Dead And Endangered Languages

Travis, thanks for your comments. I agree that the informal speech most people use on a daily basis tends to provide an impetus towards divergence. I also, wonder, however, how speakers of our respective varieties (English in Wisconsin and California is generally not so stigmatized) compare to speakers of more stigmatized varieties. I agree with your comment about informal speech and the lack of willingness to move towards "standard" speech, but I also think people may become perfectly proficient, even in informal speech, in what they perceive as a more prestigious variety of English. Sociological factors are concerned...I read a report once by a linguist describing his distinct East Texan accent (where he had grown up). He commented that overall he enjoyed the place where he grew up, while his sister, on the other hand, did not, and he tied that to the fact that she did not speak English with a noticeable accent from East Texas (even tho she had grown up in the same place as he had). She had linked the region/town's speech with the very character of the place and whether consciously or not had avoided its salient speech characteristics.

Similarly, my boss told me the other day that she was from Virginia--as far as I've ever heard, she may as well be from California. Work is a laid-back environment and she's almost always speaking in a very informal register, yet nothing particularly "Virginian" jumps out--not surprisingly she told me she has a very low opinion of Southern English and she claims that it only "comes out" in her speech when she's angry.

I myself definitely agree that it's tiring to continuously speak in another form but you and I may find it so especially because the linguistic confidence inherent in our respective speech communities lends itself to speakers who've never been told they speak "wrong" and need to change. When people truly believe they speak "accentless" English there's no incentive to modify their speech patterns.

Anyway, just for curiosity's sake I transcribed (with our friend XSAMPA of course) how I would say "do you have anything that you would not want me to take?" in the fastest, most informal speech. A few interesting contrasts with yours:

[d@jMævIniTeND@tSjMwU4n=wAm:i4@teIk]

Also, didn't know that about Milwaukee...I've always said [mI5wAki]. Guess that places me as a big outsider :) Also, I'm wondering how you say "Wisconsin"...I'm assuming the NCVS is pretty prevalent thruout the Milwaukee area...is it [wIska(:)nsIn] for you? When talking with people from the northern inland area I've often gotten chuckles for saying things like [wIskAnsIn] or [SIkAgoU].

The thing about the more prestigious varieties of English, is that formal "General American" seems to be associated with the literary language and significant formality than it is with "anywhere else" here. It's not "someone else's proper speech, as opposed to our own crappy dialect", but rather "if you use it you're setting yourself apart from everyone else here, and sound like you're reading out of a book or are a politician making a speech or like, or are just an elitist prick". I remember getting a whole lot of crap from other students in middle and high school for exactly sounding /too/ formal in much of my speech, even though since then I've really toned down the formality a /lot/ in my everyday speech, to the point of deliberately speaking in the dialect here normally (I was sort of rather arrogant and elitist for a while back when).

This stands in stark contrast to the examples that you, Kirk, provided, in that the local dialect is not something that is perceived as something to be avoided or hidden, and also its relationship with formal American English is not viewed in terms of correctness or properness, but rather in terms of formality, with formal American English being excessively formal, for most purposes. However, at the same time, it means that speech here is really not perceived in terms of "accent" (as, of course, only everyone else has an accent), as the variation between the local dialect and formal American English is not perceived really to be a matter of accent in the first place. People seem to be aware that we here do *to others* have some sort of accent (I remember my mom saying that southerners, for whatever reason, can often hear a specific /Wisconsin/ accent, from what she'd heard from some friends of hers who now live in North Carolina), but people here generally don't seem to view /themselves/ as having an accent. Rather, the only distinction with respect to speech here that people seem to tend to think of is a "high" versus "low" distinction; a distinction of formal, overly "correct" speech versus how people actually speak here.

Of course, the consequence of this all is that dialects that are deprecated by those who speak them are far more likely to move "towards the average" than those which are not only not deprecated by those who speak them, but which are not even perceived as being somehow "different" from some kind of "average" in the first place. This is accentuated the difference between people who intentionally try to adopt a more prestigious dialect and cases in which the local dialect is an agent of social cohesion and identity. While the former is likely to disperse and actively remove local dialect features that differ from various prestigious dialects' features, the latter is likely to act to not only preserve the local dialect, both from the potential of people adopting the forms of other dialects, and from other people bringing in their own dialect forms from outside, but also encourage local innovation of forms as well, as a way of differentiating local forms from outside forms. This is only reinforced by the active deprecation of formal speech forms, which acts to reduce any kind of tendency to move towards some kind of prestige form, while promoting differentiation from such prestige forms, which is the complete opposite of the influence of prestige forms on explicitly nonprestigious dialects, such as those that you mentioned.

I find it interesting that you do not nasalize your vowels when they are followed by nasal consonants *at all* in your version of the example that I used in my previous post. That's in stark contrast to speech here, where vowel nasalization seems to be more important in conveying the phoneme /n/ in many places than the actual articulation of [n] itself. Also, it seems like you tend to merge adjacent words together (via our good friend cliticization) and elide phonemes less, as well, as opposed to the dialect here, which seems to view word boundaries and syllable boundaries as superfluous, with respect to how what are /syntactically/ separate words are pronounced.

As for "Milwaukee", I myself say [mwOki] for "Milwaukee" ([mIwOki] if I'm being very deliberate in how I pronounce it, which I rarely do because I tend to almost strongly emphasize the initial [mw] cluster most of the time), [wIskA~nsI~n] for "Wisconsin", and [SIkOgo] for "Chicago". As for the NCVS, well, it does *not* seem particularly prevalent here, as a whole, despite what I've read about it being present in the Milwaukee area; well, it does not seem to really be present in my own speech, and I'm from the Milwaukee area, besides for /{/ often sounding not very different at all from /E/ at times.