Топик: Lexicology. Different dialects and accents of English

6) Last but not least, there may be a marked difference in frequency characteristics. Thus, time-table which occurs in American English very rarely, yielded its place to schedule.

This question of different frequency distribution is also of paramount importance if we wish to investigate the morphological peculiarities of the American variant. Practically speaking the same patterns and means of word-formation are used in coining neologisms in both variants. Only the frequency ob­served in both cases may be different. Some of the suffixes more frequently used in American English are: - ее (draftee n 'a young man about to be enlisted'), -ette - tambourmajorette 'one of the girl drummers in front of a procession'), -dom and -ster, as in roadster 'motor-car for long journeys by road' or gangsterdom.

American slang uses alongside the traditional ones also a few specific models, such as verb stem-1- -er+adverb stem +--er: e.g. opener-upper 'the first item on the programme' and winder-upper 'the last item', respectively. It also possesses some specific affixes and semi-affixes not used in literary Colloquial: -o, -eroo, -aroo, -sie/sy, as in coppo 'police­man', fatso 'a fat man', bossaroo 'boss', chapsie 'fellow'.

The trend to shorten words and to use initial abbreviations is even more pronounced than in the British variant. New coinages are incessant­ly introduced in advertisements, in the press, in everyday conversation; soon they fade out and are replaced by the newest creations. Ring Lardner, very popular in the 30's, makes one of his characters, a hospital nurse, repeatedly use two enigmatic abbreviations: G.F. and P. F.; at last the patient asks her to clear the mystery.

"What about Roy Stewart?" asked the man in bed.

"Oh, he's the fella I was telling you about," said Miss Lyons. "He's my G. F B. F"

"Maybe I'm a D.F. not to know, but would yoa tell me what a B.F. and G.F. are?"

"Well, you are dumb, aren't you?" said Miss Lyons. "A G.F., that's a girl friend, and a B.F. is a boy friend. I thought everybody knew that"

The phrases boy friend and girl friend, now widely used everywhere, originated in the USA. So it is an Americanism in the wider meaning of the term, i.e. an Americanism "by right of birth", whereas in the above definition it was defined Americanism synchronically as lexical units peculiar to the English language as spoken in the USA. Particularly common in American English are verbs with the hanging postpositive. They say that in Hollywood you never meet a man: you meet up with him, you do not study a subject but study up on it. In British English similar constructions serve to add a new meaning.

With words possessing several structural variants it may happen that some are more frequent in one country and the others in another. Thus, amid and toward, for example, are more often used in the States and amidst and towards in Great Britain.

A well-known humourist G. Mikes goes as far as to say: "It was decid­ed almost two hundred years ago that English should be the language spoken in the United States. It is not known, however, why this decision has not been carried out." In his book "How to Scrape Skies" he gives numerous examples to illustrate this proposition: "You must be extreme­ly careful concerning the names of certain articles. If you ask for sus­penders in a man's shop, you receive a pair of braces, if you ask for a pair of pants, you receive a pair of trousers and should you ask for a pair of braces, you receive a queer look. It has to be mentioned that although a lift is called an elevator in the United States, when hitch-hiking, you do not ask for an elevator, you ask for a lift.

There is some confusion about the word flat. A flat in America is called an apartment; what they call a flat is a puncture in your tyre (or as they spell it, tire). Consequently the notice: flats fixed does not indi­cate an estate agent where they are going to fix you up with a flat, but a garage where they are equipped to mend a puncture." Disputing the common statement that there is no such thing as the American nation, he says: "They do indeed exist. They have produced the American constitution, the American way of life, the comic strips in their newspapers: .they have their national game, baseball —which is cricket played with a strong American accent — and they have a national language, entirely their own."

This is of course an exaggeration, but a very significant one. It con­firms the fact that there is a difference between the two variants to be reckoned with. Although not sufficiently great to warrant American Eng­lish the status of an independent language, it is considerable enough to make a mixture of variants sound unnatural, so that students of English should be warned against this danger.

Local Dialects in the USA

The English language in the USA is characterized by relative uniformity throughout the country. One can travel three thousand miles without encountering any but the slightest dialect differences. Nevertheless, regional variations in speech undoubtedly exist and they have been observed and recorded by a number of investigators. The following three major belts of dialects have so far been identified, each with its own characteristic features: Northern, Midland and South­ern, Midland being in turn divided into North Midland and South Mid­land.

The differences in pronunciation between American dialects are most apparent, but they seldom interfere with understanding. Distinctions in grammar are scarce. The differences in vocabulary are rather numer­ous, but they are easy to pick up.

Cf., e.g., Eastern New England sour-milk cheese, Inland Northern Dutch cheese, New York City pot cheese for Standard American/cottage cheese ( творог ).

