Which explains why we can understand Aussies and Kiwis, but a random Nigel from the UK would have a speech that baffles. It boggles the mind how two people from different corners of London have different accents. Not to mention Manc vs Scouser vs the myriads of tongue-twisting nasal hiccups uttered all over them Shires.
It's like they almost take pride in differentiation. Throw an international party and the two UKians that show up will have a verbal civil war that puts us Somalis to shame. The shopkeepers maintain their peace with healthy and frequent exchange of muted disdain and murmured resentment. That's, when the other ethnic tonsils are not being inflamed (Scotts, Welsh, and the verile Manx; consciously absent are the clover-wielding gentlemen of the east, left out of the union for my own safety, and to keep membership of my drinking club.)
All good people though. Except the Chavs; a meta-culture of mediocrity that belongs on the next boat leaving for America, to plug the Gulf oil well.
[Edit:
Oh, this seems to have offended someone, most likely a fellow yank. No need to be a hero; piss-taking is a national past-time of the Isles, and its cultural debris scattered around the world, outside the U.S (we have escaped the wit shrapnels I guess) I have deliberately disclosed my own heritage within that rant above, expecting to be paid in kind ;-) When in doubt, stay out of it. It's a bonding experience]
Enlighten me, what's the the British accent popular in movies like Football Factory, Human Traffic etc. which I find cool; while every Brit I've met in my life had this 'royal' accent I personally don't find understandable (sorry, no offence)? Actors of international-targetted movies use some other accent for a certain effect?
Also, once I've met a guy AFAIR south London or sth, he spoke that his wife told me even most of Brits don't get him (it was an accent, not just that he was mumbling).
Enlighten me, what's the the British accent popular in movies like Football Factory, Human Traffic etc. which I find cool
They will be London accents; of which there is quite a broad range anyway. It can be a pretty strong accent.
* while every Brit I've met in my life had this 'royal' accent I personally don't find understandable*
Queens English should be pretty understandable; so it might not be what you've heard (the whole point of it is precise pronunciation and erudition). "Normal" baseline English can vary quite a lot; down in the south they tend to clip words (my mother does this) and, if speaking quickly, it can be hard to follow.
Once I was on a trip and landed with a British family in one car, couldn't understand a word, it was sth like (hard to write it) "Ncaaaw, intt!" and took me 2 times repeat and focusing hard to get it was "Nice car, isn't it?". And the whole family was talking like that all the time.
It wasn't any Scottish (this one I recognize). I have no problem understanding and talking to most Brits, Americans, Canadians, but sometimes you (Brits) really surprise me :D
No, everyone has an accent. They just think that they have a "neutral" accent, because that's the way they expect everybody should talk.
Actually, if you record your voice, you will find that your spoken voice has a slight accent, while your "inner voice" (the one you use to compose emails) has no accent. This is because talking to yourself sounds different, due to the acoustics of your head and ears (or whatever).
Even southern Californians? We're the only ones I've met who seem to speak 'by the book' as far as I can tell. No noticable, random infections. Every word pronounced like the dictionary says it should be. Not talking about "valley speak," which no one uses anyway now.
Could be, but I stand by my point that we mangle language the least when we speak. No pronouncing college like "callage" etc. I wonder if the schools really teach that.
Language's are impossible to mangle. Dictionaries only describe, not dictate. If the majority started to say "callage," then "callage" would become the "correct" (i.e standard) form.
There are examples of "mangling" which were successful. In Hungarian for example in the late 1700s a few writers have coined tens of thousands of new words. Today some thousands of these are so widely used that it's impossible to guess they were invented. Others failed and sound ridiculously funny today.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_reform
Except if you live in a place like France or Quebec. They have white beards in some tall towers creating the one true French (I swear they look like Saruman). One such example is the crap they are trying to implement with the new spelling convention.
Farsi needs a similar thing, at least on Wikipedia. There is absolutely no effort in translating words to Farsi, so they cheat and transliterate the English version. I have a habit of hovering the mouse over the "فارسي" links and always see the English title with Farsi conjugation, transliterated into Arabic script :-(
It's sad because it's such a beautiful and rich language; the young folks doing the translation are doing it a great disservice diluting it in their rush for volume.
For Arabic; almost every Arab is a gray-beard language nazi! All traces of foreign influence are removed with urgent and great prejudice. Which is good.
Can you point us to an example of you speaking a few sentences of unprepared material - let us decide.
I find accents hard to pick up but fascinating. I can just about make out the accent differences between my (town-sized) city and the next one though as there is a specific inflection that differs.
I served this one up on a platter for someone to take but I think lkozma's reasoning is more plausible. I don't think ErrantX's comment was based in ethnocentrism. It's just a way of describing a non-regional accent in the US and apparently the UK.
Do you mean a Californian accent? A New York accent? Boston? The accent of a hypothetical guy who immigrated from Mexico when he was 5, went to an all black school in Chicago for 3 years, then moved to South Africa till he finished high school, and now lives in New York? Because while he would have a "non-regional" accent, he will kinda sound a bit different.
