Chit-Chat

We in the English-speaking world are a bit spoiled when it comes to how we understand one another no matter where we come from. People make grouse about certain linguistic disparities between the English spoken in the UK or Ireland or Australia or Canada or the US--and certainly there are differences, enough to induce some frustration in people trying to effectively communicate with another person who is familiar with a different version of the language. Most of the time you end up with a miscommunication--if you ask for 'chips' in the UK and Australia, you get what Americans call French fries--but there's also a major risk of embarrassment when certain words have a meaning that's not only different but also potentially obscene or offensive. That much-maligned, unattractive little nylon pouch losers and touristy people wear around their waists is called a 'fanny pack' in America, but if you call it that in England you'll get a lot of stares and a very awkward silence will descend upon the room, because the word 'fanny' is a crass slang term for a woman's genitals. Instead they call it a 'bum bag'.

So it's easy to get a bit frustrated sometimes, though in the last decade or two it has somewhat diminished owing to the internet and its ability to link people across the planet who might otherwise never have an opportunity to talk to one another. But in fact, this is significantly improved when compared to the past.

One somewhat surprising--but less known--aspect of non-European English-speaking countries is that there aren't too terribly many regional dialects in them. There are varying accents, of course, a few slang terms or phrases common in one area that are unknown or mean something different elsewhere. There really isn't much in the way of linguistic variety--they mostly speak the same way as their countrymen. This shouldn't have happened, and the fact that it worked out this way is a turn of events that most people aren't aware of to appreciate.

The British isles, on paper, speak all the same language: English. Technically this is true, but there are an awful fucking lot of accents there. there are more regional dialects and distinct accents in England alone than there are in the whole of the US. This is true for every country in Europe--people within the same country (especially larger ones), while technically normally speaking the same language on paper, employ regional dialects that are often pretty substantially different from one another. To the point that they're sometimes actually mutually incomprehensible.

No, really, this happens. My aunt married a guy from Germany, who grew up in a small town in the south right near the French border. He speaks very good English but his family members mostly don't. Though most of my mother's family can speak German, and speak it well--my parents both do, as does my grandmother--the two sets of families can't talk to one another because the German my uncle and his family speak is so different from the one everyone else speaks that they're mutually incomprehensible. My uncle is even good friends with a woman originally from Berlin, to whom German is her first language, and they have to converse in English because neither of them can understand the other's regional dialects.

It's nuts.

England and English aren't that bad, even with the myriad dialects and accents within the country. But it wasn't always like that. A 1490 account by William Caxton describes a group of sailors from London getting stranded and becalmed on the Thames in Kent, just sixty miles from their start point. A few men went ashore to buy supplies and food during the wait, but when they asked a local woman where to get these things, she didn't understand them. Their words were so different from her native tongue that she actually thought they were speaking French. And this was within the same country, a mere sixty miles from where they began.

This is gradually changing, as I said, but that's the kind of disparity I mean--people living so close to one another just a few centuries ago couldn't communicate in the same language, yet people speak more or less the same across entire continents without trouble in Australia and North America.

And were it not for a few fortuitous circumstances, that's how it would have turned out, particularly in the USA. When settlers first grew in number enough to cover a large area, and when they pushed further west and discovered they were standing on a lot more land than they realized, the assumption most people made was that communities would each individually develop their own dialects based on who settled there and when. It was also believed that the continent would ultimately divide itself into separate countries much like Europe. And it's largely thanks to two very under-appreciated things that prevented this from happening.

Part of the reason is that expansion to the west in America occurred around the time railroads were being built all over the world--one reason regional dialects form and become wildly variant is due to isolation or limited influence of outsiders. Groups of people scattered across a large area wouldn't have much--if any--contact between one another when there was a distance between them and no efficient, speedy way of crossing it. The railroads changed all that. Rather than remaining cut off from each other, distant communities were never left along long enough to develop a manner of speech too terribly different from anyone else's. Again, differences remained, but they were very minor ones. People gave Abraham Lincoln an awful lot of crap because he was from Illinois and spoke with what the snobs of Washington perceived as an embarrassingly uncultured backwoodsy way. (He purportedly greeted people with 'Howdy'.) But he had no problems making himself understood whether he was in Washington DC or Maine or Ohio or California--the language was still very much the same across the country.

Another big reason regional dialects never formed--and no other language prevailed like English outside of isolated small communities--is, somewhat ironically, because of the fact that America attracted immigrants from many different countries across Europe and Asia. And they came speaking an awful lot of very different languages, making it difficult for the newly arrived immigrants to communicate with their fellow immigrants as well as with the colonists and Americans who already lived there. Even immigrants from the same country--as we've already seen--weren't always able to talk to each other. (Italian is notoriously schizophrenic.) The most practical solution was not for all the new immigrants to learn the native tongues of all the other new immigrants--that would have been hard, time-consuming, confusing, and complicated. The easiest solution for everybody was for them to adopt a single language, and adopt one that was foreign to all of them. This sounds insane, but it is actually what happened.

More or less the same pattern happened in Australia and Canada--expansion and exploration were accompanied by advances in modes of travel that didn't let any community remain isolated enough to form a new language, and immigrants adopted a mutual language that none of them knew but that they all could learn in order to talk with one another.

Of course, I'm perfectly aware that linguistic pockets exist in all of these places. People tended to settle with their own 'kind', so to speak, which is why New York City's various neighbourhoods became associated with one particular country and culture--the Chinatowns, Little Italys, Little Havanas, and Little Haitis scattered across the United States prove that. But these are basically just anomalies, and the linguistic influence doesn't extend very far in any area. There even used to be a lot more of these linguistic pockets, little communities where people could primarily talk in any number of European or Asian languages. But these are anomalies.

The final death blow--at least in the US--to regional dialects and little towns channelling old countries came during the First World War in the 1910s. There was an intense sense of paranoia and even outright hate of Europeans and Europe in general--seen as the enemy by most Americans, immigrants and inhabitants of those little pockets (especially ones who couldn't speak English) were treated appallingly. In a fit of nationalistic ego, the state and sometimes federal governments enacted laws prohibiting newspapers from being printed in another language but English, for schools (including private ones) to teach in any foreign language, and even for church services and telephone calls to be conducted in something other than English.

The fact that any of these pockets survived is something of a marvel.

All of this seems quite a marvel to us--we find it hard to believe that such things can happen, that it's possible for so few people in so small an area can speak so many different languages so different from each other. But we only see it that way because we have no experience with a world that's structured that way--and had the people of the fifteenth century been told that one day hundreds of years in the future, people living thousands of miles apart would speak the exact same language, I imagine they'd've thought that was just as strange.

I can't honestly say whether or not I believe that an eventual linguistic amalgamation would have occurred in the end anyway, had mutually incomprehensible regional dialects arisen in what is now the English-speaking world had these things not happened when they did. They may have, had worldwide communications developed the same way--which is unlikely, I admit. I'm not an expert, so it's impossible for me to even meaningfully speculate on the matter.

But that's life, No, seriously, that's what all life is like. Everything that has ever happened, everything we know today--from the ground we walk on to our very existence to our advanced technology--is the result of the right things happening at the right time.