3 ms·

The cure for the confused talk of accents being "dull", "grating", "neutral", "jarring", "ugly", "guttural", etc. is to observe that dialects have these associa

The cure for the confused talk of accents being "dull", "grating", "neutral", "jarring", "ugly", "guttural", etc. is to observe that dialects have these associations merely because of the social statuses of the people who speak them. In other words, the linguistic qualities of the dialect itself do not play any role in determining how the dialect will be viewed by others. It's a bundle of *isms wearing a linguistic fedora.

TulliusCicero 8y ago
That's ludicrous. French accents don't sound fancy to Americans purely because we think of France as fancy.
- deleted 8y ago
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- lgessler 8y ago
  If you're so sure, could you explain which linguistic features of French make it "sound fancy"? Even if you could isolate them and somehow attempt to make the case that it is their intrinsic qualities that give them their "fanciness", you would then need to be consistent and claim that whenever they occur in other languages they should also contribute to making the language "sound fancy", since the counter-claim is that there do exist linguistic qualities that have aesthetic values devoid of cultural context. But I think that kind of follow-up investigation would reveal that linguistic qualities with "objective" aesthetic values are elusive, if they exist at all. (For example, you could take two French sounds which are iconically French to English speakers[1][2]. Assuming these sounds confer fancy-points upon people with French accents, do native English speakers really grant speakers of other languages fancy-points when they use these sounds in their accented English? It's not clear to me if they would. For one thing, these same two sounds also occur in many varieties of Arabic, which Westerners generally don't regard as nearly as fancy or beautiful.) [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_uvular_fricative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_uvular_fricative [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_postalveolar_fricative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_postalveolar_fricative

TulliusCicero 8y ago

That's ludicrous. French accents don't sound fancy to Americans purely because we think of France as fancy.

deleted 8y ago
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lgessler 8y ago
If you're so sure, could you explain which linguistic features of French make it "sound fancy"? Even if you could isolate them and somehow attempt to make the case that it is their intrinsic qualities that give them their "fanciness", you would then need to be consistent and claim that whenever they occur in other languages they should also contribute to making the language "sound fancy", since the counter-claim is that there do exist linguistic qualities that have aesthetic values devoid of cultural context. But I think that kind of follow-up investigation would reveal that linguistic qualities with "objective" aesthetic values are elusive, if they exist at all. (For example, you could take two French sounds which are iconically French to English speakers[1][2]. Assuming these sounds confer fancy-points upon people with French accents, do native English speakers really grant speakers of other languages fancy-points when they use these sounds in their accented English? It's not clear to me if they would. For one thing, these same two sounds also occur in many varieties of Arabic, which Westerners generally don't regard as nearly as fancy or beautiful.) [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_uvular_fricative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_uvular_fricative [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_postalveolar_fricative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_postalveolar_fricative