I'm excited to attend this lecture about language change in America this evening. As part of Penn's annual Humanities Forum program linguist Bill Labov will talk about the results of an extensive North American dialect research project, which was in progress while I was an undergraduate in the department. Interesting stuff.
This does interest me, Katie; and, you know why? (Well, I taught linguistics and rhetoric; but, that's not really why.)
ReplyDeleteMcLuhan would have said exactly the opposite of what was expected to happen; and, yes, once again, he's been proven sound. When he noodled around with notions of the global village, he concurrently qualified his statements in terms of the way "tribalism" would overtake us. Thus, in that respect, the linguistic one, he was clearly correct. (A variation on the "think globally, live locally" theme, I guess.)
At any rate, I hope you enjoy this; and, no, I won't ask you to report on it, Doll :) . . .