Re:The Unsuitability of English (2015)
by Turing_Machine on Sunday February 21, 2016 @11:51PM
(#11148526)
I would expect that to have gone away to some degree with the rise of movies, radio, and television. Certainly it did in the United States. We still do have regional accents, of course, but I remember seeing a farmer from Appalachia on television getting subtitles when I was a kid. I doubt that ever happens today.
Still happens in the Netherlands, which is of course far smaller still. People switch from their local dialect to standard Dutch on TV, but still have accents that confuse city people or those living on the other side of the country.
I sometimes see American TV stations subtitle American-dialect speakers. Mostly this is due to audio quality, but it happens frequently enough with urban speakers of African American Vernacular English.
Standard English on television probably certainly helps speakers of less-prestigious lects understand Standard English, but not necessarily inspires them to produce it.
Have you seen Hot Fuzz? In it, the police visit a farmer with a strong West Country accent, and take an interpreter with them. All parties are speaking English in the scene, but the farmer's words are so strongly accented, the interpreter has to translate. That scene was based on a direct observation that the writers made while researching the film...