All of the above. It could be a person from anywhere without a distinctly regional accent. The news person is the common example. It's what Veronica Corningstone refers to in Anchorman when she says, "But while they're laughing and grab-assing, I'm chasing down leads and practicing my non-regional diction."
People that think they have this accent or that someone else has this accent will often refer to it as "no accent". It's not an ethnocentric viewpoint. Now, I definitely think the average person is not aware of how distinctive their accent really is and mistakenly think they have a non-regional one. But I do think it exists.
Just to give an example off the top of my head: take Conan O'Brien. He's from Boston, went to college in Boston but does he have a Boston accent? Maybe you could pick it out of his voice, but the average person probably wouldn't and he certainly doesn't have a strong one.
Grew up in Australia and then moved to the UK for 10 years. English people think i'm Australian. Or sometimes American (too much time watching US TV, I think). When i'd return to Australia, people would think I was English.
I then spent 2 years in Boston. And now 2 years in Toronto. My accent is completely mangled and jumps all over the place (ie, I might sound vaguely North American, but I know that you there's a 'h' in 'herbs').
I have the same problem with Americans thinking my accent is English, and vice versa. My accent was originally South African, but it has changed into some sort of weird hybrid.
Australian here .. I've always had a bloody atrocious time in my travels, with my accent .. so I just standardized on "American-sounding" and I get along just fine with people understanding me, mostly, about 100% of the time .. except when I reveal I'm from Australia, and the whole thing unravels into a nationalism-filled diatribe about how I'm not a "true Aussie" since I don't speak A'Strine properly ..
I am a true Australian, since I don't actually live there, and consider anyone else living there, not an Aborigine, to be just a bunch of bloody tourist wankers, heh heh ..
Yes, same here - I need to pronounce certain things in an American fashion to be understood at all when at work in the US. And much like this example, it revolves around the 'r':
'Excuse me, do you have you wireless internet access here?' (pronouncing it British / Australian style as a two syllable word)
'Sorry sir?'
'Excuse me, do you have you wireless internet here?'
'I'm sorry I don't understand'
'Do you have you wiYERless internet here?'
'Yes Sir, we do have wiYERless. Here's an access card...'
Oh, a funny American. Did you get that humor in a legal settlement?
--
Edit:
Let me add that what you're noticing is probably my staccato diction, filled with code-words and verbal winks to deliver mild amusement to an invisible audience of masochists who I love oh so very much.
Cultural and linguistic banter might not be appreciated in these "learned" circles; but to the objects of my affection, the working classes of the crown and its colonies, it's a delicacy best enjoyed over beer and a pool table (Warning: too much of it might lead to the real-world version of a downvote, a black eye.)
See now I can't tell if you are trying to be funny or a dick, but what I said I meant in no way to offend you. Your previous comment did indeed come off with an accent (I wasn't even trying to be funny).
And this is exactly what I meant by "piss-taking"; your comment was such a delightful jab, I was pleased to play along :-)
I stopped short of scratching others as well, my gut response was to say "Did you divorce a German and take half her humor in settlement." That would have gotten an ovation from the English crowd, but could have confused you and other festive yanks in this victorious of all occasions! Happy 4th of July, mate! No harm was meant :-D
I can't speak for him but as someone that had the exact same thought, here's the problem: it's not a "delightful jab" at all. You misinterpreted it and then went on to say things in a way that could be easily taken as being a dick or an internet troll.
I have a sense of humor and will laugh at just about anything but the written word does a poor job at conveying subtleties. If you want to be interpreted as "piss-taking" and not another internet troll, you need to do better.
EDIT: How does this get down-voted? I'm simply saying he misinterpreted a comment and then was himself misinterpreted. If the point of "piss-taking" is just to have a little fun then I would think that it would follow that it be relatively clear that's what you are doing. Clearly that didn't happen on both sides here.
It might come off wrong in writing, but it's worse in person when you're on the receiving end of banter like that, coming from an Aussie or Irishman or a Geordie with a very straight face.
I too was offended the first time it happened to me, but I dropped all pretense and self-righteousness; learn to give it back, cold, and you might earn yourself that highest label of endearment: the C-word :-) Then you shout the first round and move on.
In my original diatribe I was paying out the poms, as Aussies would say.
My standard way of answering my friends on the phone is "how's the virgin" or "I saw your mother out in town last night" or uuuhhhhoooohhh (sex noise). Makes things more interesting for the rest of the conversation. Even my boss takes the piss at work. Great way to prevent people getting 'up' themselves (Irish btw).
Oh, I get it. I'm usually the one that initiates the banter. It's not worse in person because a misinterpretation is easier to avoid and doesn't devolve into a troll-fest (maybe a fight, but if someone lets it go that far, it's not playful banter, it's being an asshole.)
> Oh, a funny American. Did you get that humor in a legal settlement?
Sure, this comment might just be banter considering the way you misinterpreted the original comment but when you take it the way it was meant, it just looks like petty trolling. That's all I am saying.
And I'm done here. I've made my point and people are down-voting.
Right, but which one? He says "us Somalis", "...the U.S (we...", mentions in his profile that he lives in Northern Virginia but also calls Sydney home yet the diction (i.e. "shopkeepers", "Chavs", "piss-taking", etc.) of his post screams British to me.
