Quote:
Originally Posted by Deepwaters
Tye, just as there are regional American accents and dialects, the same thing is true in England. Also, in England the manner of speech is often governed by class and access to higher education. What you're probably thinking of as an "English accent" is the speech of someone born into an upper-class family and educated at Oxford or Cambridge. Contrast this with lower-class London speech, which is very harsh and clipped, or the speech of northern England (listen to old interviews with the Beatles and you'll get that), or Scotland or Wales.
I can't figure out what type of English Alizée is learning. As far as pronunciation is concerned, she definitely has a French accent. You can hear it in Fifty/Sixty, which she pronounces "Feefy Seexty." (It's terribly cute.  ) So she doesn't sound either British or American. As far as word usage, at this point she's probably doing what I'm doing to learn French, and encountering a lot of English on the Internet (including here). God help her, poor thing . . .  |
Language change is a very interesting thing. I recall some interesting anecdotes regarding the propagation of things like the "missing 'r'" in British English. A lot of times, certain features arise in the "prestigious" dialects, that are then copied by other speakers, and then come to be associated with less prestigious dialects. I think that even happened in France once, when some royals were deposed, and then some decades later, when that family/etc. returned to power, the speech dialects that that family had preserved had now become associated with low-class French. (I can't remember when it was, but I suspect I got it from Trask's Historical Linguistics so if you're curious, you can read it there.)
One should also note that often language change is actually slower in "emigrant" populations speaking a language than in the "home country", e.g. more retentions of old pronunciations in Latin American Spanish vs. Castillian Spanish.
Oops, off topic. Sorry.
I think it would be very difficult to ascertain what kind of language she's learning based on 4 words sung in a French song (which would make it very likely for them to be pronounced with a heavy French accent as opposed to any British or American accent). I do suspect that almost anyone in Europe who is learning English would learn a British variety though unless they were specializing in American English for some reason.
BTW, regarding English as a peasant language, my impression is that English did not have it nearly as bad status-wise as other languages like German, Russian, etc. prior to the establishment of their literary traditions.