Additional context:
Native speakers of my mother tongue do not all understand each other due to some pretty extreme dialects. Now that I’m in Europe, I’ve noticed multiple instances of people sometimes not understand the dialect of someone from a village 10-20 km away…
In contrast, for example most American, British, and Australian people can just… understand each other like that?? I never thought much about it before but it’s pretty incredible
Edit: thanks everyone, and clearly I didn’t think of certain parts of the UK when I was in the shower and thought of this…
What is your native tongue?
Spanish has a pretty wide array of accents and dialects, but I think for the most part Spanish speakers understand one another.
That’s cool! For me Chinese (Mandarin), although it has something to do with language regulations: a lot of Chinese dialects really should be classified as different languages…
Speaking of that and Spanish… I was quite curious about Catalan actually, have a colleague that’s from that part of Spain. My understanding is that Catalan is considered a separate language but is quite similar to Spanish?
There are parts of the United States, where I am from, where the English is almost unintelligible to me. Also, I have only been to England once, for a layover that would last 24 hours. I could barely understand any of the white service workers, however the Indian service workers? I could understand them very very well.
The white service workers probably had working class accents, while the Indian workers likely learned English in India, and therefore had a different accent
Chewsday innit
What’s incredible is that an island of people who all watch the same tv and same radio can all maintain different accents
Class striation is a hell of a drug
Yea I live in the Netherlands and there is a fishing village just a 15 minute bike ride away from me. If the people there speak in their own dialect I can’t understand anything they say. If I drive to the north to the province Friesland, less than 100 km away, they have their own official language besides Dutch that only around 400k speak. That’s less people than half of the inhabitants of Amsterdam yet Frisian is fully recognized and official and you can spend your daily life there without speaking a word Dutch even though you are still in the Netherlands. Some kids there don’t even learn their first Dutch words until they go to school.
Some kids there don’t even learn their first Dutch words until they go to school.
That’s kinda was like Guangdong province where I’m from. Mandarin wasn’t used at home, but once school started, it was all Mandarin. Nowadays… I think Mandarin is slowly starting to take over.
It’s why the immigrant parent’s kids who never went to school in China cannot speak Mandarin, I know kids that only speak like Fuzhouese.
I can still barely understand the dialect where I have now lived for ~4 years. I can just about follow the topic of the conversation if I focus hard enough. And this is in the same country that I grew up in (Scotland).
It’s a very isolated place, which has allowed the old language to survive till now, though it’s only the older people that still speak it, and even then it’s likely still closer to english than their parents spoke.
In the larger towns nearby, the dialects have turned into an accent, with a few “cool” or useful words sprinkled in. The dialect here however, has different vowel and consonant sounds, maybe 30-50% different words (I’m just guessing), and a slightly different word order. Sadly it will die out in the next decade or so.
I guess this is pretty normal in some parts of the world, but quite rare in english.
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Yeah, like yesterday I was talking to my American friends about football, soccer and irish soccer on the telly, and then after I ate my crisps and chips, I went and had myself some tea with tea and muffins
I had a roommate from Manchester (UK) for a couple months back in college. I’m American (US). He seemed to have no trouble understanding me, but I usually couldn’t understand what he said without him repeating it multiple times.
Perhaps that has something to do with American’s being all over social media/most influencers?
My guess was that it was probably due to Hollywood, but some form of mass communication, almost certainly.
I would rather guess colonialism. Germans living 150 km from each other not understanding each other is because their languages were organically evolving from some 1000 year old protolanguage with barely any communication in medieval times.
The reason the world speaks English is because a relatively small group of speakers from within England colonised the world and kept communications up with those past colonies to this date.
India or the US didn’t have as much time to diverge from old colonial English as Bayern had time to do so from proto-German. Add to it that a sizeable chunk of the colonies are still Commonwealth.
I think at least part of the reason why English has become an agreed upon international language is because these variations are permissible. If everyone had to speak RP, then the language wouldn’t be as accessible.
Oh you’ve never had to deal with a Scottish person before I see.
About 30 years ago I went to the Edinburgh festival and in one of the bars met a farmer from the north of Scotland. I literally talked to him for 10 minutes before I made out more than a word of what he was saying.
Binging limmys show will fix that for you
that’s the exception that put “most” in the title
Most English speakers certainly do not understand the bloody Scots.
and you certainly appear to not understand the meaning of “most” and how it was used in that sentence lol
Have you seen the hedge scene from Hot Fuzz?
Yarp.