She's not British is she? She's definitely not Irish or Scottish, her RP seems off to me ... is she American? She [purposefully it seems] doesn't say in her CVs.
He intended it as an insult; the English, in his mind, were too concerned with the practical matters of life and not at all with grand visions and ambitions.
This is also the man who said "You would make a ship sail against the winds and currents by lighting a bonfire under her deck? I have no time for such nonsense."
Most of the slang is also Australian, and some, like "Chavs", is becoming more recognised outside the UK.
However, I'm sure it would only take a few years living in one country to pick-up local slang. With globalisation comes comes a greater migration of the work-force, after all.
I seem to remember a statistic where UK is reputed to have a greater number of dialects than any other country in the world, which probably has a lot to do with the difficulty people have with understanding some accents (tried Glaswegian, anyone?)
Also, IIRC, the colonies tended to have a commonality in heritage of the colonists, too. E.g. at one time, Australia had a "large number" of criminals, there are quite a lot of Dutch in NZ -- there are large parts of NZ with very strong Scots heritage -- New York is famous for Irish heritage, other parts of USA are famous for German, etc.
The UK hasn't really had the same homogenisation outside the big cities.
Ireland has a distinct accent for almost every county too. The fine differences can be subtle, but sampling Cork/Kerry sing-song, Northern Ireland ("Norn Iron"), northside / inner city Dublin and Dublin 4 / southside are all quite different range in the spectrum.
The US has a large number of distinct accents. I'm originally from Georgia (Atlanta, not Tbilisi) and there are at least 5-6 accents in that state alone. I'm willing to bet a trained specialist could narrow down someone's origin pretty closely. The idea of a "southern" accent is very, very broad.
The thing with US accents is that we're a very mobile country. People move around and lose much of their accent. I lost a lot of my own living in Atlanta, which is over half non-Georgian, and then a lot more living in California the last decade or so. It's there, but only in traces. A lot of Americans are the same...
Funny you should say that. I saw someone post a link from an Aussie comedy show on another site. Apparently most of the Americans couldn't understand half of what he was saying, which surprised me because while distinctive, it's certainly not the thickest I've heard.
Edit: My experience (and that of other Aussies traveling to America) seems to be that you have to slightly Americanise the way you speak to be understood easily.
There is not exactly one Aussie accent; a posh office jockey from a major CBD will not sound the same as a country boy. Americans probably wont get Chopper (the comedian) but they should have no trouble with Carl Barron.
Interestingly, it's also hypothesized that Brazilian Portuguese is closer to Portuguese proper 500 years ago than Portuguese proper today. The fact that the Portuguese spoken in former Portuguese colonies in Africa sounds more Brazilian Portuguese than Portuguese proper suggests the hypothesis is right. Moreover, Portuguese poetry of the Renaissance period only makes sense phonetically if spoken with a Brazilian accent, which further strengthens the hypothesis.
For what is worth, African Portuguese sounds more like European Portuguese to us Brazilians.
Portuguese poetry of the Renaissance period only makes sense phonetically if spoken with a Brazilian accent
In this case I wonder which Brazilian accent? I guess it would be Rio accent or some Northeastern accent.
In case anyone is curious the hear the differences, this page contains recordings of a Portuguese sentence spoken by people of several different areas:
For Galician (see [1] for the reason why this is relevant) speakers, Brazilian and African accents are easier to parse than "official" (not northern) Portuguese. Whatever the history there, it seems very clear to me that it's the central/southern Portuguese version that diverged the most from whatever was the original language.
Maybe it has something to do with the fact that(due to its largely african(mores) population) some southern dialects are as much arabic as portugese dialects?
Portuguese and Castillian both had massive arabic influences in pronunciation and vocabulary, not only because of demographics, but also because the Muslims had a more advanced and refined culture at the time. Still,
- they both remained mostly latin languages, and
- that influence had already happened when American colonization began. In Spain, the Muslim and Jewish were banned the very year America was discovered.
So the only explanatory power of that fact may be that
- Portuguese colonies were repopulated mainly from the north of the country (as was the case at least for Brazil), and
- that the southern dialects of the language have been promoted as the standard and expanded throughout the country. This is true today, where mass media are washing away the northern phonetics (actually richer: they distinguish between x and ch and -om and -am), accents and vocabulary in new generations.
Doubtless it's true. There are pockets of people in the Colorado and New Mexico who essentially speak 16th century Spanish. They just got pinched off from the mainstream for a long time.
Languages evolve too but much more quickly. The British who came to America spoke the same dialects of course, but this changes in one generation.
We pick up the dialect of the people that we are exposed to as we learn speech, so likely back then family was more influential then now, especially if you lived in the country.
And, of course, how we speak was influenced by the native population. I grew up near the Onondaga Reservation in New York and probably speak a bit like the people who live there.
In support of that hypothesis, migration to Brazil came mainly from the north of Portugal, where the language was born. Also, Brazil was spared the strong French influence in the XIX century.
