>I think that mobility is the key. Wherever people do not move much,
>they develop dialects. That why there are so many more in the UK
>than in the US, where a lot of people move a lot.
I would argue that people move about more in the UK than they do in the US. The difference is that the accents and dialects developed at a time when people didn't move far from home. Most predate the industrial revolution and some can be linked back to the formation of the English language. That is they retain words from Anglo-Saxon or Norse which never made it into standard English.
>But no one would
>deny that there are distinctive dialects for New England, the South,
>and Texas. The "mid-Atlantic" dialect (maybe Midwestern) is the one
>prescribed for TV, though, which tends to universalize it.
Which seems to show how quickly variations can be introduced into a language.
>And I have to mention a movie that I heard about, but did not see,
>which was about lower class Brits, and there were subtitles, in
>English! (trainspotting?)
That was set in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in the North East of England. The Geordie accent is notorious for incomprehsibility. It is the only one I've encountered which I can't understand. Fortunately most Geordie's also learn to speak a standard accent.
The class issue is a significant one. The standard accent is the middle class one and for a long time it wasn't regarded as an accent at all - just correct pronunciation. The upper class had a posh accent and the lower classes had local accents. Again this reflects mobility and also the imposition of a standard pronunciation through schooling.
Probably the best illustration of this is the play (I forget its name) which was turned into the musical 'My Fair Lady'. There you have a young lower class woman being taught the right accent to allow her to pass as upper class. Set in the late 19th Century but the class implications of accent were still important forty years ago.
In Glorantha I don't see there being class implications of accent among Sartarites. The clan chief will have the same accent as a stickpicker. At the other extreme Dara Happa will have at least two, probably three or more class determined accents. I see two alternatives for New Pelorian, either it is a language with magical equality built into it which prevents it developing class based variations. Or it borrows heavily from local languages with wide variations of dialect and accent being acceptable as "we are all us".
-- Donald Oddy http://www.grove.demon.co.uk/
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