[HN Gopher] Linguists have identified a new English dialect that...
___________________________________________________________________
Linguists have identified a new English dialect that's emerging in
South Florida
Author : Tomte
Score : 67 points
Date : 2023-06-18 19:28 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (theconversation.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (theconversation.com)
| selimnairb wrote:
| Interesting. There are similar unconventional grammars in use by
| English speakers of Cajun descent in Southern Louisiana ("put
| groceries up" instead of "put groceries away").
| quotemstr wrote:
| See also the "great northern vowel shift":
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inland_Northern_American_Engli...
|
| Fascinating phonetic rotation occuring in the north of the US.
|
| Also, regarding the Miami dialect: obviously fake. I don't see a
| single "coin" or "crypt" phoneme in the whole article. ;-)
| FearNotDaniel wrote:
| "Meat or chicken" is also quite common in parts of UK South Asian
| culture, e.g. many lower-rent "Indian" (usually Bangladeshi or
| Pakistani) restaurants in England will offer a choice of chicken
| or meat curry, where "meat" could be lamb, mutton, goat or who
| knows what.
| j-bos wrote:
| Speaking of linguistics, I'd argue that "Linguists have
| _declared_ a new English dialect that 's emerging in South
| Florida"
| jrflowers wrote:
| I found this bit of Floridian discussion from the beginning of
| the documentary This Place Rules to be fascinating.
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4iYVSl09FVY
| elgrantomate wrote:
| I would love to hear recorded audio of these examples...
| asylteltine wrote:
| [dead]
| tgv wrote:
| > This is exactly the sort of thing that's been happening in
| Miami.
|
| The example quoted is exactly the sort of thing that's not going
| on.
|
| And where's the threshold for calling people bilingual? If you
| say "get down from the car," you're (likely) using that phrase
| only to people outside your environment. It's lack of fluency.
|
| > "Thanks God," a type of loan translation from "gracias a Dios,"
| is common in Miami. In this case, speakers analogize the "s"
| sound at the end of "gracias" and apply it to the English form.
|
| That's just an assumption of the "mmm, let me think 2 seconds"
| kind.
|
| The writer also calls it Spanish, but e.g. beef is "ternera" in
| Spanish. It might be Cuban Spanish, which has a fairly large
| vocabulary that differs from other Spanish variants.
| bedobi wrote:
| "Thanks God" from "Gracias a Dios"
|
| ^^^ this is kinda weird considering Cuban Spanish omits the S
| (and often half the rest of the letters in any given sentence,
| lol, at least to my lower intermediate Spanish ears), resulting
| in "Gracia Dio"
| rvense wrote:
| Yeah, thought that was a weird claim. I'd wager that the form
| "thanks" is more frequent than "thank" in most people's
| English, making it easy for an L2 speaker to hypercorrect.
| asveikau wrote:
| Omitting the /s/ is an oversimplification. Classically what
| happens in accents like that is that /s/ is rendered as [h].
| People do this aspiration to varying extents, sometimes
| omitting totally, sometimes not. Presence of a vowel
| following nearby can make a full formed [s] appear. The "a"
| in _gracias a dios_ could easily make that into "gracias a
| dio".
|
| By the way I had a coworker who was a native Arabic speaker
| say "thanks God" a lot. I think "thank God" is a phrasing
| that throws off a lot of people learning English, from
| multiple language backgrounds.
| TazeTSchnitzel wrote:
| > If you say "get down from the car," you're (likely) using
| that phrase only to people outside your environment. It's lack
| of fluency.
|
| Fluency doesn't mean you never make such mistakes, and it also
| doesn't prevent you picking up unusual phrasing from your
| environment, even when it might have originated as a mistake.
| In a heavily German but English-speaking workplace, it's not
| just the Germans who use "until" to mean "by".
| ThePowerOfFuet wrote:
| > The writer also calls it Spanish, but e.g. beef is "ternera"
| in Spanish. It might be Cuban Spanish, which has a fairly large
| vocabulary that differs from other Spanish variants.