If I don’t see some authentic frontier gibberish in five seconds I’m gonna flip this goddamn table.
Ah hell, I’ll do it myself.
Idk, I recently heard some thick Scottish English and I couldn’t understand literally anything. That might be in part due to the fact that I’m not a native speaker, but still I believe people outside the British isles would struggle with it.
Some of the uniformity is a result of cultural domination of specific centres and now unavoidable loss of original dialectal variation.
When I was in Glasgow I couldn’t understand anybody older than 40.
Was it Scottish English or Scots? The line between the two is blurry because intelligibility varies a lot
Pretty sure it was Scottish English. Does anyone outside of super rural places actively use Scots anyway?
Are you confusing Scots and Scottish Gaelic? Scottish Gaelic is the one that’s spoken in the western isles, Scots is across most of the rest of Scotland, including big cities
Scots is hard to tell from English sometimes because Scots has undergone near language death, where it adopted more and more features from English as it was taken over, and Scots was regarded for a decent while as nothing but bad English
Scots is common throughout the country. There’s also a local variant in the north east called Doric which to others is near impossible to understand. It’s perhaps more rural only, although there’s certainly still people in Aberdeen that speak it.
Do you know where in Scotland this person was from? That might help narrow it down.
Was there a lot of Fs? In Doric the “wh” from English questions is changed to an F.
What? - Fit?
Where? - Far?
When? - Fan?
How? - Foo?
Why? - often how is asked to mean why, or just fit why will be askedIf you are in a Doric shoe shop you can legitimately ask “Fit fit fits fit fit?” which means “Which foot fits which foot?”
People inside the British Aisles would still struggle.
Especially if it was a Weegie
I remember having to interpret for my boyfriend when we drove through the Western end of Virginia. The accents get thick out in Appalachia. We’re both native speakers, he’s even from Virginia, but by the coast.
me and my wife have this dynamic. i’m from southern appalachia and she cannot understand the shanendoah or allegheny accent at all. if i say something particularly idiomatic she’ll ask me what i mean because our verb syntaxes carry a little extra information AND we have tonals
Wow, lots of people picking out whole regions to say they cant understand and i… Have never had that problem. Honestly, really, english is easy to catch the ear and even people who barely speak it can usually get legible words out. You never make the sounds accidentally.
I’m not a big fan of mumbly accents, its just lazy about the sounds but if you’ve ever understood grumbling and mumbling you can get any accent.(Note: not true for dialects that have their own local words for things)
The definition of a dialect is having it’s own words for things.
Well look at that, pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary.
Didnt realize that slang was part of dialect and only associated the first 2. Learn something every day.
Every dialect has their own words for things
I had associated that with only localization and slang. Didnt realize that was dialect. That being said, you can still understand the words just and get enough cintext to realize you dont say “fanny” in UK
Tbh where the line is between dialects and languages is a hotly debated topic in linguistics, or if there even is a line
Parisians will never stop complaining about québécois. They even show subtitles in France when they speak québécois on TV. None of the French Canadians I know seem to have any issue understanding traditional French though.
Edit: Spanish is another language where we can mostly understand each other despite very varied dialects
Parisians are such snooty fucks even other Fr*nch hate them.
Parisians will never stop complaining about québécois.
Because Paris French has a group keeping it consistent, whereas Quebecois has no regulation and it’s just driven by vapid famewhores making idiot memes popular (just like English).
I worked with someone in Ottawa who was from France. She went to Gatineau (Quebec), and tried to order a cheeseburger. They could not communicate effectively in French and had to both switch to English. The struggle is not imagined.
Also, My high-school French was Quebecois, but my Uni-level French was Caribbean. I cannot speak Quebecois any more even more than I can barely speak French any longer.
Quebecois French split from France ~400 years ago and has its own history. Acadian French has an even earlier split and can be very hard for Quebecois to understand.
Quebecois is definitely difficult. I can understand people the next province over (New Brunswick) no problem as they tend to speak slower and many of their dialects like chiac have a lot of English words in them. But Quebecois tends to be spoken very quickly, and in some cases words run together much more. I’m a bilingual French Canadian and I have a lot of issues with that accent, which is strange as my family mostly came from Quebec originally. My grandfather, whose first language was French could watch tv from France and understand it perfectly, but had a lot of trouble with Radio-Canada reporters.
Don’t french Parisians pride themselves on “purity” or whatever?
When it comes to language yeah they have a reputation
Ironically, due to the history of the region, québécois is closer to old French than what they speak in France today,.
I believe that’s true of American vs. British in many ways as well
