Well, I'm sure it's vastly different wherever you are, but what we called Spanglish mostly as a joke where I lived was nothing to do with a dialect. "Teenagespeak" which we also called "Valleyspeak" after the San Fernando Valley, only involved inserting "like" and "totally" and choice bits of slang every three words because they were talking faster than they were thinking of new words, and didn't have a huge vocabulary in any case. I think I lost brain cells just by listening to it.
Mezzie, that's a pretty interesting survey, but I didn't see any qualifications about the nature of a dialect. I don't disagree that language varies from place to place, but classifying every variation as a dialect would lead to overkill. Doubtless there's many more potential "dialects" that they overlooked as well.
The below quote is kind of buried in the middle of the giant block of text contained in the link. Sorry it was so awkward to navigate!
Quote:This chapter is designed to draw the boundaries of those geographic areas on a principled basis. It seems clear that a candidate feature for dividing an area into dialect regions should be geographically continuous and uniform. Ideally, (a) every community within a continuous region would be marked by such a feature, and (b) none of the speech communities outside the region would be marked by this feature. However, criterion (a) is not likely to apply to linguistic changes in progress. A speech community engaged in a new change in progress must include some conservative, older speakers who were not affected by the change when they were growing up. The traditional definition of an isogloss as the outer limit of a regional feature is consistent with the emphasis on criterion (b).
One can distinguish four other criteria for candidate regional markers. (c) They should based on variables that occur frequently, so that they can be easily identified and confirmed by repeated sampling. (d) For the same reason, qualitative criteria without numerical constants are preferred, which will not depend on particular methods of measurement or normalization. The ideal criterion should also (e) display a convex shape, indicating that the feature is expanding from an originating center or still preserves evidence of such earlier expansion. For an understanding of linguistic change, (f) features should be systemic, rather than isolated, reflecting relations among two or more elements of the phonological system. To sum up, the preferred features for dialect classification are (a) consistent, (b) exclusive, (c) high frequency, (d) qualitative, (e) convex in distribution, and (f) systemic.
The authors of the survey examined several specific features of English phonology, which they go on to describe later in the chapter. The above is just a brief outline; the details of what (a)-(f) mean statistically are elaborated upon later.
It sounds from that like they're more interested in the politics of it than the linguistics of it.
Wow, how'd you get that from the quote I gave?
They're talking exclusively about linguistic features, or markers (such as the pronunciation of a particular vowel), and what sorts of data they require to set geographic dialect boundaries... don't see anything political in there at all...
Well, but they're talking about defining the areas in which the dialect is spoken, not the specific linguistic differences that would make it a dialect. They have something vague about a variables that occur frequently, and something else about having more people that speak it, but again that's just related to location. I can understand why they're interested in location for this project, but they don't really talk a lot about what makes a dialect a dialect, wherever it's spoken.
And, for that matter, why assemble any group of characteristics and call it a dialect anyway? You could take their maps and chart each characteristic individually, and have a whole lot of circles that probably overlap each other in different ways - I know I saw some dots that weren't the same colors as the circles around them - you'd probably get a more accurate locational picture that way anyway.
Ah, I see your line of thinking...
I suppose from the quote alone, what you said makes sense, but if you continue reading and take a look at the specific linguistic variables they used to divide groups of speakers from each other based on linguistic grounds, their aims would be clearer.
why assemble any group of characteristics and call it a dialect anyway?
Well, how would you do it? Isn't that what the notion of dialect means to you? If you hear a speaker of English from a different part of the country and they "sound funny", why do you think that is? More often than not (unless they have had some kind of brain trauma causing linguistic impairment), it's because there are specific salient features of their speech which differ from yours. And usually those include pronunciation of certain vowels in certain phonological contexts (like whether they pronounce "cot" and "caught" the same, which of course extends to all other words containing those vowels), whether they use a particular grammatical structure or not (such as "this coffee needs warmed up" (like in Southern Ohio) versus "this coffee needs to be warmed up", use of particular vocabulary items (this is the weakest criteria; the research I linked to uses phonological data almost exclusively to divide up the dialect regions).