|
| You are discovering the difference between castellano and
| espanol; in addition to ternera, it's bife in some parts of
| South America.
| hsush wrote:
| What do you mean with "castellano" vs "espanol"? I'm a native
| speaker and over here we call the language in general
| "castellano". For me the two words are synonymous (i.e. both
| refer to the general language, not to some specific dialect).
| avgcorrection wrote:
| Presumably that Castellano is Latin American Spanish and
| Espanol is Spanish Spanish.
| anthk wrote:
| Spaniard here. Both castellano and espanol refer to the same
| language everywhere.
| cool_dude85 wrote:
| No mention of what I'd say is one of the more common cases of
| this "dialect", one I find myself using despite speaking only
| English: careful your head/hand/whatever.
| fknorangesite wrote:
| > this "dialect"
|
| Why the scare quotes?
| cool_dude85 wrote:
| Not sure I buy it, never really heard any of the rest of the
| stuff they say in the article except maybe from old people
| who are second language English speakers. Careful your head
| though I heard quite a bit.
|
| That and the fact that it seems to mostly be a few set
| phrases make me suspicious.
| alehlopeh wrote:
| It goes a lot deeper than this in Miami. A big chunk of suburban
| miami is populated by white Cuban exiles and their descendants.
| Growing up we spoke in Spanglish, which involves switching back
| and forth between English and Spanish, often multiple times
| within the same sentence. The switch between languages isn't
| random, though. There are rules that govern which words you
| should say in which language, when to switch, etc. I've never
| heard anyone investigating how these rules work, but there are
| millions of Americans of Cuban descent in Miami for whom
| Spanglish is their true native language.
| lynguist wrote:
| Like Surzhyk in Ukraine! Mixed Ukrainian/Russian that is the
| true mother tongue for many Ukrainians!
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surzhyk
| type0 wrote:
| Not quite, English and Spanish are just too different.
| Surzhyk is like Portunol and it's different in different
| places
|
| https://multilingual.com/articles/portunol-blending-
| spanish-...
| zvmaz wrote:
| I grew up with French and Kabyle [1] and to this day we speak a
| mixture of both. And it comes very naturally.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kabyle_language
| fathyb wrote:
| My favorite Algerian loanword is "mickeyettes" for "cartoons"
| which comes from Mickey Mouse.
| auxym wrote:
| Sounds similar to the "frenglish" that is often heard in
| Montreal.
| fathyb wrote:
| I like that english idioms translated literally make sense in
| Quebec, such as "ca fait du sens" for "it makes sense".
|
| I realized it's a bit controversial while searching for it,
| here is something I found on the website of the Government of
| Canada about it: https://www.noslangues-
| ourlanguages.gc.ca/fr/chroniques-de-l...
| idlewords wrote:
| There's a less widespread but similar phenomenon with the older
| generation of Polish immigrants in Chicago, who use Polish
| grammar but an almost entirely English lexicon. I've met a few
| people who I straight up couldn't understand, and I'm bilingual
| in the two languages they fused together.
| pfannkuchen wrote:
| > The switch between languages isn't random, though
|
| We kind of do this already in mainline English, switching
| between Germanic, French, Latin and Greek based on some
| unwritten rules. Adding Spanish wouldn't really change things
| that much considering its close relatives French and Latin are
| already so well represented. Though I'm sure the Spanish part
| is more dominant in this dialect than it would be eventually in
| the broader language.
| EduardoBautista wrote:
| Spanglish is not necessarily using English words in Spanish
| or vice/versa.
|
| It's using "troca" ("trucka"?) instead of "camioneta" when
| referring to "truck".
|
| Another example is "parkear" instead of "estacionar" when
| referring to "parking".
|
| This is in the case of the Mexican dialect of Spanglish.
| idlewords wrote:
| It's extremely common in every situation like this, the
| grammar of the original language stays but the lexicon
| (nouns especially) gets rapidly switched out with
| borrowings and calques from the surrounding language.
| rrradical wrote:
| Oh interesting. Japanese is like this. Many years ago it
| absorbed Chinese nouns, but more recently it has absorbed
| many English nouns.