Nowadays, the pronunciation of Lisbon (center-south) actually loses information (deemphasizing and even omitting some vowels and losing other distinctions like -om/-am into ão) wrt others, so it's hard to imagine evolution to have happened the other way.
Also, like in UK, you can find like twenty different accents only in Spain. Even in Canary Islands, with 7 main islands, have huge difference between them.
Not to speak of Catalonia, Basque Country, Andalusia, Madrid, Zaragoza or Galicia (closer to Portuguese).
Spain has now 6 official and co-official languages: Castilian/Spanish, Catalan/Valencian (Catalonia, Balearic Islands, Valencia, South of France), Basque (Basque Country and Navarra —Pamplona—, South of France), Galician (Galician and nortwest Castille), and Asturian (Asturias/Leon) and then Occitan (North Aragon, North Catalonia, South of France).
Also, in Melilla and Ceuta (Spanish cities in North Africa) there are two "branches" of arab that are in the process of becoming co-official, "dariya" or "moroccan arab" in Ceuta and "tamazig", some sort of antique Bereber language in Melilla.
So, that's 8 languages, also Portuguese and a myriad different accents in a peninsula with less the area of Texas.
Edit: Bereber is older than arab, so it's not an 'arab branch'.
Edit2: Add English to the list, as official language spoken in Gibraltar (UK colony).
Thanks for shedding light on this. Almost all Americans fail to realize that there's no such thing as a "Spanish language". There are many of them, Castilian being the "official" one (it's what it's written in the Spanish Constitution anyways). One could, perhaps, call them all Hispanic languages, since most of them (Basque is the notorious exception) are derived from Latin from the times of the Roman province of Hispania.
Well, Castilian (Castellano) is Spanish, and Spanish is Castilian according to definition. Although all of them are 'Spanish languages' because they are languages spoken in Spain.
I guess difference, if we call it that way, between Spanish and Castellano as terms, is the similar of English and British. Right? I'm not sure, but I guess they are close.
I understand the definition Castellano = Spanish, as it simplifies a lot of things. The danger of such definition is that it overshadows the other languages spoken in Spain. The definition British English = English proper is one thing, but British = English is another, as it obscures the fact that there are other languages spoken in Britain and, thus, is somewhat "imperialistic".
In any case, I have never met a Spanish person who said "I speak Spanish" in Castellano. I have heard Spanish people saying that in English, because most foreigners are somewhat ignorant about Spain and think that the country is all about toros y sevillanas, a monolithic, homogeneous block, culturally and linguistically, which is far from the truth.
Totally agree with you. In Spain we usually say 'castellano' (as stated by the wikipedia), and almost everyone say 'castellano' in areas where there is more than one official language.
In America is different, as there are no more 'Spanish languages' spoken there (apart from Portuguese being an 'Hispanic language') it's more fair to say 'Español'
again: I guess.
The difference between 'Spanish' and 'Hispanic' will fill books and books. I remember studying when Queen of Castille and Navarre, and the King of Aragon married and thus, creating what's mostly known today as Spain, calling it something like 'Ispania / Espanya' and get an angry letter from King of Portugal saying something like:
"You can't call your kingdom that way, because 'Hispania' refers to the whole peninsula and Portugal is not part of the kingdom, so change it asap, thanx bye"
Roman "Hispania" included originally a good chunk of what today is southern France and of the north of Africa, territory that nowadays would be in Morocco and Algeria.
After the Muslim invasion, (I)spania it was the name the Christians gave to Al-Andalus, the Muslim part of the peninsula, while the Christian northwest preserved the name Gallaecia. In some of these maps, especially in the translation of arab ones, the opposition Gallaecia vs (H(i))spania/Al-Andalus can be observed:
On the other hand, in Galicia it's independentist people who most often refer to Castillian as "Spanish", implying that Galicia/Basque Country/Catalonia not being Spain, and Asturian-Leonese and Aragonese being mostly extinct, the only language left in "Spain" is pretty much Castillian.
Spanish from Spain sounded really ... almost guttural to me the first time I heard it. Plus they do that lisp thing - thinco instead of sssinco. I think I prefer the new-world variety.
No matter what you prefer, thinco is the pronunciation that preserves the most information. A latin-american speaker can't distinguish phonetically between "cebo" and "sebo", for example. Therefore it's hard to argue that the american collapsing of 'th' sounds into 's' is closer to the original language.
I'm not arguing which one is better or original or anything. I simply don't know enough Spanish or enough about it; just expressing which one I think sounds nicer.
'll' is not equivalent to 'y' in standard Spanish, although the confusion exists in some zones (not in Asturias, from where Villa is) and it's a decent approximation for a non-native speaker.
As opposed to nearby romances, Spanish never distinguished between 'b' and 'v'. This is probably a Basque influence. There was a Roman pun[1] on these lines that said "beati Hispani quibus vivere bibere est" (blessed are the Spaniards, for whom to live [vivere] is to drink [bibere]).
By the way, this joke was played on Aquitanians, who occupied land mostly outside of the peninsula (nowadays southwest of France). This links with other thread on the historical fluidity of the concept of 'Hispania.'
