Native language/dialect...disappearing

[cpdv]

I apologize if my post is offensive with the description of "Irish tactics" to anyone. I got on a history rant. I was going to school to be a history teacher at one point.

 

[HudsonHawk]

With the Iriquois but thats because they were allied with the Heron against them. For instance during the 7 years war during the English occupation of Acadia and forceful expulsion of the inhabitants the Acadians and Mi'kmaq & Maliseet fought a guerrilla war against them. During that period a large part of the indigenous people in New France were a odd combination of Catholicism and their traditional beliefs and not in the form of what the Spanish did with "convert or die". The French were very laissez faire about them. Theres a reason why i'm part Abenaki and its because they didn't have the same contempt for them the English did. More recently (past 400 years or so) its been a very English thing to force people out of their homes in for instance the winter and forcibly relocate them to some barren place. The English at Jamestown coloney in Virgina under Lord De La Warr used what they called "Irish Tactics" Ie what they used in Ireland to defeat the Powhatans. It consisted of taking a town killing/raping inhabitants taking anything of use and burning everything. And agreed the Spanish were the worst!

The French were certainly more "businesslike" than the English, especially in New France, but they really got crossways with the natives in the southern US...Mississippi and Louisiana, in particular. They were more "anti-English" than they were "pro-native"...the old "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" approach. And as for forcing people from their homes, remember the French were the biggest African slave traders of them all, importing nearly 5 times as many as the English. But I think you can find examples of any of the Europeans forcing their ideals on the New World natives. They all shared the same sense of obligation when it came to religious conversion and the need to "civilize" those they considered inferior. And again, that didn't start with the New World. You can find examples of it throughout human history, all over the world.

 

[esteban68]

Miss Sis good luck with the Dutch I tried years ago and failed to keep it up, happily I 've been more successful with my Spanish....You appear to construct some of your language in the Dutch way..... "but then he has been living fifty years in New Zealand and speaking it every day" does he say also at the end of some sentences? I love the Dutch accent when they speak English, listening to my Dutch father in law is a wonder to behold.

 

[Renault]

Only real problems the French had in the south were with the Natchez (due to an certain extremely corrupt post commandant), and the Chickasaw as they were allies of the English. French/Native affairs were pretty peaceful. Otherwise it was the same policies toward the Natives as elsewhere in New France.

Funny to note that after the Treaty of Paris, 1763 the Spanish hired most all the former French trade officials in Louisiana to assist with the Natives as the Spanish record with the locals was quite dismal.

 

[Miss Sis]

Miss Sis good luck with the Dutch I tried years ago and failed to keep it up, happily I 've been more successful with my Spanish....You appear to construct some of your language in the Dutch way..... "but then he has been living fifty years in New Zealand and speaking it every day" does he say also at the end of some sentences? I love the Dutch accent when they speak English, listening to my Dutch father in law is a wonder to behold.

I only learn a word here and there when I visit my family (most of it unhelpful in everyday life!). My cousin says we should have a Skype lesson once a week! My Dad still has a Dutch accent, but he sounds like a Dutch Kiwi, rather than a Dutchman speaking English. My Uncle and Aunt do still make little errors that are common, such as saying 'make a photo', rather than 'take a photo', etc. My cousin and her husband do put 'also' at the end of sentences.

It is interesting that you think I construct some sentences in a Dutch way. I'm a native English speaker, but I find when I go to countries where another language is spoken that I start to construct my English sentences very strangely indeed! It's a bit embarrassing really.

 

[Drappa]

Fascinating thread! But then I'm a language teacher.
My grandparents spoke a local German dialect (Plattdeutsch) and I picked it up as a child living in the same house with them. Sadly it's dying out with the older generation, though I hear that some schools are introducing it again and there are Platt radioshows and plays etc. on. I used to understand it well as a child, but lost much over the years.

 

[MikeBravo]

My Dad still has a Dutch accent, but he sounds like a Dutch Kiwi, rather than a Dutchman speaking English.

Oh dear, I can only imagine!

 

[esteban68]

Miss Sis don't get embarrassed if you make a mistake most people will help and correct you if they can....in 25+ years travelling around mainland Europe in Germany, Holland,Belgium, france, Italy and Spain I don't think anybody has ever laughed at my sometimes feeble attempts to pronounce their language. We holiday in France and Spain mostly now and at first we loved not understanding what the locals were saying especially in Spain , my wife actively sought out bars etc that had no Brits there so she didn't have to listen to the same old 'moanings' however now we understand Spanish pretty well you start to realise their conversations are pretty much the same as ours with less emphasis on the weather's it's mainly 'scorchio' down here in Nerja!

 

[Flicka]

I only learn a word here and there when I visit my family (most of it unhelpful in everyday life!). My cousin says we should have a Skype lesson once a week! My Dad still has a Dutch accent, but he sounds like a Dutch Kiwi, rather than a Dutchman speaking English. My Uncle and Aunt do still make little errors that are common, such as saying 'make a photo', rather than 'take a photo', etc. My cousin and her husband do put 'also' at the end of sentences.

It is interesting that you think I construct some sentences in a Dutch way. I'm a native English speaker, but I find when I go to countries where another language is spoken that I start to construct my English sentences very strangely indeed! It's a bit embarrassing really.

I'm a native Swedish speaker and I understand very little of spoken Dutch, but without ever having studied it, I can read it pretty well - I've actually read rather complicated government reports and such in Dutch with little problem. Vocabulary and grammar is very similar. Dutch and Swedish accents actually aren't that different, either. First time I was in Belgium and spoke French, people spontaneously told me "oh, you're Flemish!"

But yes, sentence construction. That's the hardest for me when moving between English and Swedish, because when I've spoken one language for a period of time, I have trouble with my sentence construction in the other.