|
| Some Americans learning Japanese will regret this last
| part- wishing that the language stayed "pure", as if it
| were ever actually pure, whatever that means.
| fknorangesite wrote:
| > Japanese is like this.
|
| Every language is like this.
| semi-extrinsic wrote:
| Except Icelandic.
| hsush wrote:
| I don't think you're referring to anything remotely
| approaching bilingual speech. Educated English speakers might
| use "a priori" or "in vino veritas" or some word in French
| here in there, but those are tiny changes compared to how
| spanglish is spoken in Florida and other parts.
| cool_dude85 wrote:
| You don't switch between Greek and French while speaking
| English.
| permo-w wrote:
| you don't, but there is an element of code-switching that
| goes on in English. given that French, Greek and Latin-
| origin words in English tend to have come down from the
| clergy or the aristocracy, there is a subconscious subtext
| of power and education - and on the flipside pretense and
| elitism - that can be given off with particular use or lack
| of use of those words. some people do this naturally and
| some people affect it - Boris Johnson is well-known for it
| - but, while not quite the same as switching between
| Spanish and English - it is a thing that occurs
| jorvi wrote:
| "I gotta say, this kid really thinks he's the alpha and the
| omega du jour".
| asveikau wrote:
| I think a lot of English speakers would not know what
| that phrase would mean.
|
| "Alpha and Omega" as used in English is a biblical
| reference, does not really have much to do with practical
| knowledge of Greek.
|
| Du jour would be understood on a restaurant menu for soup
| more than anything else.
| [deleted]
| babelfish wrote:
| The doctor performed the Hippocratic Oath on the terrace.
| asveikau wrote:
| Imported vocabulary is not code switching.
| fknorangesite wrote:
| Borrowed words is a totally different phenomenon.
| sportslife wrote:
| Do you have any guesses as to the contours of the rules
| followed? Maybe family v. friend v. work usage, or such?
|
| I've lived most my life in very multi-lingual cities and
| neighborhoods, and it always struck me how some English very
| expressive short phrases, eg. "Like, no way", were used in
| other language conversations. Always thought, it was the
| relative brevity and ubiquity, in the way "C'est la vie" was
| for awhile in English.
| zdragnar wrote:
| Watching international versions of Taskmaster - originally a
| British show, which has now been done in many countries in
| Europe and elsewhere- it's always been amusing to hear random
| English phrases get blurted out.
|
| Brevity of phrase is part of it, but it doesn't seem to
| happen in conversational tones- usually either when someone
| is showing off or as an interjection of sorts.
| msla wrote:
| That's called code-switching
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code-switching
|
| > In linguistics, code-switching or language alternation occurs
| when a speaker alternates between two or more languages, or
| language varieties, in the context of a single conversation or
| situation. Code-switching is different from plurilingualism in
| that plurilingualism refers to the ability of an individual to
| use multiple languages,[1] while code-switching is the act of
| using multiple languages together.
|
| The whole rest of the article is the result of linguists
| studying it.
| Fellshard wrote:
| That is an entirely different phenomenon.
| msla wrote:
| OK, what makes it different?
| Fellshard wrote:
| Hmm, looking further. It seems the linguistic phenomenon
| of code-switching is one accurate name for this, but
| there's also a sociological phenomenon of code-switching
| that is related but very different - intentional shifting
| based on social context or group that you're addressing.
|
| Elsewhere in this same thread, someone was assuming the
| sociological cause for Spanglish, instead of the more
| organic linguistic cause that happens anywhere you have
| two cultures and languages in close contact. I suspect
| this blurred definition makes talking about this more
| complicated now, since sociological code-switching has
| become part of America's racialized sociology discussion.
|
| If I had my druthers I'd split those two very different
| phenomena into separate terms, because they don't even
| produce the same kinds of linguistic patterns.
|
| (Thanks for asking me to justify, my assumption was quite
| wrong regarding the scope of the term.)
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-06-18 23:01 UTC)