How are our dialects changing? Dialect blog-16/11/2015
One theory from a 1930’s linguist is that ‘all English-men are branded on the tongue from birth and that a person could tell so much about another as soon as they opened their mouth, in particular not just the region they came from but also the social class they aspired to’. Our dialects form and are a part of our identities whether we like them or not. It was a century ago that George Bernard Shaw, an Irish playwright wrote that ‘no English man can open his mouth without another despising him’. It’s remarkable that 100 years on this is still incredibly true, that so much about ourselves is judged by the way you speak. Assumptions of your class and in some cases intelligence levels can be formed on the basis on just your language. Did you know this? From the size of the UK in comparison to countries like America, Russia and China, you would assume that the amount of dialects spoken is minimal, however this couldn’t be further from the truth. There are roughly above 30 distinct...