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svartikotturinn · 5 years ago

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My speaker attitudes towards dialects

(Adapted from a Reddit comment of mine.)

People who think they know a thing or two about linguistics often tend to chastise others for their prescriptivism, especially others who know a thing or two about linguistics (and I should know—I got my BA in linguistics and East Asian studies). What they tend to ignore, however, is that a key part of linguistics is sociolinguistics, and a key part of that is speakers’ attitudes.

We are speakers. We live in a society where our language is spoken, and we know when and where certain features are used, and our attitude changes accordingly. It’s as inevitable as the change in language itself. Of course, sometimes it’s blatantly classist/racist/sexist, but that’s another issue. Oftentimes it’s purely æsthetic or something related to other issues.

So what about me as a speaker?

Generally I prefer conservative dialects of just about any language, as they maintain certain distinctions that others lose (which can lead to confusion or just less intuitive spelling and murkier etymology).

So, I’ll address the phonological level first.

In English, I like dialects that don’t mix up words like these:¹

Consonants:

Unstressed syllables:

ladder–latter

winner–winter

Syllable finally:

father–farther

Elsewhere:

wine–whine

Vowels:

Before ‹r›

marry–merry–Mary

higher–hire

coyer–coir

flower–flour

horse–hoarse

irk–erk, earn–urn, fur–fir²

Before ‹l›

vial–vile

real–reel

‹u…e›, ‹ew› after coronals

through–threw

you–yew

choose–chews

loot–lute

do–dew

toon–tune

Diphthongs:

wait–weight

Wales–wails

tow–toe

Unstressed syllables:

emission–a mission–omission

Pharaoh–farrow

shivaree–shivery

Otherwise:

cot–caught

meet–meat

The whole just makes so much more sense this way, especially if you’re teaching the language to learners, because that way there’s more of a 1:1 correspondence between orthography and spelling so there’s less memorizing involved (speaking as an English tutor and enthusiastic language learner).

It also helps when there’s a certain ‘symmetry’ in the vowel system, like when both ‹a…e› and ‹o…e› are pronounced as mid-high–high diphthongs (or just long mid-high vowels), one front and the other back; in the eastern half of the US and in the UK, that’s not really the case. Also the tense ‹a› vowel being pronounced the same in all environments makes it much less confusing to teach; in most American dialects, it tends to vary based on the sounds that follow it and whether it’s in a closed or open syllable, and in Australia (and I think certain places in the US) there’s an inconsistent split into two categories among the words. Shifts like those sometimes make more such distinctions (e.g. mad–Madd, and also put–putt for most dialects), but they can be a real headache to teach.

Similarly, I prefer to keep the vowel distinction of hurry–furry, as it makes morpheme boundaries clearer. The same for keeping the first vowel of sorry in words like corridor or horror, because it makes the orthography more consistent, following a clear rule:

A vowel letter before ‹rr› in an open syllable (within morpheme boundaries) is pronounced like a normal tense vowel.

In Hebrew, I have a special appreciation for ethnolects that maintain the distinction between:

uvular and pharyngeal voiceless fricatives, e.g. כָּךְ /käχ/ ‘thus’ vs. קַח /kä/ ‘take! masc. sing.’

glottal stops and voiced pharyngeal fricatives, e.g. אֵד /ʔe̞d/ ‘vapour’ vs. עֵד /ʕe̞d/ ‘witness’

velar and uvular plosives, e.g. כָּל /ko̞l/ ‘every’ vs. קוֹל /qo̞l/ ‘voice’³

plain and pharyngealized voiceless coronal plosives, e.g. תְּבִיעָה /tvi.ˈʕä/ ‘lawsuit’ vs. טְבִיעָה /tˤvi.ˈʕä/ ‘drowning’

plain vs. pharyngealized voiceless alveolar sibilant affricate, e.g. צָאר /t͡säʁ̞/ ‘tsar’ vs. צַר /t͡sˤäʁ̞/ ‘narrow masc. sing.’⁴

simple vs. geminate consonants, e.g. גָּמָל /gä.ˈmäl/ ‘camel’ vs. גַּמָּל /gäm.ˈmäl/ ‘(literary) camel driver’

There are other distinctions that I omitted here, mostly in terms of vowel length and quality: back in the times of the Mishna, Hebrew dialects had up to 7 or 8 different vowels and as many as 3 or even 4 different vowel lengths, but in Modern Israeli Hebrew, the vowels have coalesced into a system of five vowels with no length distinctions. However, those are pretty much obsolete except in liturgical uses, and I don’t care much for liturgical use except for academic interest because I have a very, very negative view of Orthodox Judaism. I somewhat lament the loss of such distinctions to that realm, especially since the loss of those distinctions means that a lot of Hebrew morphology and phonology no longer makes any immediate, intuitive sense (at least until you learn the logic behind it—then it makes a lot more sense but it’s still very mechanical), and is now basically the bane of every highschooler’s existence.

