I would guess that the zenith of peoples being separated by the shared language of English occurred during WW1. In July 1914 there must have been a huge number of people who had grown up speaking English as a 1st language who had never heard any example of the majority of other English accents / dialects.
When the war started most of the British Empire came to the one place for the first time, followed 3 years later by the Americans. After WW1 came radio and then talkies. I would guess that these events caused the English language to start to become much more homogeneous and mutually understood.
I think that in 1914 you could have easily found Scots who could not understand other Scots, English who could not understand other English and possibly Americans who could not understand other Americans. Then there was the whole problem of the different English speaking nationalities communicating with each other.
Are there any documented examples of English speakers being unable to verbally communicate with each other during WW1? Was any anthropological research into these issues done then?
I don’t know about during WW1, but I have personal experience of not being able to communicate with my fellow English speakers, and I don’t think this is uncommon even today.
Two quick examples:
Two teenage girls who approached me at Middlesbrough coach station. It took me about 10 minutes to realise they were asking me the time.
I hitched a lift with a Glaswegian truck driver from his home town all the way to London. He talked the whole way and I got about 10% of it.
Both instances were due not just to accent but dialect as well (unfamiliar words and usage).
Americans cannot understand a word what I say. I remember as an undergraduate needing a friend to translate, no matter how clearly I tried to enunciate, for some visiting Americans.
Similarly, I remember going to a gig in Glasgow and not understanding a word what a bouncer was saying to me: he was trying to get me to stand with arms out so that he could pat me down.
If you ask me it still happens. A Glaswegian friend once asked me and another Swede “Do you really understand what he [from Elgin] is saying? I don’t understand a single word”. To be honest they both have very thick dialects, so we have to concentrate very hard to decipher what any of them says.
I don’t have any information c. WWI, but I’ve read books set in WWII with heavy use of accents where one of the difficulties is specifically wading through some people’s accents.
That said, I wonder where the OP got the idea that current speakers of English have no problem understanding each other’s dialects and accents. It’s been mentioned in these boards time and again that they do.
I have a hard time with people from India and nearby places - for some reason that accent is just difficult for me. I don’t have much of a problem at all with people from the Far East or other parts of the world.
My own experiences with regard to miscomprehension is that I haven’t much problem with most accents I encounter. Stronger Scots accents are not too dissimilar to the way my dad from Northern Ireland spoke. However, when I’m in the US in particular some people can’t understand me, in contrast some people don’t even realise I’m not American.
Pakistani accents are very different from Indian ones and even India has several different ones, you will have to be more specific as to what you find hard to follow.
As for me, I was taught one class by an Ulsterman, I think at the end of the year I could follow about 20%. I took to sending him quries by e-mail.
> I would guess that the zenith of peoples being separated by the shared
> language of English occurred during WW1.
I suspect that you’re wrong. I suspect that English accents have continued to differentiate over the ninety-five years since the beginning of World War I. Yes, there’s more mass communication since that time, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that people lose the accents that they speak amongst themselves. It’s probably true that more English-speakers now find it fairly easy to understand Standard American English and probably Standard British English, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they speak a dialect that’s closer to those. However, I’m not an expert on English-language dialects, so I can’t be sure about this. I doubt if anyone could precisely verify the statement I quoted above from the OP. We have lots of records of what English-language accents are like over the past ninety-five years, but I don’t think anyone has sat down to calculate the amount by which the dialects have drifted towards or away from each other.
I visited a friend in Boston, and he had to go into an office at Harvard and pick up something. I literally did not understand a word the secretary said. (I’m originally from Maryland.)
My experience in Scotland was that when someone first spoke to me, I couldn’t understand a word he said. However, once I understood the subject matter and/or got some of the context, comprehensibility increased considerably. BTW, I’m an American, and the Scots I’m talking about were highlanders (if that’s the right term).
Anyone not familiar with a heavy Cajun accent would have trouble understanding it.
I also find that even some of my British friends, whom I have no problem understanding face-to-face, are difficult to understand over the phone.
My feeling is that dialectal differences would have been greater within the UK than they were in all the rest of the English speaking world, especially if you count Lallans (Scottish Lowlands English) as a dialect rather than as a separate language. Further, within the UK dialectal differences have become less rather than greater over the last century.
My experience: I lived in Leeds from 1947 to 1954, then migrated with my family to Australia. I went back to West Yorkshire again in 2005 for a visit. In 1955, when we first moved to Australia, my younger brother’s dialect was practically unintelligible to our Australian relations, since he spoke with a broad Yorkshire dialect. (My dialect was much closer to Received Standard, so they had no problem understanding me – and my brother shifted his dialect to Broad Australian in a few weeks, to fit in better at school). In 2005, I only heard one person speaking with a broad Yorkshire dialect – an older man in a shop that my wife and I were visiting in Harrogate – so that it seems to me that there has been a general shift away from that accent towards the Received Standard centre of the English language in England.
Whereabouts in Scotland are you referring to? I once heard in interview with Glaswegian author Denis Mina and to my amateur, non native English speaker, ears she didn’t sound like any other Glaswegian I have ever met but very much Belfast. I can’t interpret it in another way than the Irish immigrants tend to stick together and keep their accent.
I was referring to Glasgow. The accents definitely differ across the various cities/social classes I’ve encountered there but Glaswegian accents are the “strongest” I’ve encountered.
That’s not my point. Whether accents have stayed the same, converged or diverged, my point was that 100 years ago most people seldom actually heard people from far away places speaking, so they never got to to practice understanding their accents. Since the 1920s there have been ever increasing opportunities for people to hear broadcasts or recordings of other accents. I find southern US accents difficult to understand sometimes, but I’ve had lots of practice thanks to films and TV, and so I’m much better at it than I would have been in 1914.
I am from Philadelphia. Only once did I meet an American I had difficulty with (from Bayou country). At least twice, I experienced Cockneys I simply could not understand. I have met people from both Edinburgh and Glasgow and could understand them without difficulty. I once met a Highland Scot who, when he demonstrated his native dialect, what he spoke to his family, was incomprehensible. And I have been to Barbados many times and simply cannot understand the native dialect. However all these people understand me and nearly all (with the apparent exception of the two Cockneys) are perfectly willing and able to change their speech to accommodate me. I have noticed that Bajan (Barbadian) radio and TV announcers are invariably speaking an international (and quite beautiful) version of English.