Preservationists, please save a dying language before it’s too late: Chicagoese
chicagotribune.com
chicagotribune.com
> Contrary to the general expectation that mass culture would diminish regional differences, the dialects of Los Angeles, Dallas, Chicago, Birmingham, Buffalo, Philadelphia, and New York are now more different from each other than they were a hundred years ago. Equally significant is Labov's finding that AAVE [African American Vernacular English] does not map with the geography and timing of changes in other dialects. The home dialect of most African American speakers has developed a grammar that is more and more different from that of the white mainstream dialects in the major cities studied and yet highly homogeneous throughout the United States (http://www.upress.virginia.edu/title/4510)
Is there a difference between a "dialect" and an "accent"?
Because having been in the military, I can definitely tell you that different black people have different accents. I think anyone who's been in the military could tell you that. So I'm wondering if this guy means that blacks speak the same language, which is AAVE, but the accent of a black person from Jackson, Mississippi could still be significantly different from the accent of a black person from Lincoln, Nebraska? (Because their accents are, in fact, significantly different.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_a...
The basic premise is that there is no clear distinction between the term "dialect" and "language". Especially when you hit interesting cases like dialect continuum, which is a bit like a game of telephone. Any two neighboring dialects can generally understand each other, but the further away you get the less that is true. So if you look at the two ends, is that two different languages? Even though you could walk from one to the other and everyone will understand each other?
An accent, on the other hand, is something more intrinsic to how an individual renders sounds. That is, I can speak my native language English with my accent, and I can also speak Spanish with that same accent. For instance, I could use English "r" sound (/ɹ/) instead of the Spanish rolled or tapped "r" sounds (/r/ and /ɾ/). Or I could use English vowel "e" (/ɛ/ or maybe /eɪ/) instead of Spanish vowel "e" (/e/). And so on. "Losing your accent" is basically learning how to render those sounds in a fashion that matches expectations.
Dialect includes vocabulary and grammar too, and the quote says that the grammar they use is common.
Yes! Most definitely.
I speak Norwegian with a fairly heavy English accent. The brand of norwegian I speak is a mix between "standard" bokmål, which is also kind of 'government-speak' and close to the Oslo accent, and Trøndersk, which is the local dialect where I live.
The english affects the way I pronounce things.
The difference in dialects is vast. Verbs are conjugated a bit differently: For some words, entire sounds are different. For example, "Hvor" (Where) is "Kor" in this region. Additionally, there are things like some pronouns being essentially a different word and different syllables dropped compared to other places. And lots and lots of differences like that. Even the melody is different depending on where folks are from. And these are within the same form of Norwegian - there are two official types. The written word is more standardized, but I have seen the local dialect in print form (I can barely read it).
So yes, I can completely see a southern accent being an accent, yet some things being a dialect. There is a much bigger difference between the accent and the dialect.
h₂áu̯ei̯ h₁i̯osméi̯ h₂u̯l̥h₁náh₂ né h₁ést, só h₁éḱu̯oms derḱt. só gʷr̥hₓúm u̯óǵʰom u̯eǵʰed; só méǵh₂m̥ bʰórom; só dʰǵʰémonm̥ h₂ṓḱu bʰered. h₂óu̯is h₁ékʷoi̯bʰi̯os u̯eu̯ked: “dʰǵʰémonm̥ spéḱi̯oh₂ h₁éḱu̯oms-kʷe h₂áǵeti, ḱḗr moi̯ agʰnutor”. h₁éḱu̯ōs tu u̯eu̯kond: “ḱludʰí, h₂ou̯ei̯! tód spéḱi̯omes, n̥sméi̯ agʰnutór ḱḗr: dʰǵʰémō, pótis, sē h₂áu̯i̯es h₂u̯l̥h₁náh₂ gʷʰérmom u̯éstrom u̯ept, h₂áu̯ibʰi̯os tu h₂u̯l̥h₁náh₂ né h₁esti. tód ḱeḱluu̯ṓs h₂óu̯is h₂aǵróm bʰuged.
People save stuff like this because it provides a interesting window into the human condition, not because of some assigned analytical "value".
With regards to Chicagoese, maybe I was just listening to the wrong people, but I grew up in Milwaukee and went to Chicago basically whenever I wanted for most of my young adult life, and I never heard the term Chicagoese until reading this article. I actually thought the article was satire on first read, and I would agree with the GP that there isn't really a compelling argument for it, any more than I would suggest that we preserve the idiosyncrasies that my deep-woods Wisconsinite grandparents would come up with as I grew up, even if everyone in their region used the terms.
I really don't get the thrust of the article's argument other than being upset that Chicago was ranked the accent as unattractive in the YouGov survey.
Also, though so-called Chicagoese has its own distinctive features, it's part of a larger regional dialect. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inland_Northern_American_Engli...). But that dialect is disappearing and Chicago, being the largest representative city, may become the location by which people remember it (e.g. in parody) in the future.
That's the heart of it: the dialects are now quickly disappearing (after a brief period where researchers were sure some of them were growing!) making them increasingly prominent as part of a larger social discourse.
>[It's] for historical context.
Come to think of it, I only hear it in the city because it is used for pedestrian signals and pre-recorded CTA announcements.
You'll still find it in certain neighborhoods, Beverly comes to mind.
Pretty much no young people spoke with the accents I was expecting in a particular area, everyone sounded a lot like us (West Coast).
We did hear more Texan accents in 2 days in Dallas than in a month in Austin, which I suppose is to be expected.
New Orleans was delightful when it came to accents, as were a few other cities in the South.
In most places though, we only heard very occasional local accents and they tended to be possessed by older people.
