Sotos wrote:GreekIslandGirl wrote:supporttheunderdog wrote:GreekIslandGirl wrote:Most people manage a few dialects and use them interchangeably depending on the situation they find themselves in. The better the impression you want to make, the closer to the Standard form of the language you will speak. This is true for any language. It's why the BBC used to choose people that spoke the Queen's English because everyone (reasonably educated) could understand this dialect. But, the converse may not necessarily be true - Standard English speakers (London/Oxford dialect) might not be able to understand much of a Geordie (Newcastle) dialect - which is similar to the difficulties Athenians have with the Cretan or Cypriot dialects. But, Cypriots in turn can all understand Standard Greek and use it to make a favorable impression on a teacher or judge, etc.
We also speak a completely different dialect to babies ... kootchy koutchy coooo!
Quite True about Geordies and Londoners, as I found, particularly on a Friday night as the accent got stronger under the influence of Beer.
One bizarre experience was three people, all nominally English Speaking, one from the Shetlands, one from the North East and One from London, trying to talk. The Norteasterner had to Translate between the Londoner and the Shetland Islander - mind at that point much Heavy had been drunk by all concerned....
Yeah, thanks for your solidarity. The point (on which we agree) is that none of us speak just ONE dialect. We all speak various and several versions of our Standard Language.
I don't agree that the Cypriot dialect (or any other Greek dialect) is a version of Standard Greek. That would imply that you first had Standard Greek and the dialects are a derivative of that, but this is not the case. I am not a linguist, but the process is probably the reverse: You first have various dialects and then there is a standardization process that creates "standard Greek" or "standard English".. and probably that standard is based on what most people speak... or what most educated and influential people speak at the capital where such decisions are made. Also I don't fully agree that we can all speak various version of a language. We can fluently speak a language in the version we learned it while growing up. We might understand other versions but we can't fluently speak them. This is why we can usually tell that somebody is a Cypriot even when he is trying to speak like an Athenian. Or when we can understand that somebody is a Charlie
No, the Standard Language does not signify the dialect that came first - dialects co-occur the whole time. David Crystal's definition of a Standard Language is the dialect that has the most "prestige" - not the one that came first - we cannot possibly know that.
Also, I think you are mixing up accent with dialect. The dialect has a vocabulary and a specific grammar - but how it is pronounced is the accent. So you can speak in a Cypriot dialect, using all the Cypriot-common words but still have an Athenian accent, for example. Many villages in Cyprus have unique accents even when villagers are just speaking the common Cypriot dialect. Plus, we do vary our dialect all the time - as well as modifying our accents - and the better we are at doing that, the more successful we can become.
If you are interested in linguistics (and I think you know a lot already) have a look at some of the stuff David Crystal has written - he is the most lucid and logical linguist around.
