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Dialect Levelling In Britain
Dialect levelling is the means by which dialect differences decrease. For example, in rural areas of Britain, although English is widely spoken, the pronunciation and the grammar have historically varied. During the twentieth century, more people moved into towns and cities, standardising English. Dialect levelling can develop by the influence of various types of media. Background Many of the great works in English dialectology were prompted because of fears that the dialects would soon die out and of a desire to record the dialect in time. Joseph Wright began his ''English Dialect Dictionary'' by saying "It is quite evident from the letters daily received at the 'Workshop' that pure dialect speech is rapidly disappearing from our midst, and that in a few years it will be almost impossible to get accurate information about difficult points." Harold Orton told his fieldworkers on the Survey of English Dialects that they had to work quickly in "a last-minute exercise to scoop o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dialect Levelling
Dialect levelling or leveling (in American English) is the process of an overall reduction in the variation or diversity of features between two or more dialects. Typically, this comes about through assimilation, mixture, and merging of certain dialects, often by language standardization. It has been observed in most languages with large numbers of speakers after industrialisation and modernisation of the areas in which they are spoken. Definition Dialect levelling has been defined as the process by which structural variation in dialects is reduced, "the process of eliminating prominent stereotypical features of differences between dialects", "a social process hatconsists in negotiation between speakers of different dialects aimed at setting the properties of, for example, a lexical entry", "the reduction of variation between dialects of the same language in situations where speakers of these dialects are brought together", "the eradication of socially or locally marked variants ( ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sociolinguists
Sociolinguistics is the descriptive study of the effect of any or all aspects of society, including cultural norms, expectations, and context, on the way language is used, and society's effect on language. It can overlap with the sociology of language, which focuses on the effect of language on society. Sociolinguistics overlaps considerably with pragmatics and is closely related to linguistic anthropology. Sociolinguistics' historical interrelation with anthropology can be observed in studies of how language varieties differ between groups separated by social variables (e.g., ethnicity, religion, status, gender, level of education, age, etc.) and/or geographical barriers (a mountain range, a desert, a river, etc.). Such studies also examine how such differences in usage and differences in beliefs about usage produce and reflect social or socioeconomic classes. As the usage of a language varies from place to place, language usage also varies among social classes, and it is th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Thames Estuary
The Thames Estuary is where the River Thames meets the waters of the North Sea, in the south-east of Great Britain. Limits An estuary can be defined according to different criteria (e.g. tidal, geographical, navigational or in terms of salinity). For this reason the limits of the Thames Estuary have been defined differently at different times and for different purposes. Western This limit of the estuary has been defined in two main ways: * The narrow estuary is strongly tidal and is known as the Tideway. It starts in south-west London at Teddington Lock and weir, Teddington/Ham. This point is also mid-way between Richmond Lock which only keeps back a few miles of man-made head (stasis) of water during low tide and the extreme modern-era head at Thames Ditton Island on Kingston reach where slack water occurs at maximal high tide in times of rainfall-caused flooded banks. In terms of salinity the transition from freshwater to estuarine occurs around Battersea; east of the Th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Estuary English
Estuary English is an English accent associated with the area along the River Thames and its estuary, including London. Phonetician John C. Wells proposed a definition of Estuary English as "Standard English spoken with the accent of the southeast of England". He views Estuary English as an emerging standard accent of England: an "intermediate" between the 20th-century higher-class non-regional standard accent, Received Pronunciation, and the 20th-century lower-class local London accent, Cockney. There is some debate among linguists as to where Cockney speech ends and Estuary English begins. Name Cruttenden uses the term London Regional General British in preference to the popular term 'Estuary English'. The names listed above may be abbreviated: * Estuary English → EE * London Regional General British → London RGB Wells has used different names for an accent closer to Cockney (Popular London) or closer to Received Pronunciation (London Regional Standard or South-Eastern Re ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Adverbial
In English grammar, an adverbial (abbreviated ) is a word (an adverb) or a group of words (an adverbial clause or adverbial phrase) that modifies or more closely defines the sentence or the verb. (The word ''adverbial'' itself is also used as an adjective, meaning "having the same function as an adverb".) Look at the examples below: :''Danny speaks fluently.'' (telling more about the verb) :''Lorna ate breakfast yesterday morning''. (telling when the verb's action occurred) The form of adverbials Adverbials most commonly take the form of adverbs, adverb phrases, temporal noun phrases or prepositional phrases. Many types of adverbials (for instance: reason and condition) are often expressed by clauses. :''James answered immediately''. (adverb) :''James answered in English.'' (prepositional phrase) :''James answered this morning.'' (noun phrase) :''James answered in English because he had a foreign visitor''. ( adverbial clause) An adverbial is a construction which modifies or ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Perfect Participle
