[quote=“sandman”][quote]And then there
I think that depends on where you are. I imagine that what you say is true in a place like Taiwan. In HK, though, I get the same thing from Brits as what you get from Americans.[/quote]
I think JT is right. There are snobby Brits and snobby U.S. Americans. It’s 6 of one and half a dozen of the other.
But I do think it bears repeating that the actual differences compared to the similarities are very very slight. I would love to see a percentage figure for differences in vocabulary, spelling or grammar or all combined. Some linguist must have tried to calculate this.
I remember also being surprised by that boy’s accent. Like you, though, I’m certain that it was not affected and that that was the accent he grew up with.
People still use the term, but it’s becoming harder to use it with any precision. That’s because nobody really speaks with the RP of the 50s any more. People must have heard of that recent study which showed the shift in the Queen’s accent over the decades to something more ‘Estuary’-influenced. And while her speech still sounds very ‘posh’, there are fewer and fewer people who still speak like that.
Yet the speech of educated people from different regions is still in general more similar than the speech of comparatively uneducated people. This shows that some kind of ‘standard’ is still at work. There’s no name for it as far as I know, however. The term ‘Standard English’ refers to dialect characteristics such as vocabulary rather than to accent. Although ‘Estuary English’ is very influential, it is not the centre of the by now rather nebulous educated accent standard. By this I mean that the way that educated Mancunians and educated West Country people speak, for example, is similar in a way that has nothing to do with Estuary English.
None of the above is in any way a value judgement, by the way. I just find this kind of stuff fascinating.
There’s no arguing with personal taste. Me, my skin crawls when I hear a southern US accent–Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, et al. Being from Southern Ontario, a region you can fairly lump in with the Northeast US in some regards (though certainly not most), I instinctively suspect that people who talk comparatively slowly are less intelligent, and therefore quickly become tiresome in conversation.
I’ll admit that I don’t particularly like Canadian accents either, in spite of how familiar they are to me. Our clipped vowels and slightly less elided consonants are a bit too prim and Presbyterian for my taste. It’s a choppy, almost jerky effect that grates on the ears after a while. No, give me the New York (Jewish) intellectual any day.
Then I suggest you hold out on films like The Butcher Boy and Snatch until you work up your British English listening comprehension skills.
This thread made me a little curious about how the different forms of English accents evolved. In reading up on the subject, one of the things I found interesting was the relatively “old world” character of the North American English accent.
It turns out that the way Americans and Canadians speak English is much closer to the way English was spoken in England centuries ago than the modern “Queen’s English” is. I don’t know why, but this surprised me. For some reason I would have guessed that the reason North American English sounds different is because it had “evolved” on its own, rather than because it had just stayed the same for 400 years, during which time the English spoken in England was changing.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_english
I then remembered that I had heard something similar about the French spoken in Quebec vs. the French spoken in France. Like American/Canadian English, Quebec French is apparently far more “conservative”, and remains far closer to the French spoken 400 years ago.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quebec_French
Anyway, I mention all this for two reasons:
(a) just in case others found it as interesting as I did (I don’t get out much…), and
(b) because I was curious if any of you out there knows of other examples of languages that tend to evolve more quickly in their “home country” but are more traditional in countries that adopted the language later. The source I was reading didn’t give an indication whether this was true of Brazilian Portugese or Mexican Spanish. Any other examples people know of?
Cheers,
Hobbes
Another good example of how colonys retain a more traditional form of the language is RSA Afrikaans. Dutch people get a real kick out of talking with South Africans because of all the archaic words they use.
As for American English, and how difficult it can be to understand…
I spent six months laying sewage and water lines with a group of blue collar local guys in the Sandhills of North Carolina after graduating from college. I’m from New York, and I tell you, for the first couple of weeks we were constantly misunderstanding eachother. But that experience was nothing compared to the motorcycle trip I took along the Blue Ridge mountains and deep into Appalachia. When you get into those rural hollers in West Virgina you encounter, to my ear, the most extreme accent in the country. I sat for 15 minutes at a gas station in a small town listening to an old guy tell me a story, and I was able to catch about 20% of what the guy was on about. If any of you have seen Cold Mountain, the accent that Rene Zellwegger was affecting is nothing compared to West Virgina hillbilly. Drinking and shooting the breeze with older black guys in the deep south can also be an interesting linguistic experience.
And to the British poster who wrote, earlier in the thread, that he can understand virtually all of the English spoken in the world… take a trip through the West Indies. I was in Jamaica recently, and found hardcore Kingston street English almost impossible to get at first. For an even more extreme experience go to Georgetown, Guyana - the official language is English, but it is so peppered with creole that, to me its pretty much incomprehensible.
Here’s a link to an interesting site that gives and idea of how linguistcally diverse the USA actually is: http://www.ethnologue.com/show_country.asp?name=USA