The language of the U.S.

Then why did you use the phrase "on time" to define the phrase "in time"? Frankly I would have said just the opposite: "in time" means you might be early and have time to buy popcorn, whereas "on time" means you got there with just a couple of minutes left to find your seat.

What is your native language? From what perspective do you make this observation of neutrality? Neutral in what way, and compared to what? Many people who speak Italian, Spanish and other languages with lots of cardinal vowels, long words and lyrical inflections think English, with its abrupt monosyllables, guttural consonant clusters and flat intonation sounds butt-ugly.

That is true of songs in any language. You obliterate the tonal structure of the words and sentences to conform to the melody, you make words longer and shorter to match the meter, you change the stress to fit the cadence. It's unusual for people to sing in their "native accent" in any language. Country & Western music with its clearly identifiable Southern American dialect pronunciation is a striking exception and that may be one reason it's so popular.

So where are you from? All we know about you is your screen name, and you chose one that makes you appear to be a native anglophone.

 

Most languages that are spoken over a wide geographical area have diverse accents and many have dialects.

Two different forms of speech are languages if the speakers cannot understand each other without significant study. They are dialects if the speakers can understand each other, although it may require a little effort, and the differences must be in more than pronunciation, i.e. vocabulary or grammar. They are accents if the differences are almost exclusively in pronunciation.

Television has been a powerful force for the leveling of dialects. As people become accustomed to each other's quaint slang and idioms they tend to enrich their own language by adopting them, just as we adopt words from foreign languages. In particular, a country's standard dialect tends to spread out to the provincial areas. Thus, what were once dialects may become only accents, as the words and grammar become normalized and only the more ingrained phonetic differences remain.

But lately in the developed countries even accents are being leveled by the post-industrial phenomenon of people migrating to different regions for career purposes, often many times in a lifetime. People who live in the same neighborhoods and work together may (often but not always unconsciously) lose the extreme elements of their dialect pronunciation from constantly hearing the words pronounced differently. Even if the adults don't do this, their children will.

In my lifetime I have heard the classic Boston accent, which had many echoes of Standard British English such as being non-rhotic (final R was silent), virtually disappear. The last time I was in Boston, I didn't hear a single person speak that way.

During the same time, Southern American dialect has become little more than an accent. For many speakers, the only important difference in vocabulary is "y'all" for "you" (plural) with the possessive form "y'all's." Frankly I think that's kind of handy and I wish we would all adopt it.

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How would we know? I'm not fluent in Russian, are you? Most outsiders can't tell Russian, Czech and Polish apart. How could they possibly differentiate an accent from a dialect when they can't even differentiate between two languages?

No John. He was simply transcribing the words phonetically in English so we can see the difference in pronunciation. Don't you know anything at all about French? Everyone who reads runs into enough French to realize intuitively that it never uses the letter K, except in foreign words.

It's still one of the most popular foreign languages in America even though it has outlived its usefulness in business, scholarship and diplomacy. It should be obvious to a high school student that that was not French writing.

Then why did you not answer me when I asked you, twice, what your native language is? If you want to participate in discussions in the Linguistics subforum, you must be more forthcoming about issues of languages and linguistics. We all give different answers to foreigners than we do to anglophones.

No it was not. Don't dissemble about the meaning of words when you're talking to people who study linguistics. You told us that English is not your native language. I kept asking you what is your native language, in order to be able to phrase my answers to your questions in a form that you would more easily understand. Then you turned around and told me that English is your native language after all.

This is dishonesty. Fortunately you did not post that statement on my board. I don't tolerate it here. SciForums is a place of science and intellectual honesty is a cornerstone of the scientific method. Intellectual dishonesty is the worst kind of trolling.

Please be aware of this and follow the rules.

 

The phonetics are very easy but everything else is difficult. Their view of the universe is different from ours. I have a friend who lived in Japan and speaks the language fluently. Someone once hired him to translate a novel into Japanese. When he got to page two, a female character was speaking. He realized that he did not know how to conjugate verbs in the feminine gender. All the endings are different for a female speaker. He could understand them when he heard them but he was never actually taught how to use them properly. He had to subcontract to a Japanese woman to write the female dialog.