In linguistics, a participle () (from Latin ' a "sharing, partaking") is a nonfinite verb form that has some of the characteristics and functions of both verbs and adjectives. More narrowly, ''participle'' has been defined as "a word derived from a verb and used as an adjective, as in a ''laughing face''". “Participle” is a traditional grammatical term from Greek and Latin that is widely used for corresponding verb forms in European languages and analogous forms in Sanskrit and Arabic grammar. Cross-linguistically, participles may have a range of functions apart from adjectival modification. In European and Indian languages, the past participle is used to form the passive voice. In English, participles are also associated with periphrastic verb forms (continuous and perfect) and are widely used in adverbial clauses. In non-Indo-European languages, ‘participle’ has been applied to forms that are alternatively regarded as converbs (see Sireniki Eskimo below), gerunds, geru ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Relative Pronoun
A relative pronoun is a pronoun that marks a relative clause. It serves the purpose of conjoining modifying information about an antecedent referent. An example is the word ''which'' in the sentence "This is the house which Jack built." Here the relative pronoun ''which'' conjoins the relative clause "Jack built," which modifies the noun ''house'' in the main sentence. ''Which'' has an anaphoric relationship to its antecedent "house" in the main clause. In the English language, the following are the most common relative pronouns: ''which'', ''that'', ''whose'', ''whoever'', ''whomever'', ''who'' and ''whom''. According to some dependency grammar theories, a relative pronoun does not simply mark the subordinate (relative) clause but also may be considered to play the role of a noun within that clause. For example, in the relative clause "that Jack built," "that" is deemed a pronoun functioning as the object of the verb "built." Compare this with "Jack built the house after he m ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Demonstrative Determiner
A determiner, also called determinative (list of glossing abbreviations, abbreviated ), is a word, phrase, or affix that occurs together with a noun or noun phrase and generally serves to express the reference of that noun or noun phrase in the context. That is, a determiner may indicate whether the noun is referring to a definite or indefinite element of a class, to a closer or more distant element, to an element belonging to a specified person or thing, to a particular number or quantity, etc. Common kinds of determiners include definite and indefinite article (grammar), articles (''the'', ''a''), demonstratives (''this'', ''that''), possessive determiners (''my,'' ''their''), cardinal numerals (''one'', ''two''), quantifier (linguistics), quantifiers (''many'', ''both''), Distributive pronoun, distributive determiners (''each'', ''every''), and Interrogative word, interrogative determiners (''which'', ''what''). Description Most determiners have been traditionally classed eith ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Th-fronting
''Th''-fronting is the pronunciation of the English "th" as "f" or "v". When ''th''-fronting is applied, becomes (for example, ''three'' is pronounced as ''free'') and becomes (for example, ''bathe'' is pronounced as ''bave''). (Here "fronting" refers to the position in the mouth where the sound is produced, not the position of the sound in the word, with the "th" coming from the tongue as opposed to the "f" or "v" coming from the more-forward lower lip.) Unlike the fronting of to , the fronting of to usually does not occur word-initially (for example, while ''bathe'' can be pronounced as ''bave'', ''that'' is rarely pronounced as *''vat'') although this was found in the speech of South-East London in a survey completed 1990-4. ''Th''-fronting is a prominent feature of several dialects of English, notably Cockney, Essex dialect, Estuary English, some West Country and Yorkshire dialects, African American Vernacular English, and Liberian English, as well as in many non-nati ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Standard English
In an English-speaking country, Standard English (SE) is the variety of English that has undergone substantial regularisation and is associated with formal schooling, language assessment, and official print publications, such as public service announcements and newspapers of record, etc. All linguistic features are subject to the effects of standardisation, including morphology, phonology, syntax, lexicon, register, discourse markers, pragmatics, as well as written features such as spelling conventions, punctuation, capitalisation and abbreviation practices. SE is local to nowhere: its grammatical and lexical components are no longer regionally marked, although many of them originated in different, non-adjacent dialects, and it has very little of the variation found in spoken or earlier written varieties of English. According to Peter Trudgill, Standard English is a social dialect pre-eminently used in writing that is distinguishable from other English dialects largely by a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Posh
Posh is an informal adjective for "upper class". It may also refer to: Entertainment * ''Posh'' (album), a 1980 album by Patrice Rushen *"Posh!", a 1968 song from the musical ''Chitty Chitty Bang Bang'' * ''Posh'' (2006 TV series), a 2006 Philippine television drama * ''Posh'' (play), by the British playwright Laura Wade, first staged in 2010 **''The Riot Club'', formerly titled ''Posh'', a 2014 film adaptation of the play Computing *Plain Old Semantic HTML, a term used by the microformat community to describe some uses of Semantic HTML *Poshlib, the Portable Open Source Harness *PowerShell, sometimes abbreviated PoSh Other *Victoria Beckham (born 1974), singer nicknamed "Posh Spice" while she was a member of the Spice Girls *Peterborough United F.C., an English football club, nicknamed "The Posh" *Received Pronunciation, sometimes known as a "posh accent" *Posh (Haganah unit), the commando arm of the Haganah during the 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine * Sexual Harassment of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Received Pronunciation
Received Pronunciation (RP) is the Accent (sociolinguistics), accent traditionally regarded as the Standard language, standard and most Prestige (sociolinguistics), prestigious form of spoken British English. For over a century, there has been argument over such questions as the definition of RP, whether it is geographically neutral, how many speakers there are, whether sub-varieties exist, how appropriate a choice it is as a standard and how the accent has changed over time. The name itself is controversial. RP is an accent, so the study of RP is concerned only with matters of pronunciation; other areas relevant to the study of language standards such as vocabulary, grammar and Style (sociolinguistics), style are not considered. History RP has most in common with the dialects of South East Midlands, namely London, Oxford and Cambridge. By the end of the 15th century, "Standard English" was established in the City of London, though it did not begin to resemble RP until the late ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
