If anyone wants to know why I'm a little cranky on the internet sometimes, "getting my own dialect mansplained to me by someone who has literally never met me and then called illiterate" is only about the sixth most deserved block of the last few weeks
Right!? Like, I too have needed to do some work to murder the inner prescriptivist, but if he'd been a little less of an ass I would have explained to him about syllabic consonants and how they color the vowels in the preceding syllable in some dialects but instead he got a blocking
These people are always 'there is one correct way to speak English and coincidentally it is the way the people I grew up around talking and I will die on this hill'
Classist AND racist! The fastest way to make a certain type of person very mad is to start talking about the verb tenses and aspects AAVE has that other forms of English don't.
White friend from Kentucky described Southern English as having lots of verb forms that they didn't learn in school;
I'm not sure how much AAVE differs from that.
("I'd been fixin' to get around to that" as an past intended future tense of some sort...)
Yes. I get way less familiar with the racial aspects - my heritage is heavily "White New England" - but one of the reasons I deliberately picked up "y'all" was to push back on the prejudice even against white folks who used that one.
That’s probably fair.
I was trying to suggest that prescriptivism is harder the more experience you have with the cool ways people use language.
But I think my own unconscious biases have led me to say something to the contrary.
Is it just me, or is English the only language where people refuse to acknowledge different vernacular as dialects, whereas other languages I have studied don't seem to do this?
Yes, but as someone who grew up in a family where almost all of us speak 2 or even 3 languages, the snobbery seems to be contained to English only. Where as the other languages we look and go oh you're speaking that dialect.
French
French French French. If it's not Parisian French it's wrong, and quebecois is an abomination. Spain can be like it as well, Italian sometimes but in a different way
Then you've got China where, well, it's nasty. Apparently Russia is worse but we've little direct info these days
See I would argue no on Spanish because my mom spoke spanish and somehow picked up Catalan and sometimes she slips into Catalan and Spanish speakers will look at her strange and she will be like "oh sorry, Catalan" and they will nod and say oh that makes sense. I can't speak for French though.
There is a lot of political nationalism tied to language within Spain, it can be quite nasty. But there's also a lot of "we hate those guys so we're fine with it" anti nationalist liberal/leftism there as well
English snobbery is a bit less, um, lethal about it than some of the Castilian supremists
yeah the liquid consonants are fun like that
true story: one day during my linguistics master's, after a midterm, my officemates and I were kicking back with some mad libs
the woman filling them in asked me for a liquid and I immediately replied "/l/!"
oh, apologies for the lack of clarity -- that's the international phonetic alphabet, which is what the slashes indicate. so it's as if I said the first sound in the word "lime" but not any of the rest of the sounds.
So wild it’s basically feral.
“I, a person who has never heard you speak, have definite opinions on how you pronounce specific words.” How do you type that without any shame at all
Everyone knows that "intelligent" means "an upper middle-class straight white cis man from [wherever I'm from] who went to [the same type of college I did]"
In England some of the REALLY expensive "Public Schools" (which are elite private high schools) teach elucution with the stated intent that when a boy leaves you shouldn't know what county he's from
So yeah, I'm common despite everything because you can tell I'm from Devon
