bloodline wrote:
If I hear a girl speaking with a German accent, I find it very sexy... I don't know if that relevant to this discussion. :-)
Accents rock. BTW, sex appeal is always relevant to any discussion.
Moto, that book sounds like it was written by my mother. I think this type of concept is a hang-over from a very classist history. I think these classes are breaking down now, but I think the basis in history is quite real. I think modes of speech relate more to education and cultural background than intelligence.
In Australia, some professions are really 'old boys' clubs, and I think part of their attempts to maintain their professional standards includes modes of speech. This is changing though.
In my engineering profession, it tends to go the opposite direction. One of my lecturers told me it was important to add extra swear words when talking to contractors, to break down the perceived class barriers. I was brought up with standard, academic English, so I've taught myself to be less stuffy most of the time.
I don't think use of vernacular English is a predictor of low intelligence. I think this is more related to upbringing than intelligence. However, I think intelligent people will be more perceptive, and learn skills of articulation regardless of communication style. If people are not intelligent, I think they will tend to speak in a more limited set of utterances, and have difficulty in communicating complex ideas.
In USA, African American street lingo has been recognised as a dialect, which seems appropriate to me. However, the dialect has been given equal standing with standard English in some universities. This seems inappropriate to me, for the reason that the street dialect is limited in grammatical complexity, and doesn't allow for the same level of articulation of complex ideas. Of course the dialect has eloquence in it's own way, but I don't believe it would be sufficient for an in depth dicourse on metaphysics, for example.
In Australia, middle English seems to be disappearing. TV is becoming more and more colloquial, and people who used to speak middle English on TV are now frequently using grammatical errors, which I think is probably deliberate. I have noticed this being copied by most people I talk to. I think this is quite interesting in itself. Some examples: 'are' is being replaced with 'is'; 'I am well' is being replaced with 'I am good'; adverbs are being replaced with adjectives.
Commercial speech is also beginning changes to Australian English: verb forms of words are being used in place of noun forms, such as 'I have an invite to a party'; verbs are being misused, such as 'action something' meaning 'do something', or 'transition something' meaning 'change something'. I think this is just people trying to sound clever, or fashionable, as though to attain the level of class destinction you discussed.
Oliver
