fffast languages vs. s-s-slow languages

[bluebeard]

Oh hey y'all.

I found this interesting article in Scientific American (link!) and had to share. :D It's only three paragraphs long, so I won't bother to copypasta or summarize here.

My thoughts (put under spoiler-tag for incoherent rambling):

[Spoiler (click to open)]* Ofc Spanish is spoken faster than English. Or at least, my dialect is compared to the English spoken

Comments

[bluebeard]

loool I love "y'all". English needs a plural "you", let's be real. :3

but only reason I use it is because people I know do, haha. as I'm not a native speaker, I just pick up stuff from all across the board, either via friends, the media or Internet speech.

I just hope people (don't mean you, just people in general) don't think that like, I'm a wannabe or something. I'm obviously not from the South nor a native anglophone. I just can't help but copy/mimic others, partly because it's fun, partly because it's interesting. I don't consider myself to be a speaker of any English dialect in particular; I just speak whatever and however it's spoken around me, plus the bits and pieces I pick up elsewhere. It's hard to stay purely Canadian when I've moved around so much and my American friends easily outnumber the Canadian ones (go figure).

I wonder if this happens to learners of other languages? Surely it does, I should think. I mean, if someone learning Spanish spends an awful lot of time around me, they're bound to pick up stuff from Cuban Spanish. But can they ever really say that they have a Spanish dialect, i.e. Cuban Spanish? (as opposed to just general/standard-ish Spanish with a mishmash of whatever their teachers, friends and Spanish media they've been exposed to) It seems that one only truly speaks one dialect of a language and it's their native one; every other language after that is whatever they've been exposed to.

[ameliorate23]

Native English speaker here, from the Southern United States. I can, of course, only speak for myself, but I think most would agree with me:

Y'all is a pretty common term. It fills an obvious need in the English language, and with technology being what it is nowadays, y'all is definitely no longer exclusive to the South.

I don't think anyone would find you being a wannabe and/or offensive for using the word occasionally. As long as you're not using it in formal situations (because it's still not acceptable there), I think most people wouldn't even notice it. Of course, if you adopt a fake Southern accent, pepper the word into natural conversation as much as possible, or start wearing a cowboy hat - that's a different story. ;P

[bluebeard]

lol i can't fake accents. every time I try to imitate British speakers or Southern US speakers a bunch of fail comes out. I'm amazed at people who can switch accents like a boss; I can't at all. I'm stuck with my Cuban one, lawl.

as for formal situations, I rarely find myself in those, and since at school I study Linguistics (not to mention a few of my profs are American) no1curr and/or notices, hehe. but mostly I use it online, since it's pretty standard to find Americans in forums, LJ comms. and so on and so forth, so I've never had someone be all like "y'all ain't from around here so don't be speakin' like us, now" or something, hehehe. /stereotyping, sorry

[di_glossia]

I'll admit, it's so out of sorts with what I'd expect a non-native speaker to use that it comes across as mocking. That's all I was trying to clarify: that it's indicative of some very stigmatized dialects. When I want to or need to remove the stigma, I use "you guys", "you all", or "all of you". Other possibilites, though very regional, are "you guys", "youse", and "you lot". It's part of my native dialect, so I love and fully understand "y'all".

That's why I try to have teachers and listen to music/radio/interviews from many different dialects to balance out whatever dialect I was first taught. It just happens you picked up a word that a lot of people look down upon.

[bluebeard]

okay, now I'm just confused. stigma? what the hell? o.o haven't you been around the Internet a lot? people use y'all all the time, or at least the places I frequent with high number of American members sure as hell do. if there's stigma it must be in those places (Texas, the South, idk), except I've never been there (never been to the USA, period). I use it because I see it being used, I don't understand how this is weird. O.o

I asked a friend about it, he said this (he from Texas, but lives in Vegas):

Who the hell told you that the word "ya'll" was stigmatized? They made it a word in the dictionary because it was extraordinarily common colloquial slang throughout various English speaking countries, as far as I know. It certainly has a special home in the Southern U.S., but it isn't like it's derogatory. No more so than using a double negative. Which. You know. Is also common in the south. I fail to see how something commonly used in a particular region is an offense to that region. I couldn't give two shits if you came bursting through going "HEY YA'LL, I AIN'T GOT NO ____".

...Not only do I use "y'all", I use double negatives all the time too. o.o It's not exotic.

I am aware that the Southern dialects are stigmatized - so are the Caribbean Spanish dialects. Boo-hoo, who cares. I get that "y'all" is associated with the South, but I think it's expanded well outside the Southern range. I mean, how can non-native speakers not use it? It's everywhere. Applejack from MLP, pretty much everyone from True Blood, the chars in The Princess and the Frog, and country music. To me "y'all" is like Spanish "ustedes"; that shit's gone viral, regardless of which dialect had it first. No-one in the Americas uses "vosotros" as far as I'm concerned. o.o

[ljs_lj]

Erm, as a native speaker of American English from a region outside of the South (and Texas), 'y'all' is *very* stigmatized, and Southern US English dialects, particularly if spoken by individuals from poor areas, in general are *very* stigmatized. The US is a very big place, and the examples you gave (True Blood, Princess and the Frog) are not only very recent productions, but take place in the South, and therefore would require Southern US dialects for any sense of authenticity. MLP is also recent, but I don't know enough about it to comment properly on the role of dialect in the production.