In Japanese, I like dialects which, unlike Standard Japanese (which is based on the Tokyo dialect and serves as the basis for transliteration and standard kana orthography), maintain the traditional distinction between:

Consonants:

plain vs. labialized velar plosives (both voiced and voiceless), e.g.

家事 /kaʑi/ ‘housework’ vs. 火事 /kʷaʑi/ ‘conflagration’

both normally transcribed kaji

雅歌 /gaka/ ‘elegant song’ vs. 画家 /gʷaka/ ‘painter’

both normally transcirbed gaka

voiced sibilant affricates vs. fricatives, e.g.:

alveolo-palatal ones: 地震 /d͡ʑiɕiɴ/ ‘earthquake’ vs. 自信 /ʑiɕiɴ/ ‘confidence’

both normally transcribed jishin

alveolar ones: 数 /käzɯᵝ/ ‘number’ vs. 下図 /käd͡zɯᵝ/ ‘the illustration below’

both normally transcribed jouzu or jōzu

/o/ vs. /wo/:

折る /oɾɯ/ ‘to fold’ vs. 居る /woɾɯ/ ‘to be’

both normally transcribed as oru

Vowels:

long mid-low and mid-high rounded vowels, e.g.:

～長 /–t͡ʃɔː/ ‘head or leader of’ vs. ～庁 /–t͡ʃoː/ ‘government office of’

both normally transcribed as chou or chō, pronounced /–t͡ʃo̞ː/ in Tokyo

In addition, I also like how the Kansai dialect allows for more varied pitch accent patterns than the Tokyo dialect. Distinctions like these, along with those mentioned above, could be immensely helpful in mitigating the preposterous amount of homophones it has (especially among Sino-Japanese loanwords) which make it so, so much harder for learners to master listening comprehension (and for native speakers to understand spoken academic or technical texts), but alas. It also makes the connection between less intuitive go-on & kan-on pairs, which generally remain a mystery to anyone who hasn’t researched them in depth or has any background in Chinese.

In other languages, I naturally prefer other such distinctions, e.g.:

Spanish dialects with lleísmo and distinción

French dialects that preserve all the vowels that Parisian French no longer does, and also between mid-high and mid-low vowels

Portuguese dialects that resist as many of the plethora of mergers other dialects have as possible

Italian dialects that distinguish between mid-high and mid-low vowels; examples of minimal pairs here

The North-central dialect of Vietnamese

Korean dialects that preserve vital distinctions in terms of vowel length and quality as well as pitch accent, and also initial /l/ in loanwords

Mandarin dialects that retain retroflex consonants, rather than merge them into alveolar sibilants (like in Taiwan and southern Mandarin dialects)

Cantonese dialects that retain the difference between

Tones

high and high-falling tones, e.g. 衫 /saːm⁵⁵/ ‘shirt’ vs. 三 /saːm⁵³/ ‘three’

Consonants

plain and labialized velar plosives, e.g. 各 /kɔk̚³/ ‘every, each’ vs. 國 /kwɔk̚³/ ‘country; national’

alveolar laterals and nasals, e.g. 里 /lei̯¹³/ ‘li’ vs. 你 /nei̯¹³/ ‘you sing.’

But at the same time, I’m not above political or regional biases, e.g.:

I like Arabic dialects that maintain the wide array of consonants of Modern Standard Arabic, but I feel very connected to my city of residence Haifa, so I prefer the dialects spoken in this region.

Also, I prefer Standard Taiwanese Mandarin (think Pearl in the Taiwanese dub of Steven Universe) over PRC Mandarin partially because, well, fuck Winnie the Pooh.

On a grammatical level, I love how dialects create subtler distinctions in terms of tense and aspect or pragmatic distinctions:

For example, while African–American English exhibits a wide array of phonological mergers (e.g. fin–thin, den–then), it also exhibits far subtler distinctions of tense and aspect that ‘Standard’ English lacks: compare the short AAE been knew vs. the much longer SE have known for a long time.

Another example is the modern ‘vocal fry’ (a.k.a. creaky voice) that some American girls have started using in the past few years, which marks parenthetical information in a sentence.

This is also why I like German dialects that have a wider use of the preterite (i.e. more northern ones), as opposed to those that have merged them entirely into the present perfect (e.g. in Bavaria). It’s also why I’m somewhat miffed by the merger of the 1st. sing. fut. conjugation of Hebrew verbs into the 3rd. masc. sing. fut. one, e.g. יַסְבִּיר /jäs.ˈbiʁ̞/ ‘[he] will explain’ vs. אַסְבִּיר /ʔäs.ˈbiʁ̞/ ‘[I] will explain’.

