Hogwarts students and dialect

[Ali]

No: HPFGUIDX 45648

--- In HPforGrownups at y..., "pippin_999" <foxmoth at q...> wrote:
> 
> Working  class jobs in the wizarding world could be associated 
> with non-standard  dialect  or pronounciation without imagining a 
> separate school for the working classes.
> 
> Any way you slice it, half of all the students leaving Hogwarts 
> leave in the bottom half of their class. Consider a  Muggleborn 
> student  from a working class background. Call him Stan. He 
> qualifies for Hogwarts, but only just, and he leaves after his 
fifth  year with an O.W.L. or two. Without wealth, family connections 
or  impressive academic credentials, he's not up for the plummy 
> jobs, but he manages a living as a bus conductor. He pals 
> around with others of his sort, and their  dialect becomes a 
> badge of identity. They're capable of a more cultivated speech, 
> but using it  with each other would be putting on airs.
> 
> Stan knows that in his  class-bound society, nobody's paying 
> him to think...or wants to.  So if famous Harry Potter wants to 
> pretend to be Neville Longbottom, Stan's not going to argue 
> about it...though he might pass the word on quietly.  Then Stan 
> has a little fun pretending to be oh so surprised. "I knew it!" 
> indeed.
> 
 Whilst I do agree with you in principle, I don't really see how 
seperate accents and dialects would survive the workings of the WW. 
The WW seems to me to be too small and too segrated from the Muggle 
World to retain its many accents and dialects. I like you tend to 
believe that all wizarding children are educated at Hogwarts. But I 
am inclined to think that 5 or 7 years would be sufficient to modify 
most children's accents to the "standard" accent, when the "standard" 
accent is what they would hear day in and day out. This is particurly 
so as their parents and grandparents would also have been subjected 
to the same language. I also feel that Muggle-borns who could 
legitimately arrive at Hogwarts with different accents would swiftly 
try and modify their accents in a bid to fit in.

The only logical way I can satisfy myself over the dialect issue, is 
to think that JKR has used them for literary/comical purposes only. 
Otherwise, they confuse *my* reading of the text.

Ali