Especially as the clip begins “I was having a fag”…typical hard-working Scotsman…
I had no problems when I was in Glasgow, Edinburgh, or Ayr, but when I got up to Inverness I found people very hard to understand. It could have been Icelandic.
I find heavy accents from Ghana and Nigeria harder to understand than Caribbean accents.
I was born in New Jersey and cast no stones.
Yup, I came in here to say some urban black people in America. They have their own dialect. Shit, go into Southeast DC and listen to some of those younger black people talk. Good luck understanding a lot of what they say.
None of those clips were too tough but I did have to pay attention. Maybe I’ve been living internationally for so long that I’ve heard a lot of these accents before. the guy going on about the terrorists sounds just like a colleague.
The funny part about that for me is that my husband and I watched the film, and turned and looked at each other in astonishment - the Pikey accent was a Newfie accent! We had no problem understanding him at all.
The accent I am currently having the hardest time with is a South African accent. The vowels and whatever are pinched in the wrong places, and it just throws me.
Here is a classic sketch from Rab C Nesbitt . I would always turn on the sub-titles when watching this comedy series.
When the British film The Acid House was distributed in the US, it mercifully included English subtitles. That was some incomprehensibleness there.
Yeah, my sister’s ex boyfriend in Tennessee: “Jew boh?” he asked me. “Pardon?” I replied. “Jew boh?” “Sorry?” He started to lose patience, so spoke slowly and loudly for me. “JEW. BOH.???” …and mimed rolling a ball in a bowling alley.
The only one I have a problem with is Geordie. I’m from the NW, so used to hearing Scousers and Mancs, and lived in Scotland for five years, so most Scottish is easy to understand, but Geordie is something else.
Nah, southern accents are way more annoying. Essex? The West Country? Cockney? Let’s not even mention that the single most offensive accent in the history of mankind, RP, is way more prevalent in the south than in the north.
Try listening to the parent accent: Rural South East Coastal. My father used to go down to the barber shop when we’d visit his cousins’ farm in Bladen County, NC. He would talk with the old men there, but damed if I had any clue what was said.
There’s incomprehensible, and then there’s incomprehensible.
A few years ago I had a temp job in a lab. My supervisor was from Northern Ireland. I don’t think I understood more than about five words he said to me in the whole six weeks I was there. Even after asking him to repeat himself two or three times. He was very soft-spoken, and yet had an accent so thick you could lag pipes with it.
Having said that (and now I’ll feel old) some teenagers in London speak with such a mixture of urban US slang and Jamaican patois (especially, it seems, the lily-white ones) that I don’t have a clue what they’re on about…
I need to put in a plug for Cajun. A cousin of mine (originally from Wisconsin, moved to the bayou when he was ten-ish) married a Cajun girl who had never been outside the swamp until he brought her north for a visit. Very sweet girl, as far as we could tell, anyway.
I feel like I’m fairly competent to answer this question.
See, I worked in an Irish pub in Europe, so we got all sorts of expatriate anglos.
Irish. My boss was from West Cork. He was unintelligible for the first few months I knew him. It was difficult. Not only are the normal words different, so is the grammar and the accent.
Geordie. You know… I dunno, I really liked Geordies. They were all really nice and friendly in my opinion.
Irish were difficult though. I really never met two irishmen with the same accent. I have no idea why…
A Mancunian friend (who happens to be gay, making it all the funnier) regaled me with the time he had an appointment to receive an American visitor coming for a consultation at his agency. Apparently, from his description, the building was U shaped, with an open garden close between the arms. The guest arrived early, and my friend, not anticipating this, had stepped out into the close for a cigarette before his arrival. “He’ll be with you shortly,” the receptionist told the visitor. “He’s out in the garden blowing a fag.”
Post #22?
I understood that Glawegian guy (the one who took on the terrorist) without much difficulty. Couldn’t understand the soccer guy at all, but that was part of the comedy.
I get along all right with context and facial expression etc–but that Scotland quiz–only voices with accents–that was hard.
I find some Filipinos speaking English very hard to understand. Also, rapid speech from Yorkshire is hard (and there are some vocabulary issues there), and occasionally, I cannot understand Aussie. Cannot understand drunk Aussie at all.
Makes me wonder if US films are ever released with subtitles in the UK. Sling Blade, for example? Did that have subtitles there, or did y’all wade through the accents and dialect with no trouble?
Nyah! Never trust an actor in a role to best express any Southern dialect – even if he’s from the South. I was told by a New York television crew that I didn’t sound like I was from the South – despite the fact that I’ve never lived anywhere else but Tennessee. I rolled my eyes and said, “Oh…you want 'magnolia.” They laughed and I gave them the drawl. That was what they wanted.
Well, didjew? 