>See my earlier comments! Most of the regional corners of the UK speak
>dialects that I certainly can't understand. Strange, really: we've had
>transport and even mass media for ages. The last invasion to give
>different areas different languages was the Normans, nearly a thousand
>years ago. I wonder why we've kept the dialects: any linguists out there?
I think this will not only be true for the UK. In Germany we have also some very old dialects nobody will understand who is not born to this very region. See for example the bavarian dialect, the saxon, the northern german dialect (called Plattdeutsch), the friesian (which is so different to german as welsh is to english and therefore no dialect, more a language for its own). If you went for example to Cologne you will understand not a word of what the people their are talking about. Their dialect has influences of the french occupation mixed up with a lot a reagional dialect. I think this languages have their roots grown very deep in the population of this region, compared to the USA where nobody of the americans lives there for more then 200 years - which is a really short time.
Ingo
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