The American linguist F. Emerson maintains that American Eng­lish had not had time to break up into widely diverse dialects and he believes that in the course of time the American dialects might finally become nearly as distinct as the dialects in Britain. He is certainly great­ly mistaken. In modern times dialect divergence cannot increase. On the contrary, in the United States, as elsewhere, the national language is tending to wipe out the dialect distinctions and to become still more uniform.

Comparison of the dialect differences in the British Isles and in the USA reveals that not only are they less numerous and far less marked in the USA, but that the very nature of the local distinctions is different. What is usually known as American dialects is closer in nature to region­al variants of the literary language. The problem of discriminating between literary and dialect speech patterns in the USA is much more complicated than in Britain. Many American linguists point out that American English differs from British English in having no one locality whose speech patterns have come to be recognized as the model for the rest of the country.

CANADIAN, AUSTRALIAN AND INDIAN VARIANTS

It should of course be noted that the American English is not the only existing variant. There are several other variants where difference from the British standard is normalized. Besides the Irish and Scottish vari­ants that have been mentioned in the preceding paragraph, there are Aus­tralian English, Canadian English, Indian English. Each of these has de­veloped a literature of its own, and is characterized by peculiarities in phonetics, spelling, grammar and vocabulary. Canadian English is influenced both by British and American Eng­lish but it also has some specific features of its own. Specifically Cana­dian words are called Canadianisms. They are not very frequent outside Canada, except shack 'a hut' and to fathom out 'to explain'.

The vocabulary of all the variants is characterized by a high percent­age of borrowings from the language of the people who inhabited the land before the English colonizers came. Many of them denote some spe­cific realia of the new country: local animals, plants or weather condi­tions, new social relations, new trades and conditions of labour. The local words for new not ions penetrate into the English language and later on may become international, if they are of sufficient interest and importance for people speaking other languages. The term international w о г d s is used to denote words borrowed from one language into sev­eral others simultaneously or at short intervals one after another. International words coming through the English of India are for in­stance: bungalow n, jute n, khaki adj, mango n, nabob n, pyjamas, sahib, sari.

Similar examples, though perhaps fewer in number, such as boome­rang, dingo, kangaroo are all adopted into the English language through its Australian variant. They denote the new phenomena found by Eng­lish immigrants on the new continent. A high percentage of words bor­rowed from the native inhabitants of Australia will be noticed in the so­norous Australian place names.

Otherwise an ample use was made of English lexical material. An intense development of cattle breeding in new conditions necessitated the creation of an adequate terminology. It is natural therefore that nouns like stock, bullock or land find a new life on Australian soil: stockman 'herdsman', stockyard, stock-keeper 'the owner of the cattle'; bullock v means 'to work hard', bullocky dray is a dray driven by bullocks; an inlander is a stock-keeper driving his stock from one pasture to another, overland v is 'to drive cattle over long distances'; to punch a cow 'to conduct a team of oxen'; a puncher 'the man who conducts a team of oxen'; tucker-bag 'the bag with provision'.

The differences described in the present chapter do not undermine our understanding of the English vocabulary as a balanced system. It has been noticed by a number of linguists that the British attitude to this phenomenon is somewhat peculiar. When anyone other than an Englishman uses English, the natives of Great Britain, often half-consciously, perhaps, feel that they have a special right to criticize his usage because it is "their" language. It is, however, unreasonable with respect to people in the Vfiited States, Canada, Australia and some other areas for whom English is their mother-tongue. Those who think that the Ameri­cans must look to the British for a standard are wrong and, vice versa, it is not for the American to pretend that English in Great Britain is inferior to the English he speaks. At present there is no single "correct" English and the American, Canadian and Australian English have devel­oped standards of their own.

Conclusion

I. English is the national language of England proper, the USA, Australia and some provinces of Canada. It was also at different times imposed on the inhabitants of the former and present British colonies and. protectorates as well as other Britain- and US-dominated territories, where the population has always stuck to its own mother tongue.

II. British English, American English and Australian English are variants of the same language, because they serve all spheres of verbal communication. Their structural pecularities, especially morphology, syntax and word-formation, as well as their word-stock and phonetic system are essentially the same. American and Australian standards are slight modifications of the norms accepted in the British Isles. The status of Canadian English 'has not yet been established.

III. The main lexical differences between the variants are caused by the lack of equivalent lexical units in one of them, divergences in the semantic structures of polysemantic words and peculiarities of usage of some words on different territories.

IV. The British local dialects can be traced back to Old English dia­lects. Numerous and distinct, they are characterized by phonemic and structural peculiarities. The local dialects are being gradually replaced by regional variants of the literary language, i. e. by a literary standard with a proportion of local dialect features.