University of California Los Angeles Gullah & Appalachian English Discussion
Watch the YouTube videos below that talk about Gullah English, Appalachian English, and Cockney English. (They are 10-20 minutes long, so take some time out to watch all 3 of them.) Listen to the various types of English that are spoken in this country. What sounds familiar to you? What makes them so different?
R1
The Wikitongues sounds similar to me as I can understand everything the person there is peaking. I feel like I have been exposed to that dialect more than others. Although they have different pronunciations and have other words to mean other stuff, it is easy to understand the meaning. The Cockney Dialect also sounds familiar, but I think that’s because of social media exposure to that dialect. Both Cockney and Wikitongues sound clear, even tho there are things to decipher in some parts of their dialect. The mountain talk definitely sounds strange to me. I think of red necks or hillbillies when they speak. This reminds me of the video lecture on labeling and assuming people can change how we may hear them. I think having this construed image of it made it more difficult to hear them. The ones that I would hear more properly were the ones that dressed professionally. What I noticed in the Mountain video is that their dialect has a lot of words created. At least more than what I have seen in the other video. There are words that I feel like I recognize but with a different meaning—for example, Dopes and Boomer. The aspect that makes it sound different in these dialects is the shortening of sounds and creating new words. I find it fascinating how each dialect is quite different but also similar in some ways. What I wonder is how these dialects will change in 10 years where new speakers of the language bring new words?
2
For Gullah English, everything is completely comprehensible to me. I think the O’s are the vowels that stand out the most to me. For example, when the woman says, “Bone,” it differs from the way I pronounce it. I also notice she pronounces the TH sounds as a single t. I also noticed that she lacks the hard R and pronounces it like the British RP English R (sorry I don’t have the IPA keyboard). At around 13:30 when her accent gets thicker, I can still understand her but I notice the metathesis the module documents were talking about because she says “aks” instead of mainstream English’s “ask.”
For Appalachian English, it sounds like their vowels drag on. English has lots of diphthongs, but I feel like mainstream English’s diphthongs are very subtle. For Appalachian English, you can clearly hear the diphthongs and identify them. For example, at 1:50, when the man says “here” you can hear the “heeaahhheeeer” and all the vowel sounds he makes. I also heard some of the a-prefixing that we learned about in the module documents.
For Cockney English, one thing I noticed was the difference in the way we pronounce “London.” I say Lon-den (like a lion’s den) whereas she says Lon-dun (like dun-dun-dun you’re in trouble). Her vowels also sound less rounded. Also, I know this isn’t related to sounds themselves, but I noticed her mouth is very animated and open. Is this a characteristic for Cockney speakers or is it a personal thing?
For all the different types of English, I’m not really sure what makes them sound familiar to me. I can understand them all perfectly, but I they sound so different to the way I speak. Perhaps it’s the consonants that maintains comprehensibility. However, some consonants are different (like the Gullah woman saying “ting” vs “thing” or “chillen” vs “children”) and I can still understand exactly what they’re saying.
