Do British and Irish people have a hard time understanding Americans speak?

Factual Questions
81

In Spanish, I believe the “soft r” is an alveolar flap (spelt with a single <r>, except at the beginning of a word, where it cannot appear), pronounced similarly to the /t/ and /d/ in an American accent where they appear intervocalically before an unstressed syllable (e.g., “metal”, “medal”, “nutty”, “buddy”, etc.), while the “hard r” is an alveolar trill (spelt <rr> in the middle of a word, or by a single <r> at the beginning of a word), and which sounds like, well, a trill.

I am no expert, though, so please, correct me if I’m wrong.

82

Sweet Mother of God. I could understand… maybe 5% of what he said.

83

The oddest thing about accents, is how hard it is to tell from plain text where somebody is from. I spend a lot of time on IRC with people from all over Europe and America, and a few from elsewhere, both as a primary and secondary language, and it amazes me that people from such varied backgrounds can sound so similar in text. Aside from the occasional bits of unidentifiable slang, and followers of the British form of english insisting that a theater is actually a theatre, I would swear that all of my friends are from Iowa as well.

But then we get on Teamspeak together, and suddenly I am surrounded by strangers with crazy accents. Its the oddest feeling.

Someone earlier in the thread posited that spoken language was primary, and written secondary. I would have to disagree completely with that sentiment. Something everyone agrees on like that simply cannot be secondary.

84

My earliest memory of language was speaking in an English dialect - I was born in the States but moved to Britain at 3, lived in a small village in Norfolk, spent my preschool days watching Television for Schools on BBC and ITV, etc. When I moved Stateside as a first-grader I had the worst time - first, we were living in Florida where the accents were thick as molasses (think Fort Walton Beach in the late 70s before it became a touristy place). I was always being asked to slow down. Americans in the South speak incredibly slowly, as a general rule.

Back to the UK from the age of 9 to 15, I found that while I didn’t accrue much of an accent (mostly a conscious thing - it was such a strong part of your identity as a Yank in England to maintain your accent, and the kids who sounded English were mocked in my school), I certainly kept the cadence, and their are accents in southern Britain that aren’t a million miles from the mid-Atlantic, midwestern American accent. I never once had difficulty understanding Brits for the most part…

…except Geordies and Scousers and Mancs. Really thick Northern accents are hard for me to follow. What’s funny, though, is that when Oasis got big here in the mid-90’s they would have subtitles on when Noel Gallagher gave interviews. I thought this was extremely lazy on the part of the broadcasters, who apparently thought we Americans were so thick and slow we couldn’t understand a guy who didn’t speak Estuary English. Noel’s quite easy to understand; maybe his brother Liam is a little harder to understand, partly because I don’t think he’s all that bright.

I watch EastEnders (soap opera that airs on the BBC) and most of the characters are quite easy to understand, though again, the cadence is quick. I’m used to it, but my wife has a hard time following the dialogue. There are a few characters that are almost completely incomprehensible: two characters with thick Manc accents, and one character with a strong Cockney accent that talks fast and low (Max Branning, for anyone who’s familiar).

I certainly watched tons of American TV as a kid in the mid 70s and early 80s - we had all the popular shows from the US, so the accents are quite familiar to most Brits I imagine. I do think that most actors playing Americans or using American accents weren’t that convincing. Hugh Laurie is quite skilled with his House accent, even though it’s a very generic American accent - but it works. I find most fake American accents by British actors to be too nasal.

Speaking of which, I’m always amazed by how American some of my favorite Scottish artists sound. Gerry Rafferty, Jim Kerr, Midge Ure… sound so different when they speak compared to how they sound when they sing.

85

See, this is interesting. I find when I read some posters, like Lust4Life, I know he’s British. I can’t explain why, but I can tell easily, and it’s not because of slang use. I think we Americans tend to write shorter sentences and use commas more… maybe that’s it.

86

This is what’s known as dialect or code switching in linguistics. Speakers switch from local to prestige dialects depending on who they are speaking to and what impression they wish to give. Some of the best-known research on this was done in New York by a guy named Labov, who is mentioned in the linked article.

