#dialect

[amanufacturedheaven]

Rare Language Learning: Polari

If you have ever used the words:

- Naff

- Butch

- Camp

You have unknowingly been speaking the sociolect known as Polari, the language of queer people primarily used in the 30s to the 70s. Polari is now an endangered language, as labelled by the University of Cambridge

Something of note: Many resources out there imply (or state) that Polari was a language invented and used solely by white cis gay men, which is decidedly untrue. Many words of Polari come from drag culture, lesbians, and the Romani people and their language. The use of ‘the language of British gay men’ may be a more palatable title to the general public, but it is not to me. I did my best to curate a variety of resources, but unfortunately much of queer history has been lost many more decades than I’ve been alive, if you have any other resources for studying Polari I would love to read them, message me or leave a link in the replies.

Articles

Learn Polari, the Secret Language of the Gays ⚢ Out Magazine

Polari: The code language gay men used to survive ⚢ BBC

Polari and the Hidden History of Gay Seafarers ⚢ National Museums Liverpool

The Story of Polari, Britain’s Secret Gay Language ⚢ Fabulosa!

Polari People ⚢ Fabulosa!

Polari: a language born from prejudice ⚢ Englishpanish

The secretive gay language that gave LGBTQ people a voice ⚢ GAYTIMES

A brief history of Polari: the curious after-life of the dead language for gay men ⚢ The Conversation

Study Material

The Polari Bible ⚢ Internet Archive

Fantabulosa: A Dictionary of Polari and Gay Slang ⚢ Internet Archive

Sociolinguistics / Polari ⚢ StudySmarter

FlashCards ⚢ Quizlet

New Polari Translator ⚢ LingoJam

Polari: A sociohistorical study of the life and decline of a secret language. ⚢ Dissertation, University of Manchester

Polari: a language born from prejudice ⚢ Englishpanish

Simon Bowkett: a short blog in Polari for LGBT+ History Month ⚢ Civil Service LGBT+ Network

[thelingodingo]

Inarizaki's Kansai Dialect

Japanese Dialects are split into Eastern and Western, with the Standard Japanese dialect being Eastern (Kanto region) and Kansai region dialect being Western (eg. cities of Osaka and Kyoto, and of course Hyogo prefecture- where Inarizaki is from). The pitch, tone, and stressing of the sounds is different from standard Tokyo Japanese so you should be able to hear the difference in how the Inarizaki members speak even if you don't know any Japanese.

just in case yall didn't know, Suna is the only member on the team that does not use Kansai dialect as he was scouted from Aichi prefecture, so he basically just speaks in the standard dialect

Some linguistics of the dialect that may or may not be heard in the show:

"ya" ending vs the standard "da" ending.

Kore kirai ya. vs Kore kirai da. (I hate this.)

the use of the "h" sound instead of "s"

Han vs standard san (honorific suffix, not really used anymore)

Negation suffix "-hen" instead of the standard "-nai".

Taichou kanri dekitehen koto, homen na. vs Taichou kanri dekitenai koto, homen na. (Don't compliment him when he's obviously not taking care of himself.)

verb "oru" vs the standard "iru".

Dareka ga mitoru yo, Shin-chan. vs Dareka ga miteiru yo, Shin-chan. (Someone's always watching, Shin-chan.)

verb "temau" vs standard "teshimau"

Naitemau yaro! vs Naiteshimau darou! (You're gonna make me cry!)

Negation "suru" verb becomes "sen" instead of "shinai".

Ki ni sen dee. vs Ki ni shinai yo. (Don't worry about it.)

Some words that are different in Kansai dialect:

Honto becomes Honma (really)

Sodane becomes Seyade (thats right)

Nande becomes Nandeyanen (why)

Totemo becomes Meccha (very)

ii becomes ee (good)

"aho" means stupid in Japanese, but apparently in the Kansai dialect calling someone an "aho" is actually a compliment?! (even though it has the same definition)

Overall, I could watch the Karasuno vs Inarizaki episodes a hundred times just to listen to Inarizaki's dialect and how different it sounds to the rest of the characters in the entire show.

