I had high hopes for that three-hour program, but couldn't
take more than 45 minutes of it. In between watching Robert
McNeil drive or take the train about half a dozen times, I
learned that in Maine, people say "Ayuh" to mean yes, that
people from Boston and surroundings say "cah" for car, and
Pittsburghers say "Yuns" as the plural of you. Actually,
already knew the first two things. I'd been hoping to learn a
lot more. What a wasted opportunity for a fascinating
documentary. Do things pick up later in the show? If so, I'll
give it another go.
But it is generally acknowledged, and it was mentioned in the
program, that local dialects are fading out all over the U.S.
and Canada. There are still broad regional patterns, but
local accents and ways of speaking, while not yet gone, are
being levelled by education and the mass media.
Karin
At 23:50 08/01/05 -0500, Mark wrote, about Kerry's
post:
>As for TV wiping out regional dialects, you've
clearly never travelled
>through the American South, or between boroughs in
NY, for that matter.
>In fact, just this week, PBS ran a documentary called
Do You Speak
>American that examined the wide variety of speech
patterns (not the same
>as dialects, but . . .) in the US.
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