Just about everyone changes their language a bit depending on the audience. You wouldn’t address the president of your company the same way as a buddy from school, and you don’t cuss up a storm in front of your parents. The same thing happens with accents when someone’s family speech is not a prestige dialect, or with transplants who pick up the local dialect, or with people whose social contacts cover a range of dialects.

I saw a few people say “standard” and “non-standard.” There’s no actual “standard” in language. Scouse is just as “standard” as posh or RP English. The closest thing the US has to a universally acceptable dialect is what’s known as Newscaster English.

Oh, I’m a native Californian, and I’m with an earlier guy; that California accent would definitely be notable. I picked him out as a southern California guy right away, probably surfer or beach dweller, which was confirmed later on in the recording. I didn’t catch the Valley influence though.

87

I’m an American who has lived in Ireland for eight years and travels to Britain frequently. It’s very rare that the locals have trouble understanding me - but it does happen. Mostly, it’s just they don’t understand my pronunciation of particular words, but I can think of a few occasions where they simply couldn’t understand me at all. One was an elderly gentleman in a Glasgow B&B, another was a rural Irish lawyer and a third was a young Scottish woman (I’m not sure from what part of Scotland).

About a month ago I was sitting in a pub with a group of Irish people, from various parts of Ireland (Dublin and rural), discussing The Wire, and a number of them said that they had to put the subtitles on to watch it - I presume this is the AAVE accent they have trouble with.

And to confirm what Kyla said about Trainspotting - the American release when I saw it didn’t have subtitles either, apart from in the nightclub scene, where the British release was also subtitled.

88

Sleel writes:

> This is what’s known as dialect or code switching in linguistics. Speakers switch
> from local to prestige dialects depending on who they are speaking to and what
> impression they wish to give. Some of the best-known research on this was
> done in New York by a guy named Labov, who is mentioned in the linked article.
>
> Just about everyone changes their language a bit depending on the audience.
> You wouldn’t address the president of your company the same way as a buddy
> from school, and you don’t cuss up a storm in front of your parents. The same
> thing happens with accents when someone’s family speech is not a prestige
> dialect, or with transplants who pick up the local dialect, or with people whose
> social contacts cover a range of dialects.

That was I was about to write. Switching back and forth between dialects is very common around the world. For that matter, so is being bilingual. Some linguists estimate that more than half the population of the world speaks at least two languages fluently. Compared to that, switching between dialects is relatively easy. For that matter, most people learn to switch dialect fairly unconsciously. It’s not even a matter of forcing yourself to change it with different people. You pick up the different situations that you use the different dialects in without much thinking about in most cases.

> I saw a few people say “standard” and “non-standard.” There’s no
> actual “standard” in language. Scouse is just as “standard” as posh or RP
> English. The closest thing the US has to a universally acceptable dialect is
> what’s known as Newscaster English.

I disagree here, but I think we’re disagreeing about what the term “standard” means. It doesn’t mean that one dialect is better in any linguistic sense. Structurally, each dialect is the same as any other, functioning on its own as a variety with its own rules for grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation, etc. To call a dialect standard is a sociological decision. BBC English in the U.K. and Newscaster English in the U.S. are accepted as being the default way to speak English in those countries. They are what are taught to foreign students of the language. To speak any other dialect will result in your being labeled as “speaking in some funny accent,” despite the fact that Standard British Engllish and Standard American English are just as much their own dialects with their own accents. Furthermore, “standard” is exactly what linguists use to describe such dialects. They know perfectly well when they are doing sociolinguistics and not just ordinary linguistic description.

89

I was kind of joking about Trainspotting. I remember at the time a scurrilous story went around about it needing to be subtitled for US release, but I think we knew it wasn’t really true. ISTR in discussions of it here some people saying they had trouble following the dialogue in places, though.

90

As an aside, my daughter, two and a half, mother from Newtownabbey, father whose accent has been mistaken for English or Scottish, somehow seems to be speaking with a Newry accent :confused:

91

Sounds like he’s from the south of Lancashire or the north of Greater Manchester. In fact, he sounds like he’s from Wigan, or one of the surrouding towns.

