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From: deb5@ellis.uchicago.edu (Daniel von Brighoff)
Subject: Re: London accent *not* 'degraded'!
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Date: Mon, 26 Jun 1995 19:29:12 GMT
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In article <3sjgjn$1jo8@usenetp1.news.prodigy.com>,
Kyle Gryphon <UJZA56B@prodigy.com> wrote:
>I have seen our American dialects listed in a variety of ways.
>
>Most sources I've seen list just three dialects - Northern,Southern, and 
>
>New England.  There always seems to be some confusion as to whether
>Northern should be called Middle Western.
>
>Some books add in Northern Midlands and Southern Midlands.
>
>Rarely, I see books which discount New England English as a separate 
>type
>from Northern/Middle Western.

	I don't know which books you read (and I know you don't
either--you only remember whether they are convincing or not), but
even my outdated little Funk and Wagnalls does a better job of this.
Their dialect map distinguishes New England, NYC/NNJ, Middle Atlantic,
Western PA, and Appallachian dialects, among several others (and anyone 
from the Northeast can tell you that these accents are all quite distinct
from each other).  I know not every popular work on the American
language does as well, but I've never seen one so bad that it distin-
guishes only three accents/dialects for the entire USA.  Hell, the state
of Maryland alone has more distinct accents than that.

	And as for distinguishing "Northern" from "Middle Western", the
boundary is often drawn just south of Chicago.  My St. Louis relatives
used to vacation in "Minnesooota" and, let me tell you, there was no 
trouble telling the native sheep from the foreign goats as soon as a body 
opened their mouth.
-- 
	 Daniel "Da" von Brighoff    /\          Dilettanten
	(deb5@midway.uchicago.edu)  /__\         erhebt Euch
				   /____\      gegen die Kunst!
