austro-Bavarian dialects, I remember this one German foreign exchange student at my high school who said that for her, the "German" spoken in many rural areas of Bavaria might as well have been a foreign language for all practical purposes; hence, Austro-Bavarian dialects (and not just Allemanic dialects) may very well vary sufficiently in many cases from Middle German dialects, standard Hochdeutsch included, to be called a separate language as a group, were it not for the use of a single common acrolect.

Well, Rick, I have to admit that when I hear the word "flogging" it usually means something dirty...

That's the first time I've heard that, myself. To me, the word "flogging" is more associated with whipping someone with a frayed rope or bundle of ropes, not anything, well, you know. And anyways, certain primates that shall remain unnamed are spanked, not flogged.

Travis, I have heard that Sachsen is the most heavy stigmatized accent in Germany and that the Hochdeutsch accent is propabaly the most prestige. Would you say this is true?

Sven, when you make reference to "Sachsen", do you refer to the High German dialect of present-day Saxony, or to the native Low Saxon dialects which are spoken in *Nieder*sachsen? And when you say "Hochdeutsch", do you mean specifically *standard* Hochdeutsch, as the term "Hochdeutsch" itself encompasseses everything from standard Hochdeutsch to Rhenisch Franconian dialects, to Allemanic dialects, to Austro-Bavarian dialects, which really are a *very* large range of dialects, to the point that there is not crossintelligibility necessarily between any given two dialects within said range?