On the other hand, being non-binary, I have a special distaste for gendered morphology. This is why I came up with this system to do away with the last bit of gendering in English, and why although I find non-native speakers crude attempts at reinventing Hebrew morphology extremely distasteful (seriously, shit like that is why I say American Jews are, first and foremost, American),⁵ I do rejoice at any erosion I see of gender distinctions in Hebrew. It’s also why I like most sign languages so much—I say ‘most’, because Japanese SL, for example, has gendered pronouns (unlike ASL or Israeli SL, for example), and why I resent the Western influence that led to gendered pronouns becoming a thing in Japanese and Chinese, and why I often think about learning Finnish properly.⁶

On a lexical level, I have a particular affinity for archaisms, or more lexically conservative languages.

In the case of English:

I like dialects that preserve Old English archaisms, words from Old English that have been displaced by Latinate cognates, holding on like the Gaulish village of Astérix and Obelix. Words like gome and blee fascinate me and I wish they were in more common use, which is why I like the idea of Anglish so much.

I also like dialects that maintain mostly obsolete ‘irregular’ forms of verbs, for example clumb as the past participle of climb, as they provide a rare insight into the development of English.

And I most certainly like dialects that still use some variation of thou, like tha in Yorkshire or thee in Lancashire.

Hebrew, on the other hand, doesn’t really have any dialectical variations per se to speak of, or any ‘archaisms’ that they preserve, as it was pretty much dormant for nearly two millennia. Back when Jesus was still around, there was some regional variation among Hebrew speakers—this can be seen in the New Testament, for example, when people confront Simon Peter after Jesus is arrested and claim that his accent gives away the fact that he was one of Jesus’ men. For example, different accents of the time had notably different vowel systems, for example, which is why there were three different systems (roughly speaking) to indicate them at the time, and this is before we’ve even considered Samaritan Hebrew, which is about as comprehensible to a Modern Hebrew speaker as Doric (or even Frisian) is to an English speaker. Hebrew speakers borrow phrases extensively from their traditional literature, much like Chinese people with their four-character idioms, and often use more literary language in tongue-in-cheek, so it’s not really comparable. However, there is some amount of sociolinguistic variation as to doing so, but I would say it has more to do with religious and socio-economic status than ethnolect and certainly regional variation (which is far more limited in Hebrew than in English, mostly confined to rather small subsets of regionalisms), and I do like it when people do use these.

This is why I appreciate Québec French, for all its overzealously purist and prescriptivist faults. It’s often a wonderful museum of words of bygone days, from dialects that the efforts to standardize French have nearly if not completely exterminated. As an English speaker in particular, it’s interesting to see Norman remnants in the language.

On the other hand, it always fascinates me when languages borrow words for concepts they already have, and use the loanword for a more specific concept therein. Consider, for example, the English words kingly (Germanic), royal (Norman), and regal (Latin), or these fascinating examples.

The problem is that many of these features are fairly stigmatized.

In terms of phonology, I make a conscious effort to maintain most of the distinctions above when I speak English, but on the other hand I flap my ‹t›s and ‹d›s in rapid speech to avoid sounding like a stuck-up prick. Similarly, I don’t maintain the wine–whine distinction, for example, unless, say, I’m working with a student on a story that takes place in the Southern US, because I would sound like a dick who’s trying to sound like a Southern gentleman or something. I still teach the distinction, if only to explain why there is such a difference in the orthography to begin with even if I tell students not to observe it when actually speaking. When I speak Hebrew, I most certainly don’t make those traditional ethnolect distinctions—that would come across as being either unbelievably pedantic or outright mocking. When I speak Japanese or other languages, well, I generally don’t know them well enough to maintain all the distinctions as I would like to, even those that aren’t stigmatized, but I do make an effort to at least observe those distinctions when the orthography makes them clear enough (and stick to the standard in Japanese).

In terms of grammar, I don’t teach dialectical English irregular forms. At most, I gloss over them with a sentence or two, and leave it at that. I assume my average student would hardly read books or watch films or TV shows that take place in Appalachia or what-have-you, certainly not without subtitles anyway. If I ever got a particularly advanced student, however… I would still be reluctant, as I am hardly over-familiar with those dialects myself, and don’t want to mislead them. In Hebrew, on the other hand, my grammar and spelling do tend to be very conservative to the point of anachronism sometimes (like, I generally follow the BuMP rule when I speak; most Israelis don’t), but I balance it out with a decent amount of slang.