Whoever differentiates between b and v speaking Spanish nowadays is either:
- a native Catalan speaker,
- trying to appear more upper-class through imitation of the French, a fashion that started in the Illustration times, or
Check that link, especially post #7 -- the pun is Renaissance era, not Roman.
Can you shed more light on 'll' vs 'y'? In Mexico, at least, the two are similar enough that handmade signs frequently contain spelling errors confusing the two.
You know, Argentinians also speak Castilian, and the way they pronounce the -ll- is completely different from everyone else. Hence, bringing up Mexico to prove that Spanish pronounce -ll- and -y- the same way is a very weak form of argumentation. Euccastro seems to know what he's talking about, so shame on whoever downvoted him.
Funny! Before I went on a trip to Lisbon, a lot of people 'warned' me about the sound of the language. Event Tourist-Guides for Lisbon tell you that when you hear portuguese, you'd confuse it with polish.
I think this is because of the combination of rothic-sounds (rothic R), and a whole lot of nasal- and smooth-sounds alltogether. (Feel free, to translate this sentence into linguistical-speak).
I can't say that this is entirely incorrect, but it's at least full of inaccuracies. RP has indeed been evolving as the accent of the English upper class, but it originated in the accent common in the English west midlands and as far as I know has been non-rhotic for quite a long time. Rhoticism in Germanic languages comes and goes, and since Britain always had many different regional and social accents, it's entirely possible that some of them were non-rhotic still before the stipulated "divergence" began. While in England, accents that are mostly non-rhotic were the most common, America had a large community of immigrants from Ireland, where the accent is rhotic, from southern Germany, where the accent is rhotic, and from many non-English speaking countries (learners of English as a foreign language often default to rhotic pronunciation since it's closer to the way the words are written). Most importantly, there isn't such a thing as a British accent, but there is (with only minor variation) such a thing as an American accent. Americans often don't realise how diverse the UK is simply because they're not used to this sort of diversity from their own country.
> Americans often don't realise how diverse the UK is simply because they're not used to this sort of diversity from their own country.
Spoken like someone who has never been here. There are a ton of different accents: northeastern, midwestern, southern, californian, northwestern are the broad top level ones and the distill even further depending on where you are in those areas. For example, people from Minnesota and people from Indiana clearly sound different (Indiana having a slight twang or drawl, while Minnesota sounding mildly Norwegian). It's a big contrast with the likes of Strong Island in New York. Or with Texas.
Hey everyone, I'm the author of the post. I'm a longtime HN lurker, so I was very excited to see it shared here. I've really enjoyed reading the discussion.
A quick disclaimer: I have zero background in linguistics. The only materials I used for research were Wikipedia and Google Books (http://books.google.com/books?id=ia5tHVtQPn8C). Moreover, this is nothing more than a short post on my personal blog. So, don't expect an academic paper on the subject. ;)
As I recall from an article in Time a while back, the Southern American accent is the most authentic representative of the pre-revolutionary war accent. The Northern American accent has been changed more by waves of immigrants (especially those coming in the 1890-1920).
I've heard that the French-Canadian accent is closer to pre-Revolutionary French as well.
It seems that those areas with the least upheavals are where language stays the most constant.
Canadian French is actually close to what is (or was, at least until shortly after WWII) spoken in Normandy. Our soldiers were better able to communicate with the locals on D-Day than even the Free French.
"Standard" French was once just the local dialect of Isle-de-France, a small region including Paris, but "French", even in France today, is but a loose collection of mutually-comprehensible dialects. Canadian French has its own little quirks, though, in that it had to create its own vocabulary not only for the uniquely North American flora, fauna and landscape, but also for new items of technology that emerged while we were almost without communication with France. F'rinstance, to the French ear, a French Canadian would seem to indicate that he had just created a park (in the public gardens sense) out of his tank (armoured and armed military vehicle) rather than that he'd just parked his car.
>>> but "French", even in France today, is but a loose collection of mutually-comprehensible dialects.
That's simply not the case. A lot of effort has been made by the French Republic to spread the standard french language (mandatory school with class in french, even for kids speaking regional dialects). Nowadays, there are still local expressions and idioms, but the vocabulary is quite homogeneous.
It's actually rather unlikely that any current dialect of American English has any strict correspondence to the various dialects that were spoken in America at the time of the Revolution.
I wouldn't describe the American South as having had few upheavals. It's actually had more than most places in the United States. Though, I would agree that it's had fewer lninguistic influences than other regions of the country.
show me the fuckin receipts. fewer linguistic influences? between the french, dutch, spanish, portuguese, central african, west african, native americans, and british there are very few places in the world that have such of an unique stew of languages. safire died but the knowledge of american language did not die with him. upheavels? thats another post. but lets refrain from throwing around ignorant barbs and passing them as facts.
Not to mention being influenced by French, Spanish, Portuguese, English, West African and native languages is hardly unique amongst the world's former colonies.
I always been fascinated by accents and dialects, coming from a very young country like Italy, built on top of thousands of city-states, where it's enough to drive 30 minutes to encounter a completely different dialect and culture.
Here in the Veneto, the former Republic of Venice, the dialect is still very alive and well, and in many situations is more prevalent than Italian. And it really is quite different than Italian in many ways:
"She's a beautiful girl"
Italian: E` una bella ragazza.