Although Karasuno speaks in the standard dialect (which isn't very strange since Miyagi is a suburb close enough to the Kanto region), theres a few lines here and there where one of them says something using the Tohoku dialect (the dialect that would be used often in the rest of Tohoku, such as Aomori).

(I especially like Kita's voice, thank you Nojima Kenji.)

[heywriters]

Just when you think you understand a language, slangs and idioms come at you from behind. In English, my first language, there are phrases that can confuse me in a busy conversation.

"We're cooking!" and "We're cooked" have opposite meanings.

"That's cool" and "That's hot" mean similar things.

"Fired up" and "Got fired" have wildly different meanings, and so do "Knocked out" and "Knocked up."

And if you move slightly to the left in any country/continent, they use different terms and idioms! How does one keep track?! Especially when new to a language?

[marte-14]

Doodle made based on my fic Labrynian.

Context: Legend is bilingual and sometimes he speaks in Labrynian, Wind picks up on this and want to know more, so he learns the language as well.

Labrynian is based on a dialect from Italy, Genoese

What Legend says to Wars: "Cap. You are a dickhead/idiot"

[monsterfactoryfanfic]

My latest essay is on "Dialect," by Kathryn Hymes and Hakan Seyalıoğlu! I compare the game's inevitable language death to Arkady Martine's "A Memory Called Empire," and discuss how both texts are interested in the ways hegemonic culture consumes everything, even without violence.

Transcript here.

[ebenelephant]

i know we all like to have a little haha at gambit's expense, but i really do appreciate how thoroughly cajun he was allowed to be accent-wise. dialects and even foreign accents are watered down in hollywood for the sake of being understandable to US audiences – à la foreign characters speaking english to each other so they don't need subtitles – but remy gets to really lean into it! some of those quick, murmury sections that you and wade didn't understand? he's speaking fucking french! that's great! and yes, wade is making semi-meta jokes at his expense, but a baby step is a step tbh

[hecticelectron]

Have you played Dialect before? Isn’t it awesome? How does a game about language (and how it dies) bring out such intense feelings?

I think it’s the “how it dies” part.

I wrote a little thing about it over at the Everlasting, Neverending Game Night:

[ahedderick]

Bless your heart. No - really

It seems to be understood, at least through the southern US, that "bless his/her/your heart" is a thinly veiled insult. However, when I was growing up, technically southern, my mother always used it more literally. F'rinstance, if I took her flowers she might say "Oh, bless your heart" and would 100% mean it. Based on that example, I use it the same way. I've wondered a little about that, since I realized how other people mean it.

Anyhow. I posted a scan of a letter from my great grandmother (daughter of Irish immigrants on both sides) to my grandmother dated 1944. At the end of that she refers to a Valentine's card that my very young mother had sent to her, and added "Bless her heart." Clearly meaning it sincerely. It made me wonder if the southern Bless-your-heart met up with the Irish diaspora tendency to use the term 'Bless' frequently and literally and created a little coal-mining-town pocket of folks who say it when they're truly delighted with someone or something.

Just pondering. Anyone else out there use B-y-h in a positive, loving way? Is Bless-your-heart George's Creek* an outlier that should not be counted?

'* George's Creek follows a major Appalachian coal seam and has lots of tiny, defunct mining towns.

[noosphe-re]

An isogloss, also called a heterogloss, is the geographic boundary of a certain linguistic feature, such as the pronunciation of a vowel, the meaning of a word, or the use of some morphological or syntactic feature. Isoglosses are a subject of study in dialectology, in which they demarcate the differences between regional dialects of a language; in areal linguistics, in which they represent the extent of borrowing of features between languages in contact with one another; and in the wave model of historical linguistics, in which they indicate the similarities and differences between members of a language family.

