Wow Fraggle that seems like a most impassioned response. . . .
Well thanks for the compliment. Bear in mind that I write for a living (although these days it's usually boring stuff like contracts and software manuals), so I try to always communicate at the level I need to maintain at the office.
I almost feel guilty for my post now.
Oh don't worry about it. It was well-written and you made your point.
Also really informative, cheers, but from a far less informed perspective I was expressing an opinion based on current experiences. It just seems that many of my American friends find older British movies easier to understand, certainly more so than many of the newer ones which seems odd when you consider many modern producers a surely now far more aware of the global market place and the need for mass market appeal.
I find that astounding. During my adolescence in the 1950s, I found the dialog in British movies almost impossible to understand. But when the James Bond movies, TV series like Masterpiece Theatre, and of course Monty Python came into every American home, we were all exposed almost daily to the British standard dialect of English.
And of course the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and myriad other British rock bands were rapidly establishing a huge presence on the radio. The teenagers and even the older Baby Boomers (the generation born in the 18 years between the end of WWII and the conquest of American politics by their anti-war, anti-religion, anti-racism, pro-feminism, pro-drug, pro-science positions) were young enough to master the understanding of the Queen's English. Your people were doing the same thing with American English. As a result, both dialects have absorbed much of the other's slang and grammar (we know what a "bird" is and you know that a "chick" is the same thing, even though that word is Spanish
chica, a girl or a very young woman) and the speakers learned to interpret the major differences in pronunciation. Eventually the phonetic differences were considerably reduced.
Track down a recording of the Queen speaking early in her rein, and compare it to her current interviews. For a moment you'll be certain that it can't possibly be the same lady.
Received Pronunciation or "RP" (what we Yanks call "Oxford English" or "BBC English") has changed mightily in the last century, especially the second half.
The impact of electronic media has had the same effect, although stronger, on regional dialects. Again, in the 1950s I found American Southerners almost impossible to understand. Today I can do a pretty good job of imitating them. There aren't any real dialects of American English anymore--by the definition that dialects have differences in vocabulary and grammar, not just pronunciation; otherwise they're merely
accents. Only AAVE (African-American Vernacular English) qualifies as a true dialect, yet 90% of the people who speak it are also completely fluent in Standard American. This would actually make AAVE a
cant rather than a dialect: a speech variant used for the purpose of thwarting understanding by outsiders.
As I understand it, there still are genuine dialects in the British Isles, such as Scottish and "Brummy," but exposure on TV and in movies has made them considerably easier for the speakers to understand each other.
Also this whole idea of using subtitles to help audiences when watching certain British television shows is not something I'd come across until quite recently.
I wish they were in use in the 1950s, but today very few Americans would need them. They'd have to be older than me, and most people don't live that long.
So I really find what you've been saying about this greater possibility for understanding of all English dialects as something we are all heading towards quite interesting.
Thanks to electronics! Of course the power of broadcasting cuts both ways. Hitler was the first statesman to recognize the power of radio, and his broadcast speeches, complete with inflections and other nuances, are widely credited for the ease with which he won the hearts and minds of the German people. Before electronics, it was impossible to speak to more than about 1,000 people at one time.
. . . . RP is what we regard as the "Queens English", thus the royal connotations give it such a highly prized sense of status. Generally this seems to be mostly widely spoken in the South of England, yet it is also here perhaps more than anywhere else that the new foreign and cultural influences of imigration are having the biggest impact on changing the way the British language is being both understood and spoken.
That's also true in American English. Since before the nation was founded, we had a strong influence from both French- and Spanish-speaking people. You folks obviously also have a lot of French influences (the English language itself was "colonized" by the Normans--everyday words like "face" and "second" are French), but American English is full of Spanish words that probably seem quite foreign to you, such as "buckaroo" for "cowboy," from Spanish
vaquero.
It just seemed logical to think that the way English is understood around the world would be influenced by further changes in imigration to a point where it becomes so different to that spoken in some other locations as to be virtually different languages. What perhaps seemed less obvious but now much more so since your most helpful explanation was the idea that English speakers across the globe would come together to understand the differences that already exist or may come to exist in the future.
Take India, for example. Every educated citizen can speak and understand Hindi, but because it is the language of the ruling class in the New Delhi region, they do not like to honor it by using it. So when Indians from different regions meet, they speak to each other in English, the language of their conquerors!
And yes, Indian English is regarded as a distinct dialect, with its own grammar and vocabulary, like British, American/Canadian, and Australia/New Zealand. The differences are largely phonetic, but their grammar is not quite the same as ours, and of course they have quite a list of words that most of us are not familiar with. (I come across very few discussions of South African English so I don't know if it is also considered a separate dialect.)
I also appreciate the sentiment expressed for the US retaining the notion of having English as it's language, it's seems, certainly at least, from your post that there is still a strong desire for a cultural link through language for Americans with the UK. This suggests rather than some type of seperate need or search for identity that many Americans already see themselves as having it with "English" thus forming a strong part of it.
Certianly again from my British perspective this is an enjoyable thought to consider about our Atlantic Cousins.
It's often said that England is our oldest and closest ally, but in fact France is our oldest (they helped us win our war of independence from your country) and Canada is our closest. As recently as World War I there was considerably animosity toward the British, who, after all, had sided with the Confederates during our Civil War. Many Americans lobbied for entering the war on the
German side.
Somehow, we got over that. Cynics insist that U.S. agents clandestinely gave the Germans the Lusitania's route, so their submarine could torpedo it and arouse anti-German sentiment. The temperance movement was also anti-German, since most of our breweries were founded by German families--Pabst, Schlitz, Coors (Kurz), Miller (Mueller), Yingling (Juengling), etc...
But in my opinion, the Beatles clinched it.
