12. Overdoing Things
(Trudgill, Dialects: 1994, pp. 55-58)
Contact between speakers of different dialects can lead to the development of a number of interesting processes, including hyperadaptation, which involves speakers trying to adopt features from other dialects without being totally successful. A number of interesting things happen in dialect-contact situations -- in situations where people who speak different dialects come into contact and communicate with one another. Usually there is no need for us to modify the way we speak very much in order for someone who speaks a different dialect to understand us -- most English dialects are not that different from one another. All the same, it is a matter of common observation that we often do this anyway. We are influenced by the way people around us talk. A British person who goes to America for six months may well come back sounding rather more American than when they went away.
This influence that speakers can have on other speakers must play an important role in the way dialect forms spread from one part of the country to another, as we discussed in Units 7 and 8. It is not surprising that London pronunciations tend to spread to other areas, simply because there are lots of Londoners. A person from Cambridge, say, has a thousand times more chance of meeting, and being influenced by, a Londoner, than a Londoner has of meeting someone from Cambridge. This type of face-to-face influence is much more important than the influence of radio and television -- people don't change the way they speak very much because of what they hear on the TV, because they don't talk to the TV -- and even if they do it can't hear them!
In certain situations, this mutual influence of dialect-speakers on one another can have interesting consequences. For instance, where new towns are established, such as Milton Keynes, which people come to live in from all different parts of the country, a whole new dialect may grow up which is a mixture of the different dialects which the incomers bring with them.
Hyperadaptation:
(Trudgill, Dialects: 1994, pp. 56-57)One of the most interesting things that happens as a result of contact between dialects, though, is what dialectologists call HYPERADAPTATION. This refers to cases where speakers try to modify their speech in the direction of a different dialect and get it wrong because they overdo it.
A well-known example is what sometimes happens when people from the north of England move to the south. As we saw in Unit 8, speakers in the Northeast, the North, the West Central area and the East Central area have one vowel less than speakers in Scotland, Wales and the southern English dialect areas. Speakers in Scotland, Wales and the south of England have six short vowels in words such as:
Speakers in the north of England only have five:pit put pet but pat potIf English Northerners want to change to a southern way of speaking they therefore have to change the pronunciation of words like but from boott to butt. The problem is that, if they do this, they have to know, and to remember, not to change the pronunciation of words like put from poott to putt, because all dialects of English say poott. This is rather difficult to do, because each word has to be learnt individually, and the spelling is no help:pit put, but pet pot patIt is therefore not surprising that people from one of the four northern dialect regions living in the south can sometimes be heard to say words like cushion and butcher and hook with the wrong vowel. They have modified their accents in the direction of the accents of the people they live amongst, but they have got it wrong and overdone things by changing the pronunciation not only of words that are different in the two parts of the country but also the pronunciation of words that are the same and should not have been changed.put-words but-words put but full dull pull hull good blood wood flood push rush
We can say that what happens in such dialect-contact situations is that speakers have made an incorrect analysis of the dialect they are being influenced by. One group of people who really ought to know better but can quite often be heard making faulty analyses of this type are actors. If you listen to the BBC radio programme The Archers you will hear plenty of instances of this kind of thing. Some of the characters have accents, typical of the Eastern Southwest area, in which arm is pronounced arrm rather than ahm and car carr rather than cah. However, it is clear that some of the actors don't normally themselves have accents of this type because, in trying to speak in this way, they put in rs where they don't belong. Their own pronunciation of arm is ahm, but they change it to arrm when they are acting this particular part. This is OK. Unfortunately, they also sometimes change the pronunciation of words like calm from cahm, which is correct, to carrm, which is not.
English pop and rock singers trying to imitate an American accent can sometimes be heard to do the same thing. There is an early Beatles track ('Till there was you'), for example, where Paul McCartney can be heard to sing the words I never saw them at all, pronouncing the word saw as sawrr in an exaggerated and incorrect attempt to sound like an American.
Hyperadaptations of this sort can also occur in grammar. For example, it is quite natural in all dialects of English to say things like:
John and me went to the party.Some people, however, believe that it is 'incorrect' to use forms like me and us as the subjects of verbs, and that it is 'better' to say:
Our mothers and us read the book.John and I went to the party.Over the years these pedants have made such a fuss about this that many people today try to avoid using expressions like John and me even where they are not in subject position. You therefore sometimes hear people use hypercorrect expressions such as:
Our mothers and we read the book.He gave it to John and I.
a good relationship between we and our mothers
EXERCISES
(Trudgill, Dialects: 1994, pp. 57-58)
12.1 The following sentences contain hyperadaptive forms. Identify the forms, and explain how they came about.(a) Between you and I, I don't think he looks very well.
(b) She's a person whom I don't think will be very successful.
(c) They want five happles and three horanges.
(d) We were walking along the pathement.
(e) I feel badly about it.
12.2 Given what you know about differences between north and south of England pronunciation, what hyperadaptive pronunciation of the word gasmask might you expect some English northerners to come up with in trying to acquire a southern accent?
12.3 Given what you know about differences between American and British English pronunciation, what hyperadaptive pronunciation of the word ready might you expect some Americans to come up with in trying to imitate a British accent?
12.4 In the dialect of Bristol, many speakers pronounce words like America, India, Sandra, area, pasta as Americal, Indial, Sandral, areal, pastal. Dialectologists believe that this may be due, originally, to a process of hyperadaptation. If this is correct, what exactly would have happened?
12.5 Listen to one episode of The Archers on BBC radio and make a note of instances of hyperadaptive r.