92

Yikes. Sorry to have been a party to this. My Dick Van Dyke comment was intended almost completely in jest (although imagine Dick Van Dyke saying those written words in the character of Bert the Chimbley Sweep and it’s not a completely useless example of how the mind can alter what it sees on the page).

I will, however, stand by my other point that to a large extent, the filter by which you judge the ‘proper sound’ of written text is the same one you use to speak it yourself and therefore cannot be used to objectively measure the supposed accuracy of your own spoken rendering.

However, I think you did make a quite valid point about dropped letters/sounds etc in certain dialects, to which my argument above does not really apply.

93

I wish I had a recording of the interview with an old man in my parents’ town of Strabane. A little place in the country where the people speak quickly, even for Northern Ireland, it was featured in one of those “top funniest moment” clip shows a while back. For a little time after, it was the only way people could say they knew where I had come from.

94

This is exactly what I do - sometimes I’m aware of it, sometimes not. I will, in some situations, speak with a fairly generic southern-English middle-class accent. But I’m also now working in the area I grew up (as a transplant, with parents from elsewhere), I code-switch to the speech of the children I teach, not only with the accent, but with a few bits of dialect: “doesn’t it” becomes “do it”, “isn’t” or “ain’t” becomes the quite distinct “int” (or "in’ "), and so on. I think I’ve sometimes used “larn” for “teach”, and some kids certainly do (it makes my blood boil when I hear them being ‘corrected’ for this in casual speech - it’s one thing to aid them to code-switch in such a manner, another to tell them that their own native speech is ‘wrong’).

95

The movie The Ratcatcher was set in an estate of council flats in Glasgow and had subtitles here in the states. I definitely needed them.

I once knew an Oxford educated Glaswegian woman (Glaswegienne?) who I almost never had any trouble understanding. Once, though, she said “cook a meal” and I was sure she said “kick a mule,” and I admit I did give her kind of a funny look.

96

With regards adapting your dialect to match a “better” one, when my sister came back for a few days from Liverpool, my ex reckoned her Northern Irish accent had become a bit thicker. She’s one of those people who almost has no accent, I’d say it was as neutral a Northern Irish accent as you can get.

It makes me wonder if she felt she could relax in front of the Scousers. With nobody from home around, she could speak as she felt was comfortable, with the Scousers none the wiser.

97

I think there should be a standard preliminary to threads like this, making it clear that phrases such as “she has no accent”, as in the previous post, are to be understood to mean “she has the accent that is considered neutral or standard here”, and that objectively there is no such thing as “no accent”. Otherwise there’s just going to be endless nitpicking.

98

It depends on the person, I think. i have several coworkers from the UK and I can understand them…unless they’re speaking really fast and then sometimes words get lost to me because of their accent…and it works both ways. They say the same thing to me. Which I find interesting, since they always say “You have to slow down, with your accent…” and i’m like 'what accent?".

99

Speed of speech is another subjective thing - everybody seems to think that people with an unfamilar dialect “talk fast”. They don’t, you just understand slower, because you are not as fluent in their dialect.

100

You see, in MY accent (middleclass Dublin, Ireland - kind of an Irish equivalent of ‘newscaster accent’ I suppose) the ‘a’ sounds the same in ‘cat’ and bra’ though it might be held for slightly longer in ‘bra’ because it’s the end of a word. Though, I know from hearing some Americans that the way you say the two words sounds like ‘cat’ and ‘brawh’ to me! :smiley:

Whoever gave the examples of Mary, marry and merry - kudos. To me they all sound different but when I hear some Americans saying those words they appear to sound the same. Equally for ‘medal’ and ‘metal’…

Then there’s the soft Irish ‘t’. Some people might say that I say ‘waw-sher’ instead of ‘water’ but I hear quite a significant difference between my soft ‘t’ in ‘water’ and the ‘sh’ sound.

Potayto, potahto…