Wednesday, October 6, 2010

The Way People Speak


Are Dialects Fading?
The answer to that is no, different dialects will never go away. Carmen Fought address language diversity in the 21st century. She states that some of her students don't like when applications ask them what ethnicity they are. They respond by checking other and writing "human being." She also says that we tend to be very attached to the distinctions among

Ex 1). Teenagers would die of embarrassment if somebody were to think that they dressed, acted or talked like their parents. We try to avoid this as much as possible like inventing new slang terms.
Ex 2). Men don't like to be mistaken as women and vice versa.

Will we all end up talking alike?
"Now that we have so much television in America, will dialects die out?
Will we all end up talking alike?"

Carmen Fought thinks not. People who oringinally settled here were seperated by geographic features or great distances, which helped to maintain the distinictions between dialects. Now, that we have airplanes to get from place to place, and t.v. to bring people who speak other dialects into our lives it is easy to think that all the different accents could eventually evaporate. Also, another important fact to think about is all the large cities that have people of very different dialects, but they still maintain to speak different from eachother.



Our language expresses who we are
Carmen says in the article that we want to sound like the people we want to be like, not like other people from other groups. Basically, people want to sound like other people who are exactly like themselves. For example: cheerleaders at Barrington want to sound like other cheerleaders at Barrington. This is the reason dialect will stay around because people want to sound like the people around them.

Chicano English is Still English
Many Chicano English speakers dont speach any spanish. Chicano English is a contact dialect. It developed were two languages were in contact. Many people who speak Chicano English today are monolinugal in English.
Carmen's co-worker:
'Why do so many Mexican-American students seem to have
such a hard time learning English, even if they were born in the U.S.?'

The student that her co-worker was talking about was a native speaker of English. Her co-worker's confusion illustrated a common myth about Chicano English:

that it is a broken version of English
spoken by people whose first language was spanish

Kids of all ethnic backgrounds learn English perfectly, but its not standard English. Mexican-American students who speak spanish at home tend to have low test scores. Carmen said that someone looking at these scores would conclude taht bilingual Mexican-American children are likely to be hindered in learning English properly because of their spanish.

My Opinion:

I agree with what Carmen was saying throughout the article about dialect never fading. Reason being, because theres still a lot of people in America who you speak to personally and you can hear their accent clearly. Also, the people who are on television still seem to have their tone of dialect when they speak. I have personally witnessed this when I went down south to Texas and visited my family. When I spoke to people there they had a really slow relaxed southern accent. Also, they had the different slang words that southeners use. They tend to mix their words together and if you're not a decendant from Texas or the southern part of the states is more difficult to understand what they are saying. When I moved to Illinois from Texas I even had a real legit southern accent, but being that I was still at a young age when I moved here I have lost that accent. That does not mean that other people who mover here from other countries will though. This article was very interesting to read on someone else's oppinion of people's dialect. Especially the Chicano English speaker's part. To see that many of them don't even speak Spanish is astonishing because I would think that would be the first and formost language they spoke.