In summary, if you don't accept the premise of the study to begin with - that is, identify regional variation of English across the continent and try to determine geographic boundaries dividing up dialects consistently defined on phonological and statistical evidence - then that's fine, I suppose. But that makes it difficult to continue with discussions like this one unless you have alternative suggestions for how to do this.
You seem curious about the issue and the questions you ask are fantastic ones - "why assemble any group of characteristics and call it a dialect anyway?". That is precisely what the sociolinguistic literature covers and tries to answer. The survey I linked to is the culmination of decades of field work and research about what makes dialects, and what a useful and formal definition of "dialect" is.
In my opinion, that's really the key. We can use the word "dialect" all we want, but without having a clear idea of what that really is quantifiably it doesn't really have any meaning.
Finally,
"You could take their maps and chart each characteristic individually, and have a whole lot of circles that probably overlap each other in different ways - I know I saw some dots that weren't the same colors as the circles around them - you'd probably get a more accurate locational picture that way anyway."
That is an excellent point. In fact, the chapter I linked to talks about that precise issue in the first several paragraphs. Specifically the issue of "isogloss" which is an area in which a particular vocabulary item is used exclusively (the "old" way of dividing up dialects). It was found that indeed, there was always tons of overlap and the resulting map ended up looking as you described it.
That's why the researchers started looking for other features of the language to define "dialect", which they describe throughout the chapter. And the results are much more clearly delineated. It's really pretty exciting, I think!
In case you think the research I linked to is just a random survey done at a random school, Bill Labov is the leading sociolinguist in the world, and has been for decades. He's respected throughout the field, quoted extensively, and his ideas are all backed by sound statistical analyses and huge amounts of data. He's one of the few linguists who doesn't trust his own judgements about language, and always goes to the field to test his hypotheses.
Drom, awesome translation.
I wonder how similar a fluent speaker of Teenagespeak's translation would have been...
Ahh, I see... it's vastly different in England, I know, I haven't really been there for very much time, but I've heard that the differences over there are vastly more different from each other than in the US. Apparently Cockney is the most similar one...
But anyway, on the study:
"But that makes it difficult to continue with discussions like this one unless you have alternative suggestions for how to do this."
I was thinking along these lines:
"You could take their maps and chart each characteristic individually, and have a whole lot of circles that probably overlap each other in different ways - I know I saw some dots that weren't the same colors as the circles around them - you'd probably get a more accurate locational picture that way anyway."
If that's the "old" way, why'd they stop? I think you could learn a lot more about the differences that way, especially about how they spread or diffused into different areas, and there's so much more data there ro look at than just grouping a whole series of changes together and calling it "southern shift" or colloquially, southern drawl. You can consider more or data or less, I don't think it matters, but the worst thing you can do is probably to arbitrarily group the data into nice neat little containers, because it doesn't fit there. This just causes people to start saying stuff like "It's soda, you freaking morons! Go back to Norway!" and that doesn't give a good name for the science either....
The first anthropology book I ever read was a University textbook from a local used bookstore, The Golden Bough.... I know Frasier is outdated and everyone hates him because he was a evolutionist, but I thought it was awesome how he just took all the instances of one specific part of one specific myth and linked them all together rather than bundling up all the myths as relics in and of themselves, to be admired and not studied componentially. I collected faerie books and King Arthur renditions, and I thought it was pretty cool how different parts of the story were left out or changed depending on the author's place of origin - French authors spelled everyone's name differently, focused on Lancelot, portrayed Uther and the witches as bad people - from Welsh authors, the names were spelt with Welsh combinations, and Uther and the witches were good guys and it was for the most part the fault of the christians who were trying to "save" the pagans... and so on. And it would be so cool to shade in little areas on the map and say, "here they say that Elaine was raped..." and so on. That would be fascinating.