Venetian Dialect (at least one version of it): Xe na bea tosa.
Lots of words change, and even the grammar a bit. Indeed, with many italian "dialects" it's quite likely that they evolved from Latin on their own, rather than there being some standard "Italian" that then diverged.
It's really amazing, too, how much it changes over short distances - I can't hear it myself, I don't speak it that well, but you can ride an hour by bicycle from here and people recognize that you're from over there...
Edit: another good bit of dialect would be appropriate for the comment by Mark_Book below, "xe un mona".
Another good example is Bergamo, a city on the side of the Alps, where people from higher part of the town has a different dialect from the people on the lower one.
On top of developing independently from the Latin, the dialects where heavily influenced by the different dominations each part of Italy had. North-west dialects for example have a strong French influence while in south Italy the influence is more Spanish.
Probably much more than 50%. I've never heard my grandparents speaking any italian at all, but I guess they could understand it to some extents.
Italian as a language started to spread among middle/lower classes only in the 60's when most of the people bought TV sets for their living room.
I still use my regional language (a variation of venetian) everyday with family and friends.
The above comment of mine received a fair number of votes with the majority being negative. The comment was intended to be humorous and in my view if people downvoted because they were offended on behalf of Italians they need to lighten up.
OTOH if they downvoted becaust they thought it was not funny, fair enough. I don't mind because it's not my joke I heard it on The Simpsons
I think Australia will be an interesting country to watch accent-wise. At the moment there are very obvious "city" (closer to British non-rhotic) vs. "country" (Steve Irwin) accents, but it's much harder to tell which city and which part of the country any particular Aussie is from. Considering the distances needed to travel between towns and cities, it'll be interesting to see if, over time, these accents become more localised or if (due to easy transport, etc.) they remain fairly indistinguishable.
There are a few clues. Queenslanders will say 'castle' with a short 'a', rhyming with hassle. South Australians will always elongate the 'a' - 'caarstle'. Then there's the dialect differences - Victorians will go to the 'milk bar' to get some milk. Queenslanders will pack a 'port' to go travelling.
It's true, though, it wasn't until I lived overseas that I could start to pick up the differences. And as for the city/country difference, I would say it is more a function of education level than geography.
That said, I think there will be no more divergence in Australian accents because of high population mobility and nationalised TV broadcasting.
Yeah, I totally agree. You can tell some areas, most definitely! I grew up in Sydney and can tell Melburnians, partly because they can have a bit more of a nasal accent than us from Sydney. I bumped into some people from the Sunshine Coast today in Luxembourg and they had quite a Queensland accent (a la Pauline Hanson) but I couldn't really tell you what about it made it particularly Queenslandery. (The different names for things definitely makes it more obvious, but since we're talking about accents I didn't mention those :)
I do agree also on the city/country difference being education, you can definitely hear the "country" accent in the outer suburbs of Sydney, for example. Still, it's the best way I could really describe the two, since that's more traditionally where they're from :)
Hrm. I never noticed a large difference until I left. Now that I'm in NY I can usually pick someone's state right away. Folks from Melbourne have the most pronounced accents, I reckon. Something about how the 'e' becomes all elongated when they Melbourne, it sounds like 'Mahlbourne' to my Sydney-sider ears.
The difference is probably about as pronounced (if not moreso) as the difference between a middle class non-regional East Coast American versus the same on the West Coast.
You can always tell a Victorian, you just can't tell him much.
As a Queesnlander, I find South Australians easiest to pick, slightly more refined vowel sounds, although my fellow cane toads do stand out when I'm at work in Sydney or Melbourne.
> What is surprising, though, is that those accents were much closer to today’s American accents than to today’s British accents. While both have changed over time, it’s actually British accents that have changed much more drastically since then.
He claims that RP has diverged much more than American English, but only goes on to support this claim with the divergence of the (r) variable. Any other variables that characterize the innovations of RP since American and British English divergence?
- the gas/pass divide: in many British accents pass is pronounced like 'pahs', but gas retains the same vowel as in American accents. gas and pass will basically always rhyme in America, but in Britain it'll depend on where you are. In RP they won't rhyme. In the 18th century, it was the same sound everywhere, the one Americans retained.
- the long o, in words like go, home, etc. changed in many British accents from [ou] to [eu]. If you can imagine a very "British", RP pronunciation of home, that's the difference you hear.
I remember hearing that there was a concerted effort in England (initiated by some Queen) sometime after Shakespeare to modify the way that vowels were pronounced and that this was largely responsible for the divergence we hear today. I did a little searching but couldn't find anything. Any links would be appreciated.
I'm pretty sure you're thinking of the Great Vowel Shift, but as far as we know that occurred naturally, not as a direct result of any royal dictate. At any rate, it was basically over by the time the American colonies got going. The oldest colonies might have been affected to some degree, but my (strictly amateurish) feeling is that it doesn't really fit as the main explanation (except in that the English accent was shown to be exceptionally malleable at the time).
