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UK Dialects Research

Interesting article
Interesting, yet also an oddly-reported one.

The key summary statement missing from it is their priority intention, to digitise an existing set of researched data, specifically, that:
www.leeds.ac.uk said:
Between 1946 and 1978, fieldworkers from the University of Leeds travelled to over 300 locations and recorded the language and lifestyles of hundreds of speakers from across England

Yes, in Ireland 'gallivanting' means going off on time wasting and unnecessary journeys
Ditto-snap, in Scots.

But this sort of thing is far too late, and much too lost.

Across Scotland, other than a literary corpus (eg The Scots Kist and the wider Scots Language Society library) and a slowly-evaporating vocabulary, there will be almost nothing left of actual spoken Scots language within 20yrs.

In Scotland, Scots is besieged on every side:

  • by government-funded support for an almost-unused retrophonic quasi-establishment Gaelic (in areas and contexts that are entirely-alien to that 'official' nearly-unspoken language)
  • by generations of deliberate (and accidental) deprication and marginalisation
  • by beatings- I'm old enough to have been lined-up and belted by teachers at school for having spoken Scots in the classroom rather than English (for the avoidance of doubt, I do mean 10yr-olds in the 1970s being given seriously-painful repeated physical whacks with a thick leather tawse across the outstretched hand to the point of drawing blood: our parents thought nothing of it, since they'd received the same or worse for committing the same offence)
  • by a regional mainstream media that utterly-ignores the disappearing originally-prevalent language & vocabulary, supporting only English and officially Gaelic (spoken by less than 3% of the population)
Regional accents in the British Isles have ostensibly been redeemed over the last few decades, such that broadcasters and media producers no longer require participants to speak in the clipped quasi-germanic frameset of Received Pronounciation (well: superficially, that is the case).

But the vocabulary/register/cadence /style of these other British tribal tongues remains, for the vast majority of the time, firmly slammed-shut in the deepest drawers of closet shame & marginalisation.

I refer mainly to Scots/Lallans language with its clear Scandanavian roots, but my comments could apply, fairly-similarly, to Yorkshire/Northumbrian/Lancastrian/Geordic/Shetlandic/Orcadian/Doric (and many other isophonic collectives) in the radial settlements that are at various distances of remove from the M25 that insulates Olde Londinium Town.

I totally 'get it', that to communicate as a species we must intercommunicate clearly, but it saddens me greatly that the spoken localised differentiators of tongue are always railroaded into oblivion, leaving only vestiges and echoes behind. It has happened all across the world, many times before: and the final showdown a couple of centuries from now (which I predict will be between Universal Standard English ie 'USE'=American, and a form of Mandarin Chinese) will produce a bifurcated amalgam of phoneticised Chinglish.
 
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Whenever I see the word dialects I always read it, mentally, as daleks
 
Somewhat like they use on Firefly
Not familiar with that at all, but apparently yes.

Whether it be Bladerunner (or any other high-end dystopian scry-fi) there's >always< a strong hybridised oriental language theme. And correctly-so, if predictive demographics are to be believed.

In contrast, not forgetting 'But'nBen A-Go-Go' possibly the only-ever sci-fi written in Lallands Scots
 
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