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Alfred's Serif Users' Forums → General Discussion → Minority languages
Thanks to a thread on CreoFora, I’ve made the surprising discovery that despite there being only around 60,000 speakers of «Rätoromanisch» (Romansh) — mostly in Switzerland, but also in northern Italy — it has four dialects.
I wonder if they are as undecipherable to each other as Cornish, Yorkshire, East Anglian and Glaswegian?
Geoff - add Geordie to the list. That must be the hardest English dialect.
You can throw broad Scouse into that mix!
But (and it's a big 'but'). over the past ten or so years, there has been a mass homogenisation of English in the UK. I have noticed this particularly in news items where younger people (late teens and early twenties) are interviewed: although there are still hints of thick and long vowels (north v. south), there is no discernible dialect or pronounced accent. Young people from Nottingham sound more or less the same as young people from Leeds, from Norwich, from Bristol and from London.
It was bound to happen in a world where TV and Internet (mainly the latter) reign supreme. I think we have reached the point where, within another 50 years, regional accents and their dialects will die out almost completely. It's just the next step on what Melvyn Bragg called the Adventure of English, and as a linguist, I find it fascinating.
These minority languages will succumb, too, in time.
But (and it's a big 'but')
I like big ‘buts’ and I cannot lie. Or summat.
Alfred's Serif Users' Forums → General Discussion → Minority languages
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