Just to add to this, the Great Vowel Shift happened at around the time of Chaucer, which is why it takes a slight mental adjustment to read his text (well worth it though, the guy is hilarious once you get on his wavelength). Shakespeare used modern English.
The Great Vowel Shift happened after Chaucer, but was mostly complete by Shakespeare's time. One important change in vowels that didn't happen yet by Shakespeare's time was the unrounding of short u, that is, the modern sound in words like cut, but, knuckle, lust, blood, etc. All those words sounded like "put" during Shakespeare's time, and of course move/love was a real rhyme.
Here in SA we are very proud of how much better (and some may say more poetic) Afrikaans sounds than Dutch. But hey, that is a very subjective opinion indeed :-)
As a native Dutch-y I must upvote both of your comments. Afrikaans sounds more logical than the contemporary Dutch and Flemish sounds softer and 'more sweet' (to me :)
Most people mistake "Brabantian" with "Flemish" Flemish is spoken in East and West Flanders and sounds very much like Hollands, which is the dutch dialect spoken in the west of The Netherlands. This is not strange as it were Flanders monks that started to cultivate the peat bogs in the west of the Netherlands round 850 - 900 AD. In most other parts of dutch speaking Belgium they speak Brabantian or Limburgish (cross between Brabantian and Lower Saxon) which has a soft G and a lot of it is hard to understand for people of western Netherlands, but not hard for the people living in Dutch Brabant or Limburg, likewise the north eastern provinces in The Netherlands they speak "Nieder Saksisch" (Lower Saxon) which is closer to German than to Dutch. Like Belgium The Netherlands is situated exactly on the border of of 2 main language areas that is Lower Frankish and Lower Saxon. We have many crossing dialects between those 2 language groups and many people cannot understand each other when speaking in their native dialect, that is why the standardization of languages is so strong here. I live in Amsterdam and can understand Flemish without any trouble but when listening to somebody talking in dialect from Antwerpen where they have Brabants dialects it sound like they speak Russian or Chinese, no kidding.
Hollands and Flemish come from Middle Dutch which is exactly the same Language Group as Middle English.
It depends. Some Flemish dialects are nearly unintelligible for a speaker of standard Nothern Dutch, but standard Flemish and standard Nothern Dutch are fairly similar. Which isn't surprising because standard Nothern Dutch was heavily influenced by the Flemish of well to do Belgians that fled to the North during the sixteenth century.
This article's explanation is a little too curt. I think regional American accents at the time of the Revolution matched up better with certain regional British accents explains it a little better. For a more in depth study of not just accents, but the micro English speaking cultures that came to make up the United States I recommend "The Cousins' Wars: Religion, Politics, Civil Warfare, And The Triumph Of Anglo-America" by Kevin Phillips. http://www.amazon.com/Cousins-Wars-Religion-Politics-Anglo-A...
Spelling gives some hints. One technique is to look for common spelling mistakes. An especially interesting mistake is hypercorrection (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercorrection).
For example, there was a time when the K in words like "knee" and "knight" became silent. We can pinpoint this time by looking for Ks in front of words, that never used to start with K. The writer doesn't pronounce the K in "kn" any longer, but remembers that proper spelling has a K for some words. Since pronunciation doesn't help, she has to rote learn those words. And occasionally will make a mistake.
Another one, especially in fairly recent times, is too look for prescriptive texts, that lament this or that development in the language.
Americans in 1776 did have British accents in that American accents and British accents hadn’t yet diverged. That’s not too surprising.
Really? Because that surprises the hell out of me. Americans were an ocean away from Britain for maybe a century before 1776, and the accents still hadn't diverged?
I do not think it is that surprising. Being part of the same political entity, there should have been a decent amount of intermingling and cross-travel in both directions. There was a NYTimes op-ed today about colonists from Massachusetts who returned to England to fight in the English Civil War in the mid-17th century: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/04/opinion/04tinniswood.html
On the other hand, transatlantic travel was far more time-consuming, unpleasant, expensive, and difficult then than now. If you couldn't afford it outright, one-time passage was worth years of indentured servitude even if you were from a rich country. While the odd rich American aristocrat like Jefferson or Franklin could travel to France for a few years serving as a diplomat, and a group of Puritans could commission a ship to take them across for their latest religious crusade, transatlantic travel can't have been that common.
Immigration from lots of different countries, though I'm not sure how many immigrants standardized on English at the time. And while contact with British merchants may have been a factor in port cities where trade happened, there were a lot of farmers far away from that influence as well.
I don't know much about how the American accent arose. But from what I know about the Australian accent, it apparently arose in the first generation of children born in the country.
I always thought that northern New England was the closest to the original English. Why else would we subject ourselves to such ridicule from the rest of the country?
Several hundred years ago England had different dialects in different parts of the country.
New England was settled by a different group of English than various parts of the South. Therefore the dialects were already different before they came here.
Considering that the Declaration of Independence was published virtually simultaneously in German (July 9) as well as English (July 5), the accents in 1776 were probably quite varied.
Well, the Robin Hood stories are set about five centuries earlier, so I don't think anybody knows how things were pronounced back then. If you wanted a verbally authentic version of Robin Hood then it would be in a version of English closer to Chaucer's than Shakespeare's, and it would be almost completely incomprehensible.
