词汇大师(Wordmaster)--Sound Change, Part 2

First broadcast: January 19, 2005

AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster we talk about regional changes in American English with University of Pennsylvania linguist¹ William Labov [la-BOVE]. Imagine a situation like this:

WILLIAM LABOV: "Someone says 'gee², I got to find a coffee shop,' and someone said 'but you already had your coffee.' The people who would normally expect that 'copy shop' would be different from 'coffee shop' are quite confused when they enter an area where both are pronounced with the same vowel³."

RS: "As were we right now."

AA: "So copy -- there are some Americans who say 'coffee' and 'copy' the same?"

WILLIAM LABOV: "Well, the vowel will be the same; the 'p' and 'f' differences are hardly worth noticing in rapid speech. But the vowels⁴ will be identical for the people who come from Pittsburgh or from Montreal.

"People have a great tendency to think our language works better than it does. So when we ask people to keep track of the number of misunderstandings that occur in the course of a day, there are quite a few. But if you ask them to remember them, they don't."

AA: Yet there may be more and more misunderstandings. Professor Labov says many local dialects are dying out and regional ones are growing stronger.

WILLIAM LABOV: "We have plenty of real-time studies to show that these changes are moving on so that the dialects of the United States are more different from each other now than they were 100 years ago."

RS: "That's so surprising, given that we travel so much."

AA: "And given that we hear each other so much more now through radio and television."

RS: "And even the Web."

WILLIAM LABOV: "Well, one of the things that social psychology⁵ has told us, and many other branches of study, is that listening passively to the radio and television doesn't change your behavior. You're influenced by the people you speak with in daily interaction face-to-face."

AA: "Now you've done a lot of research on the influence of women as a driving force in sound change, have you not?"

WILLIAM LABOV: "Yes, the difference between men and women is really important, and it's an astonishingly powerful force in most of the changes that we've talked about. In about 90 percent of them, women are way ahead of men -- a full generation ahead."

RS: "Now what is your explanation for -- you say it's who you interact with. But we are very mobile people. We go from coast to coast. We take a job in one city and then another. We're taking our language with us and interacting with people on business trips and such."

WILLIAM LABOV: "Well, almost everybody will tell you, 'Oh, I'm a regular chameleon⁶. I change my speech according to who I'm talking to.' That's a great exaggeration. The fundamental pattern that you learned as a child stays with you pretty much for the rest of your life."

AA: "Now, Doctor Labov, I'm curious, let's take an example like Southern California or other parts of the country where there's a large number of immigrants, and so you've got different languages and different sounds and dialects all coming together. What effect are you seeing?"

WILLIAM LABOV: "Well, people used to think that the American dialects are the result of all the immigrants coming in. And that turns out to be just the opposite. Gender⁷ has a big influence on the way you speak, your social class, what city you're living in.

"But the language spoken by your parents has almost no influence in most areas, so that the people whose parents spoke⁸ Italian or Yiddish or German or Irish, now in the second or third generation will speak almost the same. That's the powerful assimilationist tendency in the United States.

"There is one exception to that, and you mentioned Southern California. For the first time we are getting a native type of English which shows a certain amount of ethnic⁹ difference, and that's the people whose parents spoke Spanish and who may have grown up themselves speaking Spanish."

AA: "Can you give us an example or two?"

WILLIAM LABOV: "Let's take the pronunciation of a word like card, and old. Most Americans will sometimes drop the d in old, and you'll see this when you read a novel, 'good ol' Joe,' o-l apostrophe. But Americans never drop the d when it comes after an r, so you don't talk about a 'car game' for a 'card game.' Nobody will say 'I had a har time' for 'a hard time.' But Latino speakers will do this.

"These are small differences. We still don't know what the future holds for us with the large Asian group that's coming in the United States. But in every community there are some groups who assimilate totally and become absolutely natural speakers of that local dialect, and others who become native speakers but not really local."

AA: University of Pennsylvania linguist William Labov is the project director for the forthcoming Atlas¹⁰ of North American English. You can learn more about this project from a link at our Web site. The address is voanews.com/wordmaster. And our e-mail address is。。。。。。。。。。。。With Rosanne Skirble, I'm Avi Arditti.

 

1 linguist   

n.语言学家；精通数种外国语言者

参考例句：

• I used to be a linguist till I become a writer.过去我是个语言学家，后来成了作家。
• Professor Cui has a high reputation as a linguist.崔教授作为语言学家名声很高。

2 gee   

n.马；int.向右！前进！，惊讶时所发声音；v.向右转

参考例句：

• Their success last week will gee the team up.上星期的胜利将激励这支队伍继续前进。
• Gee,We're going to make a lot of money.哇！我们会赚好多钱啦！

3 vowel   

n.元音；元音字母

参考例句：

• A long vowel is a long sound as in the word"shoe ".长元音即如“shoe” 一词中的长音。
• The vowel in words like 'my' and 'thigh' is not very difficult.单词my和thigh中的元音并不难发。

4 vowels   

n.元音，元音字母( vowel的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• Vowels possess greater sonority than consonants. 元音比辅音响亮。 来自《现代英汉综合大词典》
• Note the various sounds of vowels followed by r. 注意r跟随的各种元音的发音。 来自超越目标英语 第3册

5 psychology   

n.心理，心理学，心理状态

参考例句：

• She has a background in child psychology.她受过儿童心理学的教育。
• He studied philosophy and psychology at Cambridge.他在剑桥大学学习哲学和心理学。

6 chameleon   

n.变色龙，蜥蜴；善变之人

参考例句：

• The chameleon changes colour to match its surroundings.变色龙变换颜色以适应环境。
• The chameleon can take on the colour of its background.变色龙可呈现出与其背景相同的颜色。

7 gender   

n.（生理上的）性，（名词、代词等的）性

参考例句：

• French differs from English in having gender for all nouns.法语不同于英语，所有的名词都有性。
• Women are sometimes denied opportunities solely because of their gender.妇女有时仅仅因为性别而无法获得种种机会。

8 spoke   

n.（车轮的）辐条；轮辐；破坏某人的计划；阻挠某人的行动 v.讲，谈（speak的过去式）；说；演说；从某种观点来说

参考例句：

• They sourced the spoke nuts from our company.他们的轮辐螺帽是从我们公司获得的。
• The spokes of a wheel are the bars that connect the outer ring to the centre.辐条是轮子上连接外圈与中心的条棒。

9 ethnic   

adj.人种的，种族的，异教徒的

参考例句：

• This music would sound more ethnic if you played it in steel drums.如果你用钢鼓演奏，这首乐曲将更具民族特色。
• The plan is likely only to aggravate ethnic frictions.这一方案很有可能只会加剧种族冲突。

10 atlas   

n.地图册，图表集

参考例句：

• He reached down the atlas from the top shelf.他从书架顶层取下地图集。
• The atlas contains forty maps,including three of Great Britain.这本地图集有40幅地图，其中包括3幅英国地图。