View original post

View original postTrue: There is far more to dialect generally. That only underscores the significance of modern British English being practically indistinguishable from that taught and spoken in India, all of Western Europe, most of Africa and the remaining British colonies (just for the record: Indias population ALONE outnumbers the US (not just its Southern region) by a factor of 4, and Europes by a factor of 2.) Given all dialect involves, the nearly perfect equivalence between UK, Continental European, African and Indian English strongly suggest they are not just superficially and/or incidentally identical, but ACTUALLY so. That those speakers outnumber Southern US English speakers by an order of magnitude irrefutably establishes British English as the "larger" dialect by population as well as area.

Is there any particular definition of "British English", or alternatively of "practically indistinguishable" and "nearly perfect equivalence", that one needs to be aware of to make sense of this paragraph? Because it's not making a whole lot of sense to me using the normal definitions of those concepts.

I believe (perhaps erroneously) the dialect of English taught in India, Africa and Continental Europe is officially CALLED "British English," so the English taught and generally spoken in each is not just "practially indistinguishable" from but literally synonymous with that of the UK. The nomenclature was improvised a bit in an effort to transform a geographic distinction into a lingual one that I do not believe exists.

In essence, I needed a way to identify and separate the British English spoken on three continents, and wanted to do some CYA in case a native Indian showed up and said, "Actually, we do not learn British English: Though all other words, meaning and spellings are identical, instead of saying, 'cobra,' we transliterate the Hindi term to 'mongoose-food.'"

Well, they do not sound the same even among those fluent; at my last US job, I worked with numerous immigrants from various African countries: Not only did several have accent to thick as to be almost unintelligible to me, but there was no single "African English" accent: The Kenyans, Ethiopians and Ghanans each had (at least to my ear) distinct accents.

To the primary question though:

1) Many (I daresay most) Indian and Continental Europeans speak English at or near the level of fluency and

2) between them constitute nearly 1/3 of the global populace; adding in Africans who either speak it on the same basis or as a native language makes them ~80% of all English speakers.

When debating which dialect is a languages largest, how is it fair to NOT discuss 4 out of 5 its speakers just because they are non-native speakers, especially when most speak it as well as most natives? You write English better than many native speakers, so why would I exclude you from "English speakers" just because it is your second, third or fifteenth language? The is the form learned and used, not whether it was acquired from ones parents or ones formal educators.

In principle, perhaps, but since

1) The US was a colony two centuries, 2) British English progressed through more than one form even in that brief span and 3) all predate "Victorian English" by a century

how can anyone guess which "British English of the US colonial period" rt declares modern Southern dialect matches better than Britains does? That is, since US colonists COULD not have brought a "Victorian dialect," do their heirs preserve the pre- or post-Johnson English dialect better than England does? Johnsons dictionary was an epochal event in English dialect and diction, so the question is critical to the larger discussion.

I do not pretend to be a formal scholar of dialect or accent, but my laymans impression is that dialects change much faster yet less prominently than accents, making this whole discussion murky. Look at "I should think..." and similar British English constructions from the US colonial era: Modern British English still accepts that, but the majority of Southern (and all US) linguists prefer "I would think..."--since maybe 50 years ago. Tens of millions of Americans have thus seen one form of what was the "standard American" dialect of their youth become "archaic" in their lifetime; I could be wrong, but do not believe that often happens to accents.

Sure, US dialects that did not get the post-Revolutionary update use many archaic English terms. Yet even within the South many of those are far from uniform. To take a notorious example, "et" (not only pronounced but SPELLED as such) as the past tense of "eat" is used only in a tiny PART of the South, essentially swathes of Tennessee, southern Kentucky, eastern Missouri and eastern Missouri (double-checking that just now I saw someone claiming it is common in Texas, but I have never encountered it there; maybe rt has, since he lives near the Arkies. ) That is pretty much it; anyone who encounters the word ANYWHERE else is either watching reruns of "The Beverly Hillbillies" or speaking with an Englishman who uses a particular British accent (and even the latter still spells the word, "ate:" It is a different accent, not dialect.)

Bottom line, best case scenario for the assertion that started this sub-thread: The assertion cannot be conclusively PROVEN wrong, but there is much substantial EVIDENCE against it, and the burden of proof always lies on an assertion, else anyone could say any absurd thing and expect it to be accepted as fact until/unless someone refuted it by proving a negative. Since Indians alone (e.g. excluding Pakistanis) outnumber Southern English speakers by an order of magnitude, and European and African speakers each do so by half that much, it is very unlikely any (much less ALL) of them speak (an) English dialect(s) less common than the Souths. There is no airtight proof either way, but also no reason to believe dialect varies significantly more within any single region than within any other.

Mutliply all that by at 250+ years when asking whether modern British or Southern English is more like Sir Francis Drake and/or William Pitts dialect.