I'd agree with the analysis that English is closer to how its spoken in the US today accent-wise. If you look at how people speak English in British colonies, the pronunciation isn't heavily accented to how its spoken in the UK today. For example, South Asia (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh).
I don't think this is relevant, since speakers in Asia rarely speak English as their mother tongue. Whatever accent they have is due to the sources they've been exposed to. Well educated speakers in India and Pakistan, for example, usually speak with an accent that is quite closed to RP. Other speakers often learn their pronunciation from American movies.
Agreed. Many of us who do speak English as a first language ( or are very fluent in it) are definitely closer to RP but for those who pick it up TV etc have a huge influence and that is getting more American
It's interesting how South Asian English uses many British words as well (such as "dustbin" instead of the American "trashcan"). I was young enough to relearn the American words when I moved to the US. However, it's still the British words that I use when English occasionally pops up in my native language.
Valid points. I was thinking of people like my grandfather (born 1920) who speak English fluently without a british accent, and wasn't influenced by American tv.
Melvyn Bragg (who is in possession of a beautiful accent himself) has done a large number of BBC radio programmes on the recent evolution of the english language, accents, etc.
It's an amusing thought that a couple of centuries ago we were all talking like Americans. It just goes to show that accents, like everything else, are subject to fashion.
Can someone tell me when did english people start pronouncing sixth with a k instead of an x. I've only noticed this phenomenon this decade.
It's almost as irritating as pronouncing 'three' as 'free' which at least has the merit of being easier to say
>It's almost as irritating as pronouncing 'three' as 'free' which at least has the merit of being easier to say
Free vs Three has been a constant battle for me. I found these extremely difficult to differentiate aurally and three very hard to make orally. This was a constant source of me being corrected throughout school.
British people can certainly tell the difference and I've learnt it well enough to make the difference in pronunciation and to hear it enough to teach it to my son and correct him - he doesn't appear to have my problem with it (he's in infant school).
Chav English and other dialects ignore the difference.
Canada too! Their English speakers sound subtly more British than American.
The New World-Old World divergence also applies to French speakers in Quebec. If you take their perfect French from Montreal to Paris, to the Parisians much of it sounds like an antiquated form of French. I suppose it's equivalent to the way King James or Shakespearean English sounds antiquated to us now.
Well, until recently we've managed to avoid the vowel flattening and raising that has been pretty much a constant throughout the US since independence. We're accused of saying "oot", "aboot" and "hoose", but what we hear from our neighbours to the south is "aot", "abaot" and "haose" -- the vowel being a tail-rounded flat "a" to the Canadian ear. (We use the same vowel in "house", the verb form, which is distinguished in Canadian speach by more than just the zeddifying of the ess.)
That being said, one shouldn't be deceived into thinking that there is a single Canadian English dialect or accent -- we have a number of regional variants. The upper crust of both Ontario and Quebec (the former Upper and Lower Canada) both spoke with an essentially North American vocabulary and a "mid-Atlantic" accent (the sort of halfway meeting between RP and mid-American that, say, Deutche Welle would use for its English-language world news service). The lower classes in the same provinces were, like the American south, far more heavily influenced by Cornish, Kentish, Geordie, Scots and Scottish and Irish gaelic -- but without the black feedback loop. Nova Scotia has several accents, ranging from the heavily Gaelic Cape Breton to the German Lunenberg. Newfoundland "English" is a language of its own -- the accent is a Gaelic-heavy mix, but the grammar is very much Irish Gaelic. British Columbia speaks an odd mix of SoCal and Pacific Northwest with a tiny tinge of RP in the mix. Manitoba and Saskatchewan are essentially indistinguishable from rural Pennsylvania, but for an odd metre that leaked in from the local aboriginal languages. And, well, Alberta is a State at heart -- I don't think an American would have any difficulty picking out the new economic immigrants to that province from the natives in a sentence or two. There is a lot of overlap between political borders, of course, but there are several distinct regional dialects.
Yup, I'm a French Canadian and I've heard it before from French people (from France)... Some also say it sounds more like the French that is spoken in the more remote or rural parts of the country...
It's like they almost take pride in differentiation. Throw an international party and the two UKians that show up will have a verbal civil war that puts us Somalis to shame. The shopkeepers maintain their peace with healthy and frequent exchange of muted disdain and murmured resentment. That's, when the other ethnic tonsils are not being inflamed (Scotts, Welsh, and the verile Manx; consciously absent are the clover-wielding gentlemen of the east, left out of the union for my own safety, and to keep membership of my drinking club.)
All good people though. Except the Chavs; a meta-culture of mediocrity that belongs on the next boat leaving for America, to plug the Gulf oil well.
[Edit:
Oh, this seems to have offended someone, most likely a fellow yank. No need to be a hero; piss-taking is a national past-time of the Isles, and its cultural debris scattered around the world, outside the U.S (we have escaped the wit shrapnels I guess) I have deliberately disclosed my own heritage within that rant above, expecting to be paid in kind ;-) When in doubt, stay out of it. It's a bonding experience]