Followup to the Schedule poll

[liv]

Wow, nearly 80 people filled in lethargic_man's poll about how to pronounce schedule. As of midday today, the results are as follows:

Country	sh	sk	other	total
England	26	21	2	49
USA	1	13	1	15
Scotland	1	2		3
Canada		2		2
Australia	2			2
Other		3	1	4
Total	30	41	4	75

(Excuse the ugliness of the table HTML; I auto-generated it from Excel — yes, I know — and I tried to clean up the output a bit but I know it's not wonderful. Data also available as comma separated format in case anyone wants to do anything clever with it.)

Conclusions:

• The normal US pronunciation is sk-.
• English people are about equally likely to use either pronunciation.
• Several people use both pronunciations interchangeably; most but not all were able to pick one that they favour.
• Scottish people are liable take offence at the use of the word England, even if it is in fact being used to refer to England.

Anyway, now I'm really into this whole poll game, and some of the interesting clarificatory responses from that poll set me wondering. So, for your delectation, a poll about how to define one's dialect.

Just to make things clear, when you tick the factors that are relevant, I mean you to choose factors that are relevant to your dialect, not factors that you think people in general should take into account when describing their dialect. So if you think, for example, that having non-native speaker parents would be likely to have a major effect on your dialect, but your parents are both English speakers, you shouldn't tick the "Parents' first language other than English" option. Likewise, if you have always lived in the same country, you shouldn't tick any of the former country options.

[Poll #336176]

Comments

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

This is a phenomenon I have observed at first hand in a variety of ways:

Basic data: Grandparents all from Southern Lancs. Classic accents of their respective towns.
Parents grew up in S.Lancs and definitely had classic accents but they have now lived in the South for almost 40 years and their accents (especially my mother) are close to RP.
Me: Born in Manchester, primary school in Bradford, prep/public school in Hertfordshire (moved South at age 9), moved to Canada twenty years ago and have worked extensively in the US and Australia. Accent progression: W.Yorks to RP (with flatter vowels in some situations) to RP stripped of many Britishisms and a slight mid-Atlantic twang.
Brother (two years younger) From West Yorks to Essex man (might have something to do with his wife being from Sarfend)
My kids: Moved from Canada to Australia at ages 11 and 13. Canadian accent disappeared completely within a year. My son sounds like Barry Humphries.

Conclusion. Kids change their accents very quickly. Adults still change but it's a longer and less complete process.

[liv]

Ooh, thanks for this description, that's really interesting. Had a friend at uni who did her PhD on accent change when people move between regions, on the grounds that most linguistics assumes that people keep the same accent throughout their lives. And I always thought of this as a very interesting topic!

[darcydodo]

Was that a certain person at Merton who successfully managed to determine that I came from California? Though I wish I'd run into her in my fourth year, rather than my second, because my accent was further altered by that point!