Friday, August 5, 2011

Strange ideas I sometimes have

I was chatting to a class about dialects of English the other day, and how some are so different as to almost boarder on being non-mutually comprehensible.

How excellent and interesting it would be to get two disparate groups of English speakers - for maximal difference let's say northern Scottish and Indian - and get them to work together in a situation where there is no standard English. I wonder if they would try and drift towards a dialect that is not native to any of them, or create a pigeon/creole? I think it would be excellent to have a Creole where the superstrate and substrate languages are both English. I got terribly excited about the idea but the students didn't appear to take to it as much as I did.