[mark in perth]

Hmmmm . . .

Hi, Italian Brother. Here I am, in an Internet cafe in Perth, Australia. This is my first contributive visit to this site; and I'll crank out an extemporaneous essay-ette on the subject of dialects for you:

To begin, hold this thought: the defining of a 'dialect' is a political matter. Someone once said, 'A language is a dialect with an army and a navy,' meaning that who gets to be on the top of the language mountain -- and thereby position the practices of less politically powerful speech communities -- depends on the old men in stripey trousers who write the textbooks.

English is a language of West Germanic origin. It was brought to what is now the U.K. by Saxons between the Fifth and Tenth Centuries. (This is all evilly simplistic.) However, at that time, as the pre-existing languages were already mixing with it to produce what came to be called 'Anglo Saxon,' the Romans had been and gone . . . and left plenty of words. Moreover, Latin was the language of Christendom; and that also had an enormous influence.

In the Eleventh Century (Battle of Hastings, 1066), the 'French' (the Normans) conquered most of 'England.' French was the language of their 'regime' for centuries. Chaucer's English -- Middle English -- (It always astounds students that Shakespeare wrote in Modern English.) is of this period -- and that's Phase One.

Phases Two and Three kick off at around the same time:

Phase Two was the 'transplanting' of English speakers to the New World -- the American continent -- in the Sixteenth Century. When any body of speakers ups and moves, the language that they speak changes. So, back in jolly old England, a great number of dialects (including Scottish English and Irish English) already existed -- and the U.K. remains the region in the native-English-speaking world with the greatest variety of dialects. The U.S. has many fewer speech communities, and also now a much larger number of native speakers. This numerical superiority, in tandem with the economic strength of the U.S., is the reason why American English is dominant though the U.K. is the 'home' of the language.

Phase Three was the transplanting of English to all the countries that were colonised by the British. (With Australia as an exception: we started as a penal colony. I am not quite sure about the number of countries that still have significant bodies of native-English-speakers as a result of colonisation, but I think that it is around a quarter of the world's nations. If you are interested enough, find a 1920's world atlas -- that is, an atlas of the period at which the British Empire was at its height -- and check out just how much of the world was pink. (Pink is the colour that was generally used to colour the British chunk of the world.) A posting somewhere here mentions the English-speaking competence of the Nigerian Prime Minister -- and why not? Nigeria was a British colony.

Ask for further details if you care to. I will teach you some principles about the defining of 'dialects,' and about two related topics, that is, creoles and pidgins.
Finally, get your hands on a copy of David Crystals 'Encyclopedia of Language.'

Mark in Perth