[Buddha-l] languages

[Jim Peavler]

Thanks for the link. I was kind of involved in this in the 60's and  
70's (on the fringes) because I had the opportunity to contribute to  
research for an American dialect atlas when I was in Missouri (a  
treasure trove of American frontier dialects). We ran into these  
social/political/economic/etc. dialectal differences. We also ran  
into surprising dialect similarities. For example the American black  
dialects have a lot more similarities -- no matter where they are  
found -- than white dialects for the same regions. Blacks in New  
York, Miami, New Orleans, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles use nearly the  
same dialect.


On Jan 6, 2007, at 9:53 PM, curt wrote:
>
> A fellow named Labov more or less single-handedly created the field  
> of "socio-linguistics" back in the 60's by demonstrating how people  
> systematically alter their speech patterns in order to  
> differentiate themselves from some groups and/or to identify  
> themselves with other groups. See for example
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociolinguistics and
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Labov
>
> - Curt
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>

Jim Peavler
jmp at peavler.org