From: mdhangton@gmail.com   
      
   Dorothy J Heydt wrote on 04/30/2015 :   
   > In article ,   
   > William Vetter   wrote:   
   >> jmd@nelefa.org wrote on 04/29/2015 :   
   >>>   
   >>> To the original poster - if you don't natively speak Scottish (or any   
   >>> other,  for that matter) slang, please don't have your character use it.   
   >>> It'll come  out trite and wrong.   
   >>>   
   >> My observation is that when immigrants came to America, the slang words   
   >> they brought with them became static when they stepped off the boat.   
   >   
   > Not just slang.  General vocabulary, pronunciation, syntax   
   > changes slow down.  The dialect of the capital region changes   
   > rapidly (perhaps in part because it gets more foreign visitors   
   > and trade) while the distant provinces are caught in a time warp.   
   > We've probably all heard that Appalachian English resembled   
   > Elizabethan English, which is true to some extent.  If you can   
   > get hold of a copy of Robert MacNeil's television series, _The   
   > Story of English, you can hear some very interesting sounds.   
   >   
   > This is why modern Spanish is a whole lot like Latin than modern   
   > Italian is.   
      
   Yeah, Chinatowns are like that, because they weren't exposed to any   
   communist reforms.  They're like frozen colonies.  Also the food   
   becomes very resistant to change, partly because the Western concept of   
   named and rigidly-defined recipe dishes becomes imposed on them when   
   the ethnic cuisine catches the attention of outsiders.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)