I chalked it up to people just gradually moving toward a Hollywood type of accent. I also noticed that if we spent very long in one place, my accent would shift slightly toward whatever was local, so I'm wondering if the locals, upon discovering we were from the West Coast would do the same thing and let their accent drift closer to ours.
In any case, I was always listening for accents and even though I'd never really thought about it, it was disappointing to realize that a lot of accents are probably disappearing.
That's apparently due to the large influx of Californians, though I personally run into more Easterners moving here rather than Californians.
By here, I mean Austin.
Garbage. Lies. All lies."
I went to a school where at least half the people in my dorm had a Chicago accent and I found it extremely grating.
"Chicagoese is our lyrical native tongue. But we’re losing it, bit-by-bit in the great American leveling that is destroying distinctive speech across our nation. .... “Some people still speak that way, but it is no longer as widespread or as distinct as it was 70 years ago. Radio, TV, and the great mobility of modern Americans are gradually leveling all the various, colorful, local varieties of English in favor of a dull, neutral, standard American.” "
I may be imagining things, but when I was growing up people in my area(don't want to give it away but it's a rural area where a local university would have lots of Chicago students) spoke more dull and neutral than they do now... now there's more of a southern/redneck tinge taken from country music.
Even if you could isolate them and somehow attempt to make the case that it is their intrinsic qualities that give them their "fanciness", you would then need to be consistent and claim that whenever they occur in other languages they should also contribute to making the language "sound fancy", since the counter-claim is that there do exist linguistic qualities that have aesthetic values devoid of cultural context. But I think that kind of follow-up investigation would reveal that linguistic qualities with "objective" aesthetic values are elusive, if they exist at all.
(For example, you could take two French sounds which are iconically French to English speakers[1][2]. Assuming these sounds confer fancy-points upon people with French accents, do native English speakers really grant speakers of other languages fancy-points when they use these sounds in their accented English? It's not clear to me if they would. For one thing, these same two sounds also occur in many varieties of Arabic, which Westerners generally don't regard as nearly as fancy or beautiful.)
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_uvular_fricative
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_postalveolar_fricative
A distinct language might be a little easier to preserve (but only if there is a sufficiently large number of people who want to put some effort into preserving it), as its distinctiveness helps make its preservation an overt act.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_a...
For instance, having taken German in school, I could generally read Yiddish as long as it was written in Latin alphabet and not Hebrew. Even though they are considered two separate langauges.
However, I could generally not understand, say, Swiss German, even though that's still considered German.
EDIT: I just found this interesting blurb regarding Low German in Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_German#A_language_or_a_mer...?
In the case of 'Chicagoese', whatever it is, it is clearly the English language.
I assume you're making your judgement about "clearly English" based on mutual intelligibility. That is, you expect that someone with strong skills in "English" but not "Chicagoese" would be able to understand someone speaking "Chicagoese".
But what about dialect continua where any two neighbors are mutually intelligible, but the two ends are not? How do you classify which is in which language, if you are going to declare that there are in fact two languages based on the ends not understanding each other?
That is what I was responding to. There is a difference, but it's social and not linguistic. Which means when you say things like, "Chicagoese is clearly English", that you are making a social judgement that they are the same language, whatever that means to you.
Clearly, for at least a few people quoted in the article, it has social meaning that they both speak "Chicagoese" and not "just English". So they might have a quite different opinion on the matter. And clearly the author of the article does.
* https://web.archive.org/web/20180808164502/http://www.chicag...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBnnon_iZOM
(This is Saturday Night Live from the early 90's, so it's a bit of a New York interpretation of Chicagoese.)
Nevertheless after half a decade in The City, people from my hometown of Cincinnati stated I had picked up a bit of the Chicago accent. After another half decade in The (other) City, it’s disappeared.
A few best friends of mine grew up in Beverly, fwiw.
The Tribune, back when they mattered, used a simplified version of English spelling.[1] "Tho" for "Though" was the most noticeable change. McCormack, the publisher, was into that. It didn't catch on at all.
[1] http://www.chicagotribune.com/ct-per-flash-simplespelling-02...
just VPN in though, if you really want to see
torguard has a nice interface to switch servers pretty easily, but note that it changes the traffic from your whole computer and not just a browser
To elaborate on my original point: the GDPR establishes privacy and data ownership as human rights. The remainder just elaborates on what that means in practice and addresses when and how business interests might outweigh those principles.
If your business model is incompatible with the GDPR, this almost always means you're intentionally or carelessly violating someone's (typically at least your customers') privacy or their rights to own and control their data. Note that there are many cases where those rights can already be limited for business reasons -- we're only talking about cases where not even those exemptions cover your behavior.
That's why I'm calling such business models "abusive". You're intentionally ignoring your users' rights or you're intentionally neglecting to consider their rights.
I call them "defunct" because even if you exist outside the scope of the GDPR right now, you will likely eventually either enter that scope or have to cooperate with companies who do -- at which point your non-compliance will become a defect. If your non-compliance is inherent in your business model, that defect cannot be resolved.
This thing is not like that, because it is a regional regulation intended to have global consequences. The Podunk Gazette of Podunk AL has no idea how EU regulations work or whom to lobby to get them changed. You're probably right that EU doesn't care about this newspaper, but they do care about e.g. LAT or WSJ. Where is the cutoff? Who knows?
This is true even if we stipulate that GDPR has the wonderful properties you claim, which I doubt. No one running a business wants to assume something like that.
GDPR is not just about preventing abusive behavior, though. If I sell someone my data, arguably the buyer should become its owner in full extent - GDPR makes that impossible even if both parties are fully informed and willing.
GDPR made it even more unclear.