That's a nice observation about the switch to 'foreigner speech', which I've
come across a good deal in Scotland as well. And many speakers of broad
rural dialects especially seem to be conscious of the contents of that
speech, both phonology and lexis. And of their behaviour in using it. We
lived for a year in a tiny 3-house village in rural Fife, and got to know
our neighbours quite well, and were surprised in a way at lexis that didn't
appear in their ordinary speech. Like the fact that they used the word
'onions', which I did not expect. One day when the husband and I were
talking about gardening, he said 'ingins', which I'd expected. So I asked
him why he'd always said 'onions' before and he said he didn't think us
being foreigners that we'd know the word. From then on he spoke much broader
and in a more natural way to us, and we were 'taken in' in a way that we
hadn't been before since we showed this to them surprising knowledge of
Scots. (We'd lived a year in Edinburgh previously, and I'd done a sabbatical
year largely working on Scots.) The particularly interesting offshoot of
this was that they started speaking a much less 'anglicised' language to us
(not expecting anything Scots in return), to the extent that we sometimes
had to ask them what words meant. And this also triggered a lot of
metalinguistic discourse -- they'd sometimes use a word and then tell us how
you could use that as an identifier for the next village, or the local
metropole (aye, that's what they say in Dunfermline).
RL
-----Original Message-----
From: Variationist List [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Troike,
Rudolph C - (rtroike)
Sent: 08 August 2013 02:12 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Dialect comprehension
Roger's comments on intelligibility and Scottish phonology remind me of the
time I was having students (at the University of Texas) practice phonemic
transcription, and after class one student came up to me and said "In this
word (pointing to 'football' on the list), only one sound is the same." I
asked him to pronounce it, and found: an initial bilabial fricative + [y] +
glottal stop + [b] + umremembered vowel (low mid?) + no /l/. The ways in
which the speaker of one variety could calibrate that number of differences
to understand the speaker of another variety are certainly mind-boggling,
and greatly in need of psycholinguistic investigation.
Context and content obviously has something to do with it. After living in
Mexico City for two years as a student, I stopped at a restaurant in
northern Mexico on the way back to Texas, and discovered to my great chagrin
that I could not understand the casual conversations going on within my
hearing. However, later when attending an archeological conference in
Europe, I was able to follow a talk on archeology (that was in the days of
my previous incarnation as an
archeologist) given by a speaker from Portugal, but did not -- again to my
utter amazement -- comprehend/recognize a single word of a talk given by a
speaker from Brazil. During the discussion afterward, I was able to
understand the first speaker perfectly, but never the second, though they
obviously had no trouble communicating between them.
To return to Roger's example of pub speech, Mitford Mathews once told of an
experience while he was studying at Oxford. One Sunday he hiked out into the
countryside and became lost, so when he came to a crossroads pub, he went in
and found that he could not understand the conversations going on.
When he asked the bartender for directions back to Oxford, the man switched
into comprehensible English, and as Mathews turned to leave, the curtain of
intelligibility again fell behind him.
Rudy
Rudy Troike
University of Arizona
Tucson, Arizona
USA
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