As for your friend, well, he's Texan, and he lives in an area where it would not be strange to find a lot of Southerners. Vegas is a world unto itself. Your friend would naturally be defensive of his own speech - no one likes to be stigmatized by their dialect - but at the same time he's not representative of the rest of the United States.

Not only is 'y'all' indicative of Southern US dialects, but it is also used in a lot of AAVE (African American Vernacular English) variants. Which, again, is highly stigmatized, despite its presence in music, television/film, and, certainly, the Internet.

Double negatives, too, are indicative of both Southern US dialects and AAVE: they would be unacceptable where I come from. In fact, I struggle to understand double negatives, which exist in the Slavic language I'm currently learning, because double negatives do not exist in my native dialect of US English, and do not exist in any "standard" form of modern English.

There are a *lot* of different US dialects, and just because something is on TV or the Internet doesn't mean that it isn't stigmatized. In cases, you may in fact have missed some kind of joke or mocking when someone used 'y'all' online - or the individuals involved were all from y'all-positive regions. Trust me: if someone said 'y'all' in everyday speech in my home state, people would be uncomfortable. We say 'you guys'.

Finally, just because something went 'viral' in Spanish doesn't mean that it will in American English. It's true that 'y'all' fills a kind of void in English, but different dialects have filled it differently, and different languages "decide" differently how to fill different voids. Some languages have singular, plural, and dual - both English and Spanish don't seem to feel a need for dual and yet people communicate just fine in both languages. Same with case systems. Same with verb tenses, which are are all over the map in different languages.

[bluebeard]

that's too bad, about the stigma. :c

luckily, I don't live there, and up here (Canada), no1curr, so I'm gonna keep on using y'all. c:

[muckefuck]

I don't know how useful it is to talk about "stigmatisation" outside of particular contexts. Sure, "y'all" is unacceptable in formal registers, but then so are the other informal alternatives like "youse" and even "you guys".

I live in Chicago and I wouldn't characterise "y'all" as "*very* stigmatized" in informal contexts. In fact, I think a lot of people would say it connotes warmth and familiarity--even to Northerners. In fact, I know some Northerners who did not grow up with "y'all" but have adopted it into their speech non-ironically.

[di_glossia]

Um, life? I'm not sure how to respond to this. Like I said, y'all is part of my native dialect. I've faced discrimination and ridicule for using it. Within the United States, at least, it has connotations of low intelligence and a lack of education because it is a marker of Southern speech and AAVE. The examples you listed all use Southern or Western dialects. True Blood and The Princess and the Frog are both set in Louisiana, Applejack is, I believe, a cowgirl pony, and your friend's from Texas. Those are not just y'all-positive dialects but also extremely stigmatized dialects.

Of course, y'all is used outside of the South- though a lot of that has to do with AAVE, which is not nearly as confined to the American South as it once was. The issue of y'all is similar to ustedes vs. vosotros, but also different: y'all can't be used in formal situations and it's not y'all vs. you. It's y'all vs. you vs. youse vs. you guys vs. all of you vs. you lot, etc. You guys is fairly neutral within the United States, though all of you would work better across country lines. I'm sure y'all isn't an issue in Canada because the stigma's not there.

As ljs_lj mentioned, the usage of y'all online could very well be satirical or mocking in many cases, similar to the way many people will use "like" as an interjection when they would never use it seriously.

Also, Internet as a gauge for what is and isn't used irl? I'm pretty sure I'd get strange looks for using creys, feels, gaiz, lolcat, yolo, or referring to myself in third person with **.

[bluebeard]

whatever, I'm not other people. I know something about being ridiculed for one's dialect, but isn't discrimination a bit much? Forgive my skepticism - it's probably because I've lived in places where certain dialects are mocked (Quebecois French is looked down upon, so is Santiaguero Spanish within Cuba) but not actually discrminated against (what does that even mean? you can't get a job because of your dialect? lol isn't that illegal?). Then again, it's the U.S., where intolerance and injustice runs rampant (much more than in Cuba or Canada, lol) so I guess I shouldn't be too surprised.

At any rate, I use "like" and "y'all" all the time online and offline despite being neither from California nor the South, and irony or mockery has nothing to do with it. -shrug- It's too bad that it's stigmatised, but that's never stopped me before. My dialect is stigmatised too, and so is Quebecois French (which I'm hoping to learn one day, not just "standard" French).

[di_glossia]

http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/Canon-paper.pdf

Page 5 talks about dialect discrimination.