> Oh...speaking of dialects...my linguistics prof last year played some
> tapes about future dialects. Some science fiction writer...I think it
> was Larry Niven but I wouldn't swear to it, who was also a liguist to
> some degree was convinced that dialects in the future will separate more
> and more until people in different social classes and even different jobs
> will for all apparent purposes be speaking separate languages...
well, i guess that's part of what H.G. Wells told in The Time Machine,
but not only separate languages...
and the fact that people from different social classes speak
languages so different from each other that they will have trouble
understandign, well, that's a fact today,and not tomorrow/in the
future. variations in dialects between social classes within one
geographical region, may even today be larger than between the
dialects of different regions.
sociolects may be more importent than dialects?
have a nice day :-)
tb
* ----------------------------------------------- *
\ Trond Buland \
\ e-mail: trond.buland@ifim.sintef.no \
\ phone:+47 73 59 25 65 home:+47 73 52 78 21 \
* ---------------------------------------------- *