Wikipedia

[linguisticdiscovery]

🌞 Good morning to everybody except ppl who think they don’t speak with an accent 🗣️

[polldermodel]

Limburg poll gaf me inspiratie

Spreek je het dialect waar je opgegroeid ben?

Ja

Nee

Nuance button?

[thelingodingo]

Haikyuu Miyagi Dialect

So I mentioned in my Inarizaki's Dialect post that Karasuno (and the other Miyagi schools) would actually speak in the Tohoku dialect (technically). They don't really speak in the dialect (they speak the standard dialect since they live in a suburb of Sendai, which is big enough and close enough to the Kanto region (tokyo)), but theres a few lines in which some characters do use a little bit of dialect. So here are some examples that I can think of:

disclaimer - im too lazy to properly rewatch the show so im going off memory, therefore i cant guarantee 1000000% accuracy

Sugawara, Terushima, Hinata, Oikawa, Asahi, and Iwaizumi seem to have the most noticeable Tohoku dialects from what I remember hearing??

Suga (and Terushima?) especially ends his sentences with "-yarube", "-dabe", "-be" quite often which is very miyagi of him, he definitely has the strongest dialect out of all of them.

A specific example from Asahi is him saying 俺は昨日残るって言ったべよ! (ore wa kino nokoru tte ittabeyo).

I also remember Iwaizumi saying バレーはコートに６人だべや! (bare wa koto ni roku nin dabe ya).

Hinata says 昼飯食うべ (hirumeshi kuu be) along with other tohoku-like sentences

and I think Daichi once says 一回聞いとくべ (ikkai kii toku be)

I also remember reading somewhere that "boke" (often used by Kageyama and Iwaizumi) is reminiscent of the Tohoku dialect but im honestly not too sure....?

OoOOOooOO i just remembered a specific dialectal word that Oikawa once uses towards Kageyama is おがったね (ogattane). he uses the verb おがる (ogaru) which means "to grow up" in tohoku dialect.

Ukai once uses いずそうな (izusouna) which is also part of miyagi dialect

basically, you can assume that sentences ending with "-be" in haikyuu are miyagi dialect

(this is a completely different anime but in jujutsu kaisen Itadori actually uses some tohoku dialect closer to the beginning of the story which I thought was also interesting)

[basicallyanotherwitchesthing]

Thomas Sternberg - The Dialect and Folk-Lore of Northamptonshire - S.R. Publishers Limited - 1971

[calabria-mediterranea]

Calabrian Proverb: "simu cumbinati comu i santi 'i Rriggiu" (in Calabrian dialect)

Siamo ridotti come i santi reggini. (in Italian)

We’ve been reduced to such a state, like the saints in Reggio. (in English)

This proverb refers to the historical vandalism committed by Ottoman Turks and Barbary pirates, who defaced religious paintings and chopped the heads off of and otherwise damaged sculptures in Reggio Calabria, Italy.

At the San Paolo Museum, in Reggio Calabria, amongst the many paintings, San Michele che uccide il drago (St. Michael Killing the Dragon), a large image on a wooden panel stands out for both the beauty of the work and its history. Dating from 1470, this painting of Saint Michael the Archangel was for many years attributed to Antonello da Messina. For this reason, the piece was analyzed in great detail. Even though it was determined not to be of the hand of the renowned artist, which is of no great surprise, the physical state of the image was studied more than perhaps it otherwise would have been.

At first glance, coming across this painting in a museum, you might just think that due to its more than 500-year existence, a little paint had chipped off here and there. However, the damage to the saint’s face has actually been ascribed to historical vandalism. In the 16th century, Reggio suffered terribly from attacks by Ottoman Turks and Barbary pirates. These invaders defaced, literally, religious paintings and chopped the heads off of and otherwise damaged sculptures. Thus, Saint Michael the Archangel suffered from this collateral damage.

Today, these events might seem like ancient history. However, their memory is still very much alive in the common saying in the local dialect:

Simu cumbinati comu i santi 'i Rriggiu

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