Americans have accents? I thought we owned the world…
Okay, just joking. But, I ran across a site that brought up a question. A few years ago I was on a cruise in the Caribbean and I was speaking with a British guy. I had no trouble understanding what he was saying, but unless I spoke slowly and clearly he couldn’t understand me at all. I’m from Michigan and if you compare how I speak to the way Tom Brokaw speaks there are a few subtle differences but, nothing major. ( The A is more nasal, The I in milk is different) How could it be that I was able to understand him yet he wasn’t able to understand me.
What really chuckles me is when folks with slight accents (eg. An Irishman with a wee little lilt) appear on U.S.American news broadcasts, they get subtitles!
—CoffeeGuy
I’ve seen this a couple times, but only with people with fairly strong foreign accents (e.g. Stuart Adamson from Big Country, the Gallagher brothers from Oasis). Certainly not as a matter of course for anyone with even a slight accent.
Almost certainly it was a matter of familiarity – I think the guy with whom you were talking was simply not familiar with your accent, whereas you may have had some exposure to various British accents.
Read through this thread to learn more on this topic.
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Ruadh, I once discussed the topic of Scottish accents with a dorm-mate from England back in my college days. He said he once saw a documentary about a Scottish prison in which the prisoners’ words were subtitled.
Rab C Nesbitt is the greatest exponent of the inpentrabile Scottish accent, sometimes I’d watch whole episodes without understanding a single thing that man said:
Not surprising, since Scottish accents IME tend to be the most difficult for others to understand (and prisoners often come from working class areas where the accents would be particularly strong). But this doesn’t back up the previous statement that even the slightest lilt would be subtitled.
Oh, no doubt about that. I wasn’t trying to disprove your statement at all – I know you’re correct on that point. I was just posting “conversationally”.
I’m in California. I have a pretty strong accent, but lord knows where it came from. I can generally recognize other Californians though.
Nobody in Florida can understand a single word I say. I had to call there for a few days at work, and even when I tried to speak slowly and ennuciate (and thats work for me) I still had to repeat myself a lot.
In my line of work (personal lines insurance) I often speak on the phone with customers ranging from Maine to Alaska to Texas, and I can assure you that some of them are very difficult to understand. The most difficult in my opinion are those in Texas. Even the West Virginians, who have a thick drawl, aren’t too bad because they speak slowly and deliberately. The Texans and their cousins from the Trans-Mississippi tend to mumble their consonants and speak very quickly on top of it all, kind of like Boomhauer from King of the Hill. Now this certainly doesn’t apply to all Texans but as a group I find them the hardest to understand.
As far as the OP, I think the greatest factor in understanding a dialect is your familiarity with it. The first time I watched ‘Snatch’ or ‘Trainspotting’ I missed half of the dialog. Now after seeing them many times I can follow along remarkably well and can even do a pretty decent impression of a Scottish youth or a London commoner.
The keys to communication in English are the consonants, the vowels can be slurred or altered without loosing too much meaning but the consonants are paramount, which any elderly person with trouble hearing high frequencies can attest so. The problem that your British friend had in understanding you probably came from your grouping or under-emphasizing certain consonants which they were used to hearing pronounced distinctly. This works on both sides of the Atlantic as well. Americans have a difficult time understanding the Sco-ish because they tend to toss in guttural stops in place of T’s and pronounce their R’s in a different part of the mouth. Hopefully a linguist will be along shortly to sort this whole mess out.
Some Irish friends once told me that the Cork accent was hard to understand even for other Irishmen. A special on Cork being shown on Irish television had subtitles, although I think it was at least half jokingly.
i think that comment about the subtitles was a joke but within Ireland there are a plethora of accents which people from other regions can often find hard to comprehend. With increased social mobility in recent decades these differences have been leveled out somewhat probably. However it can still be difficult for a person from say, Dublin to understand what a person from Donegal or Cork or lots of other areas is saying. It often takes a while for a person from one part of the country to get used to what another is saying.
I have a fairly strong northern England accent. Some Americans from Dartmouth college are currently staying in the same halls of residences as me, they can’t understand me for love nor money.
As a kid I couldn’t understand southern accents, which is funny because I’ve lived my whole life in Texas. Whenever someone would talk to me I always had to look to my mom to translate for me. In the area I lived accent was more of a class thing. Blue collar workers and people who lived further in the country usually had east Texas drawls, while middle class people tended to sound similar to the popular “standard” accent found all over the US. Still have problems understanding people from Louisianna or Alabama.
Its weird, Even middle english starts to make sense if you have to listen to it for awhile. For a class I had to listen to chaucer for a thirty minutes and at first I almost turned it off because it made about as much sense to me as german. Then towards the end I was getting the majority of it. There was usually a rule to every change, and your brain just needed a couple minutes to adjust.
Rather like when you see a caption under a newspaper photo like:
“LBJ (left) with his pet beagles”. Do they think we need the little note to decide which is LBJ and which is the Beagle? Or is the newspaper just making a snide comment about LBJ? Either way, I usually find it quite funny.
People in Texas tend to talk fast??? Not in my experience, they don’t. That’s what the famous Texas drawl is awl about…dragging out those vowels to two or three syllables apiece.
Having lived a life in Texas and being unable to understand folks from Louisiana or Alabama??? OK yes they’re different accents, but good heavens…Louisiana is a bordering state.
You live in California and NO ONE in Florida can understand a word you say? I live in Florida, and this just blows my mind. The California accent is just simply not that thick, unless one is deliberately exaggerating SoCal surfer slang with a lot of unusual word usages. Are the folks in Florida who can’t understand you perhaps Hispanic?
Brits not being able to understand an American, but the yank being able to understand the Brit. This I again cannot corroborate. Once in the Air Force at RAF Chicksands in Bedfordshire, I had the pleasure of accompanying some men from the north country working on some pipes. They chatted away amiably in some completely foreign tongue which I later learned to be English. They were easily able to understand me, a St. Louis native, and they were also extremely amused at the fact that in no instance was I ever able to understand a single word of their speech. They could literally have planned my demise in elaborate detail right in front of me. Only on the third and sometimes fourth repetition, with excruciatingly slow enunciation and at times even SPELLING the words, was I able to decipher what they were saying.
And I was there in the first place as a linguist.
It later struck me as odd that I was more easily able to understand a stressed-out air-traffic controller half a planet away in the howling wilds of Siberia chattering non-stop in caffeine-charged slang through dense layers of static, morse code and other squalling noise than a man standing right next to me, supposedly speaking my native tongue. The poster who chalked it up to “familiarity” hit the nail on the head, I think.
Surveys by operators of UK call-centres disagree with you.
A ‘strong’ accent is only a measure of the exposure that you personally have had to it, which in turn is usually a result of the number of people who speak it. Too few and the accent gets diluted by neighbouring influences, too many and it becomes commonly heard and recognised.
So Scottish accents get this unjust reputation because they are a minority of just the right size. Large enough to resist dilution from either English or American influences, small enough that the average American rarely hears it.