One thing I recently read that intrigued me is that Danish (which is so similar to Swedish that we usually understand each other fine) had a much more distinct diction still in the 1940s, so that we actually understood it each other better. That article claimed that our pronounciation has become significantly more different in the last decades.

As for Sweden, we haven't spoken what could be considered different languages to any large extent for a long time (not for several hundreds of years), but I would say the minority languages are probably in a better position today than in the 30s, because it's now a priority to preserve them, whereas in the early 20th century, they were trying to stamp them out. My grandfather was Sami and Sami is a distinctly different language from Swedish (they have nothing in common at all, no more than say English and Finnish). You had several versions of it once upon a time, most notably northern Sami and southern Sami. My grandfather's family was southern Sami and that language isn't really spoken anymore thanks to the government's attitude in the 19th and early 20th century when it was a pronounced strategy of the government's to completely "Swedify" the Sami. They were nomads and lived off hunting, gathering and reindeer husbandry and the government tried very hard to root out the traditional way of living. My last name means "Stayman" in Swedish, and was adopted by my great-grandfather as a significant marker when he gave up the nomad lifestyle and his naming tradition and tried to become Swedish (here's a post I wrote with pictures of 19th century Sami life so you can get a feel for how very materially poor their lifestyle was http://victorianexplorer.blogspot.se/2013/02/a-visit-to-lapland-1868.html ). One of my grandfather's brothers was so deeply ashamed of his heritage that he refused to admit it at all (while his cousins lived extremely traditionally and still moved around with their herds of reindeer and even lived in tents made of reindeer hide in the summers). Now the government is trying very hard to undo the damage it did, and is encouraging Sami culture and language, but you can't really unscramble the eggs. Significantly, I don't even know a single word of Sami.

 

[esteban68]

Quite sad Flicka....I have recently been informed by a teacher of 12 years that here in the UK that there is an 'unofficial' movement within English primary schools to discourage the use of local dialects and colloquialisms by the children!

 

[HudsonHawk]

Quite sad Flicka....I have recently been informed by a teacher of 12 years that here in the UK that there is an 'unofficial' movement within English primary schools to discourage the use of local dialects and colloquialisms by the children!

That has long been the case here in the US, particularly in the South, where local dialects and colloquialisms are ridiculed as being inferior and a sign of ignorance.

 

[Miss Sis]

My cousin's husband laughed at me - he said I had to stop trying to say things like a German!!!! Well, I did do three years of German at High School. Now all pretty much forgotten, apart from the pronunciation....

Miss Sis don't get embarrassed if you make a mistake most people will help and correct you if they can....in 25+ years travelling around mainland Europe in Germany, Holland,Belgium, france, Italy and Spain I don't think anybody has ever laughed at my sometimes feeble attempts to pronounce their language. We holiday in France and Spain mostly now and at first we loved not understanding what the locals were saying especially in Spain , my wife actively sought out bars etc that had no Brits there so she didn't have to listen to the same old 'moanings' however now we understand Spanish pretty well you start to realise their conversations are pretty much the same as ours with less emphasis on the weather's it's mainly 'scorchio' down here in Nerja!

 

[fashion frank]

When I was a kid my Grandmother spoke Italian in the house, spoke it to my older aunts and uncles BUT spoke english to us kids only and I remember her saying " we are in America now so you need to speak english and she would never speak
Italian when we were out in public.

All the Best ,Fashion Frank

 

[LizzieMaine]

"A lotta people who ain't sayin' 'ain't' ain't eatin'!"
-- Dizzy Dean

 

[Classydame]

Here's an interesting "dialect" that is dying out...

Tweeting in Turkey

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB100...5878760.html?mod=ITP_AHED#articleTabs=article

I though this was a cute article. It is not too deep but it is fun and a little sad.

 

[rjb1]

I remember ole Diz talking about a player who "slud" into third...

 

[rjb1]

This is more related to accents, not dialects, but do you immediately recognize someone from your local area by the way they talk/sound if you hear them on TV or in a movie?
I was watching the TV series "Deadwood", and the first sentence out of Dan Dority's mouth made me say, "That's guy's from HERE." I looked up his bio and he did grow up about 40 miles east of here (Nashville).

 

[HudsonHawk]

This is more related to accents, not dialects, but do you immediately recognize someone from your local area by the way they talk/sound if you hear them on TV or in a movie?
I was watching the TV series "Deadwood", and the first sentence out of Dan Dority's mouth made me say, "That's guy's from HERE." I looked up his bio and he did grow up about 40 miles east of here (Nashville).

I can pick out some, particularly different Southern accents. I can immediately tell someone from Virginia from North Carolina from Florida from Mississippi. Some of the more distinct northern accents are identifiable as well...New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Chicago are all very distinct. And of course New Orleans...nothing else sounds like that. There are even a few non-US accents that I can recognize. For example, I've worked with enough Scotsmen over the years to know if he's from Glasgow, Edinburgh or Aberdeen.

 

[HoosierDaddy]

Well..here in Indiana we say: "She did the warsh..while he was out hunting rabbits in the booshes". [huh]
HD

 

[HudsonHawk]

Well..here in Indiana we say: "She did the warsh..while he was out hunting rabbits in the booshes". [huh]
HD

Southern accents can be divided at a high level into two main categories; rhotic and non-rhotic. Rhotic means you pronounce the hard "r" sound...as in "butt-err" vs "butt-uh" or for "major" it's "may-jer" or "may-juh". It also means that we sometimes pronounce the "r" even when it's not there, so you get words like "warsh" or you look out the "winder" or see the color "yeller". All which conjures up images of Jed Clampet to the rest of the world.