[Zeke]

I started a thread about dialect in TV commercials you probably saw. It seems to have taken a turn, due to my ignorance, to the topic of linguistics and dialect.

I mentioned I wrote a paper some 40 years ago about the subject. In fact, the paper was about the various dialects in England and how they influenced and populated the dialects of even today in the US. I could tell you then what counties in England tended to settle in what colonies in N. America.

There were two conclusions to the paper: One that the various dialects provided for the wide difference in, say, New England accents and Southern accents. The second was that all accent and a lot of dialect was melded together as the N. American continent was settled from East to West to form Western speech as we know it on the West Coast. The last traces of "accent" were left in the Mid-West and Western Texas as a "drawl". There was even some postulation that the drawl was a product of such wide open space. Never proven.

An interesting "proof" of the migration theory is that when British people sing aloud, they lose a lot of their accent due to the physical needs of opening the mouth wide to sing out. Thenone accent the CAN be conveyed through song is that of a type of country drawl. So, nothing terribly conclusive.

We seem to have a worldly body of souls here on the OT forum, so I ask what is the difference between the working class dialect of England and that of Australia? Let's take the word beer for an example. I think I hear "beeah" coming from down under. How would you characterize the phonetic spelling of how it is said in a working class pub? How about Scotland and Ireland as well?