In terms of lexical items, I pretty much avoid teaching dialectical archaisms altogether. Those are almost entirely useless for students, and I don’t even speak the dialects that use them, so I can’t say for a fact which dialecticalisms are even in current use. In Hebrew, I might make some detours, but that’s because truly archaic words, that wouldn’t even be used in tongue-in-cheek, are a rarity, and oftentimes they share roots with more common words, so they can cement the understanding of those roots more readily.

If no socio-linguistic considerations (or my own fluency) were a complete non-issue?

In English:

I’d make an effort to maintain all of the distinctions mentioned above, including those that are observed today only by a handful of older people from rural areas.

I’d pronounce ‹gh› in words like right and weight to tell them apart from rite and wait.

I’d use thou and AAE grammar and any dialectical archaism or even Anglish coinage I could get away with.

And, of course, I’d use my gender-neutral pronoun system for everyone except trans people who might get dysphoric.

In Hebrew:

I’d speak Hebrew with extremely conservative pronunciation, like BCE-level ancient, making all of the distinctions mentioned above.

On top of those, I would distinguish between the voiceless alveolar sibilant and lateral fricatives (which was lost very early on), so I pronounce סוֹרֵר /soː.ˈreːr/ ‘unruly, recalcitrant’ and שׂוֹרֵר /ɬoː.ˈreːr/ ‘existing, prevailing’ (both in masc. sing.) differently (rather than pronounce both like the first).

I’d reintroduce syllable-final glottal stops so that the orthography and grammar finally make a lick of sense.

On the other hand, I would think of a system to do away with gendered language in Hebrew that still made internal sense.

In Japanese:

I’d speak Japanese with all of the distinctions mentioned above, the fact that they characterize two parts of Japan that are practically on oppsite ends of the country be damned.

I might maybe even bring back a few obsolete features, like nasal vowels or the syllable ye and palatalized consonants before e (when applicable), because they make go-on and kan-on relationships clearer, and also clear up their relationship to Mandarin and other languages with extensive Sinitic vocabulary. (Although I doubt there are modern dialects that do that today, certainly not in a discriminating way, so I might give up on that.)

And, of course, I would do it all with Kansai pitch accent, or at least There are too many homophones, damnit, I gotta tell them apart SOMEHOW!

In Mandarin:

I’d speak Mandarin with Standard Taiwanese pronunciation.

Maybe I’d even use the Old National Pronunciation—what with my background in Japanese, it would save me a lot of memorizing, because I’d remember that all the characters that ended with a voiceless consonant in Japanese have the same tone in Mandarin.

Hell, I might even reintroduce the distinction between /e/, /ɔ/, and /a/.

In Cantonese:

I’d distinguish between the tones and the initial consonants, as mentioned above.

In addition, I might even bring back the distinction between alveolar and palato-alveolar sibilants that died in 1950—it’ll certainly make things easier for me, as I’ve learned some Mandarin in the past.

In Korean:

I’d speak a mix of dialects preserving all of the above distinctions and then some; I’d probably sound a lot like I were from North Korea, but in this scenario this wouldn’t matter.

In Vietnamese:

North-central dialect all the way.

In that scenario, the only thing that would stop me from talking like that would be comprehensibility. It would definitely be an issue—even today English speakers would probably be thrown off by pronouncing the ‹gh›, for one, and I’m sure my variety of Hebrew would be incomprehensible to most native speakers today.

But for now, I’ll make do with what I got, I guess.

—

Endnotes

¹ Most dialects that do mix them up generally pronounce them like the former in each pair.

² These distinction traditionally exists in Scotland; Ireland has a two-way split that works differently. On this note, I’d also count distinctions between e.g. wait and weight, but at this point it’s already Scots, not English. (Which is just another reason I love Scots so much, along with its lexical conservatism.)

³ This distinction, as well as the three that follow, are exceedingly rare.

⁴ The phranyngealized voiceless alveolar sibilant affricate was not preserved as such in any ethnolect: it either became a pharyngealized voiceless alveolar sibilant fricative (in Yemenite and Mizrahi Hebrew), or it simply lost its pharyngealization (in Sephardi and Ashkenazi Hebrew, and Modern Israeli Hebrew)—e.g. צַד /t͡sˤäd/ > /sˤäd/, /t͡säd/ ‘side’. Barring the exceedingly rare loanword, I could not think of a single minimal pair such as the one given above.

⁵ For the record: I was raised speaking English alongside Hebrew, albeit in a non-Anglophone country, and a lot of research went into my solution to ensure that it’s based on precedent rather than be a tasteless neologism.

⁶ There are other genderless languages as well, but they’re either super-niche or spoken by communities that aren’t as progressive, or both.

#linguistics #sociolinguistics #speaker attitude #personal #languages #dialects #dialectology

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