Boonville's quirky dialect fading away

[conuly]

http://bit.ly/YUeH46

It is an interesting dialect, but having watched the videos it doesn't sound nearly as different from standard English as the article would lead you to believe.

Comments

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

Meh, Boontling. It's not actually a dialect, it's just a cant, like Thieves Cant or Cockney rhyming slang: standard English, but with 'secret' words larded in. Very quaint, no doubt; very historical for their tiny little town, which has no other particular claim to fame, and I'm sure it was a great and cheering source of intellectual interest in such a cultural backwater, back in the day. But of course the kids don't care about it now - it's probably vaguely embarrassing, their old grand-dads holding forth in the slanguage of their childhoods like that was still the epitome of Cool.

I like constructed languages a lot, and still can speak my own childhood conlang, as well as bits and pieces of a number of others, but I don't see them as a Precious Cultural Heritage to be artificially preserved after the fun's gone out of them. Teaching Boontling in school was probably the kiss-of-death - what good is a 'secret' language if one's teachers not only know it, but assign homework about it?

LOL, y'know what would be funny: if there's some secret cabal of brilliant little geeks in Boonville who've appropriated Boontling for their own use, but changed it out of all recognition - imagine Boontling rhyming slang, for example; that would be both easy to construct and incomprehensible even to bahl old Boontling harpers.

[conuly]

Teaching Boontling in school was probably the kiss-of-death - what good is a 'secret' language if one's teachers not only know it, but assign homework about it?

And effectively crystallize it so you can't keep secrets from them, as well?

Half the commentary I see on it actually refers to it as a language, which... no, not one independent of English.

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

Crystallize it, exactly - it stopped being a living language and turned into a dead one when kids learned it from word-lists on the blackboard rather than from eavesdropping on their uncles. Of course it's not really a language, but people who aren't lingo-geeks don't care about the fine distinctions between language, dialect, jargon, cant, patois and so on, even if they know the words - even Gibberish (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibberish_(language_game)) and the like get called 'languages'.

Boontling is quaint, but that's about all one can say about it. It's got less than 2000 words and no grammar of its own, so anyone with a word-list could learn the whole thing in a week, and then... *yawn*. Sure, it reflects 'local history', but it's boring recent history of a very small and mundane locale - if not for Boontling, no one would have ever heard of Boonville.

When I was about 13, there was a TV show that featured some old guy speaking Boontling, and it was all a big stupid joke like 'Hee Haw', as if the guy was too naive to realize they were making fun of his quaint hayseed ways. I bet the teenagers in Boonville practically died of embarrassment every week.