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

[justinep.livejournal.com]

Scots are Brits. It says 'The United Kingdom of Great Britain' on our passports.

[pseudomonas.livejournal.com]

Says "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland" on mine, IIRC.

[justinep.livejournal.com]

Feh. I will grant you there is no 'The', however I will excuse my missing out 'and Northern Ireland' as it was done deliberately. I was feeling unusually mean with my words :)

[zdamiana.livejournal.com]

After all the English vs. Scottish discussion in the comments on the last poll, I thought it might be prudent to address both separately. I guess I should have just said "Brits" or, alternatively, "Anglos and Scots". Oops.

[justinep.livejournal.com]

Nono... you did good. It's nice to see someone making an effort to be polite about such things. I just wouldn't want you to be confused. Well, actually, I would want you to be confused, as confusion reflects a full knowledge of the facts :(

I had to try to find a term for 'Scotland, England, Ireland, Wales, The Isle of Man and The Channel Islands' recently. There is no such term, unless you count 'The British Isles' which offends many people (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Isles#Problems_with_modern_usage).

I'd suggest you just wave a hand towards the mainland, mutter a bit and hope for the best ;)