Week 13 Flashcards
Inner-circle countries
Australia, New Zealand
Which processes reduce the local diversity of dialects within the UK? What is this due?
Levelling and diffusion. This has been partly due to the great development of communications (aircraft, telegraph, internet, radio).
The mutual influence between different national varieties of English shows itself especially in… what? What is an example of this?
Vocabulary. Many people are surprised that some commonly used words are of American origin: cockroach, tornado.
Terms from Australia and New Zealand adopted by English
Australia: bush telegraph, uni.
New Zealand: zorbing.
What is a feature which is heard in speech of young people from a wide range of ‘inner circle’ countries?
High Rising Tone, Australian Question Intonation and Uptalk. These labels refer to a pattern of speech in which the final syllable(s) of a declarative utterance have the rising tone usually associated with a question.
Dialect levelling
A process whereby, over a large area, distinctive features of a local dialect give way to more wide-ranging ‘regional’ ones.
What is an example of dialect levelling?
Social and demographic factors such as the creation of ‘new towns’ like Milton Keynes, relocation and commuting, have brought together speakers of different dialects.
Interaction between these speakers has led to the loss of features associated with a particular location, and used by a minatory of speakers in the ‘new’ community.
What is diffusion and what are examples of this?
A process whereby features spread from a specific point of origin over a wide area.
Examples of ‘diffusing’ features are glottalisation, especially of medial and final /t/ and the use of /f/ and /v/ where RP would have /θ/ and /ð/.
The expansion of the vocabulary is expanding quickly. Where/how do these new words come from?
- New words are coined from Greek and Latin morphemes for use in science, medicine and technology (cosmonaut).
- Compounding (spell-check, homepage).
- Shortening (weblog to blog).
- Conversion (noun Google to verb Google or Googled).
- Loanwords (limoncello from Italian).
What is a common cause of semantic change?
Formal influence: the form of a word causes it to be confused with another word, which influences its meaning. An example is the word format (technical term for bibliography, but now people use it for layout/design).
