Do you speak differently than you write?

>>In America, at least, I think it's safe to say the opposite occurs -- most people speak a bland standard variety of English, and obvious dialects are restricted to certain segments of the population. The British can claim to have a lot more variety than we do, though. We tend to be more homogenized than they are.<<

The matter is that most English dialects in the US outside the Northeast and the South are effectively descended from what could be called pre-General American, and most English dialects in Canada outside Newfoundland are descended from a dialect not far from such, and in many other areas in the US today such as the Northeast, South, and Texas GA has impinged upon the dialects traditionally spoken there. Yet at the same time, the dialects descended from said pre-GA themselves are diverging rather than leveling, but the rate of such varies greatly, with dialects in the Upper Midwest and Inland North seemingly having by far the greatest rate of divergence from such (but note that Upper Midwestern dialects in particular have substantial amounts of substratum influence from outside English), while dialects in other areas like the Lower Midwest and West, especially away from the West Coast, seemingly having far lower rates of divergence.

I am generally more informal and casual in my speech than I am in my writing - I would think that this is the case with everyone no matter what language they are using, don't you agree?

We tend to be more "natural" in ordinary speech, but even there the way we speak does vary depending on our circumstances at the time....where we are and the people we are with....for instance, the way we converse with friends is often very different from the way we speak in a much more formal environment. We'd never speak to a business contact, for example, the way we would to our friends/mates, would we?

The same applies in our writing....a letter to a mate/boy friend/girlfriend/illicit bit on the side or to our dear old to our granny in Perth would be very different from one sent to the bank manager or lawyer or your MP, or whatever.

Dialectical divergence, Travis? In the bulk of America? Maybe we're using a different definition here. When I think "dialect" I think about my cousins in Louisiana saying "I'm fixin' to" for "I'm about to", and other utterances that really take on different and distinctive word choices that deviate from the norm and are specific to a given group of people. AAVE is another good example. But the majority of people I've met speak the same standard dialect whether they come from New York or Arizona or Idaho. Accent may change slightly, but vocabulary and grammar do not.

>>Dialectical divergence, Travis? In the bulk of America? Maybe we're using a different definition here. When I think "dialect" I think about my cousins in Louisiana saying "I'm fixin' to" for "I'm about to", and other utterances that really take on different and distinctive word choices that deviate from the norm and are specific to a given group of people. AAVE is another good example. But the majority of people I've met speak the same standard dialect whether they come from New York or Arizona or Idaho. Accent may change slightly, but vocabulary and grammar do not.<<

Consider the phonologies of Californian English vis-a-vis English in the Lower Midwest and Upper Midwest - that represents a time distance of approximately 60 years, as California was largely resettled immediately after WW2 by internal immigrants from the Midwest, and the English dialects originally spoken there are largely extinct. Yet there are quite a few significant phonological innovations present in Californian English relative to conservative General American and both dialects in the Low Midwest and the Upper Midwest.

No native speakers speak like Standard Written English, you look like a pretentious jerk of you do.

Swiss people (Speakers of German) and Brazilians write and speak in such a different way, they use one language for writing and one for speaking. It's called diglossia (which is different from bilinguilism as in Catalonia)...

Uriel Sat Sep 12, 2009 7:51 pm GMT:

<< <<Yes, in Germany, the standard language isn't considered a dialect. It is above all the dialects. But even if you claim to speak Hochdeutsch, as I do, you most likely have a ''dialectal colouring''. That's because you were raised in a certain part of Germany where -- besides the standard language -- a certain dialect is spoken -- or where the others already speak with that certain colouring, but not speaking the real dialect. >>

In America, at least, I think it's safe to say the opposite occurs -- most people speak a bland standard variety of English, and obvious dialects are restricted to certain segments of the population. The British can claim to have a lot more variety than we do, though. We tend to be more homogenized than they are. >>

Maybe you've got me wrong, but I think it's all the same in Germany, too. Everyone understands Hochdeutsch. Most of us speak Hochdeutsch, even if they speak ''Platt'' at home. Here, ''Platt'' can mean a real dialect or somesthing non-standard in between a real dialect and the standard language. But, how many people still speak a real dialect? To my mind, so maybe it's wrong, dialects are closely tied to the region they are spoken in and to the traditional way of life and agriculture. But who nowadays still lives -- or is able to live -- such a way of life or is engaged in agriculture as it was performed decades before?

@ Damian London SW15

I totally agree with your post form Sun Sep 13, 2009 11:11 am GMT.

And because it's the way you described it there, it is hardly possible to divide a language like English or German in a formal and a informal register so that you can just learn that two registers and that's it. (That's for Xie!) Yes, there are languages with grammaticalized formal register, but even there there will be a continuum between informality and formality, I guess.

<<When I think "dialect" I think about my cousins in Louisiana saying "I'm fixin' to" for "I'm about to", and other utterances that really take on different and distinctive word choices that deviate from the norm and are specific to a given group of people.>>

But '' fixin' '' and ''about'' are both ordinary English words, they're just used differently. In Germany, I someone form the cost of the north sea and someone form the Alps would meet and only speaking their respective dialects -- if they would still speak dialect at all --, they wouldn't understand each other.

Therefore, I think it's necessary to maintain a standard form of a language above all the dialects.

>>And because it's the way you described it there, it is hardly possible to divide a language like English or German in a formal and a informal register so that you can just learn that two registers and that's it. (That's for Xie!)<<

I don't make this distinction only to say that I'm going to learn two different things in the same language, which are sort of blended all the time in reality. I don't mention it for the sake of it.

The fact is, I've been learning English formally since I was three, but obviously I just can't perform in a single way like an average American guy of my age. I met one, a few years my senior, and he's certainly very proficient in his own language. I couldn't do the same, not a single bit. And those years are wasted on ineffective education and so on. As some of my aunties who emigrated to Australia/the US can testify, the English they learned back home is just different from the real English they met there. You can go on for a few years without even knowing the real culture behind English, since you just aren't there abroad.

In fact, if I hadn't put it clearly...

I do make a distinction between natives who attend their own universities, and foreigners who attend the same universities, like if they've just learned English for 2-4 years and then move abroad to study for a degree. I met a few of such in Germany, and quite a few in Hong Kong (which uses English though). All of them don't speak the language, which is designed as official at that university (German and English respectively), and all of them have a lot of problems with the same language. They know academic language far more than language in the street.

Everybody studies using English in Hong Kong, and of course we always have problems with English. This is where many Hong Kong students can pass IELTS with an 8 or something and yet can't express fluently both in writing and speaking.

What's more, I did make the distinction between learning English LARGELY (if not only) for academic purposes and learning English just to master everything you like or to become a native.

For the former, most people only need to know the English they need for their subjects, NOT for watching TV, films, not for songs... many of them won't even stay abroad either after graduation.

For the latter, they aren't at all after academic goals, but just learning English until (if I can say) you can function perfectly as an adult abroad. Basically, a high school graduate would normally qualify as a native that we all foreign learners can imitate with years of work with English.

Most people are for the former, and most people won't at all try the latter, and few can do too.

To my mind, so maybe it's wrong, dialects are closely tied to the region they are spoken in and to the traditional way of life and agriculture. But who nowadays still lives -- or is able to live -- such a way of life or is engaged in agriculture as it was performed decades before?

...
Swiss people do (as well as Norwegians) so dialects are alive and kicking in these countries.

Really? I hardly believe that it is possible to be engaged in acriculture AS IT WAS PERFORMED DECADES ago.

>>Maybe you've got me wrong, but I think it's all the same in Germany, too. Everyone understands Hochdeutsch. Most of us speak Hochdeutsch, even if they speak ''Platt'' at home. Here, ''Platt'' can mean a real dialect or somesthing non-standard in between a real dialect and the standard language. But, how many people still speak a real dialect? To my mind, so maybe it's wrong, dialects are closely tied to the region they are spoken in and to the traditional way of life and agriculture. But who nowadays still lives -- or is able to live -- such a way of life or is engaged in agriculture as it was performed decades before?<<

In the case of here in North America, though, the overall land area is so great that even with the degree of mobility present today, one can still end up with populations that are still effectively fixed and isolated relative to the overall English-speaking area here. For instance, here in Wisconsin much of the rest of the US is quite away far by our standards, with the only areas of any real consequence that are anywhere near us being the Chicago and Twin Cities areas. A large portion of the population has never lived outside the state, and I would not be surprised one bit if many of those who have, aside from those from military families and like, have not lived further away than Illinois or Minnesota or have only lived elsewhere for the purposes of going to school. Likewise, most people who come here, from what I have seen, are from other parts of the Midwest, and particularly the Upper Midwest, or at least the Inland North, with few coming here from other parts of the US aside from former emigres from here in Wisconsin who have come back here. Hence with regard to actual real-world social contact there is actually quite a great deal of isolation here despite any increases in mobility over the last century or so.