# Ok, so what exactly do the Americans think is a British accent
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ok-so-what-exactly-do-the-americans-think-is-a-british-accent/591305
**Category:** In My Humble Opinion
**Created:** [August 3, 2011, 9:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ok-so-what-exactly-do-the-americans-think-is-a-british-accent/591305 "2011-08-03T09:58:36Z")
**Posts on this page:** 20
**Page:** 4
### Author:  [@Ximenean](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ximenean)
#### Post date: [August 16, 2011, 4:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ok-so-what-exactly-do-the-americans-think-is-a-british-accent/591305/61 "2011-08-16T16:37:56Z")
> [@MrDibble](#):
>
> English isn’t an immigrant tongue.
Well, my comment was tongue-in-cheek, but it does raise the question of where you draw the line between “immigrant” and “native”. Tha name “English” comes from the Angles, settlers from Angeln, a region in what is now Germany. Of course, English has changed a bit since those people brought it over, but I imagine that the Punjabi spoken natively by many British people is also somewhat different to Punjabi in the Punjab.
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### Author:  [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)
#### Post date: [August 16, 2011, 8:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ok-so-what-exactly-do-the-americans-think-is-a-british-accent/591305/62 "2011-08-16T20:16:18Z")
> [@Ximenean](#):
>
> Well, my comment was tongue-in-cheek, but it does raise the question of where you draw the line between “immigrant” and “native”.
I draw the line when the language actually developed in the place where it is spoken. English is an immigrant language in, say, Australia, but not England. Afrikaans, for another example, is _not_ an immigrant language in South Africa, but Dutch is in Guyana.
> [@](#):
>
> Tha name “English” comes from the Angles, settlers from Angeln, a region in what is now Germany.
The language they spoke is not remotely intelligible to an exclusively-English speaker (although, oddly, half-intelligible to this Afrikaans speaker).
> [@](#):
>
> Of course, English has changed a bit since those people brought it over, but I imagine that the Punjabi spoken natively by many British people is also somewhat different to Punjabi in the Punjab.
But still mutually intelligible, I’m sure.
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### Author:  [@mhendo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mhendo)
#### Post date: [August 16, 2011, 9:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ok-so-what-exactly-do-the-americans-think-is-a-british-accent/591305/63 "2011-08-16T21:01:14Z")
> [@lazybratsche](#):
>
> I am an American and I am familiar with many North American accents. I am also somewhat acquainted, through media and a few people I’ve met, with a smattering of British accents, and maybe a few other accents like Australian.
I’m an Aussie living in the United States, and i estimate that at least half of the people (store clerks, librarians, students, etc.) who meet me for the first time and notice my accent think i’m from England. I often get asked what part of England i’m from, although some get more specific and ask what part of London i’m from.
Of the folks who realize that i come from the South Pacific, about a third guess New Zealand, but i think that’s partly because people are more concerned about offending New Zealanders by calling them Australian than the other way around. 🙂
It’s worth noting that, while my accent is clearly Australian to anyone who knows Aussie accents, i don’t have a really broad accent like, say, Steve Irwin. That’s probably why i get mistaken for British quite often.
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### Author:  [@Ximenean](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ximenean)
#### Post date: [August 16, 2011, 9:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ok-so-what-exactly-do-the-americans-think-is-a-british-accent/591305/64 "2011-08-16T21:57:27Z")
> [@MrDibble](#):
>
> I draw the line when the language actually developed in the place where it is spoken. English is an immigrant language in, say, Australia, but not England. Afrikaans, for another example, is _not_ an immigrant language in South Africa
That’s just shunting the question somewhere else, like a lump in the carpet. All languages develop, all the time. Some people would say that Afrikaans and Dutch are dialects of the same language. They have a certain amount of mutual intelligibility, after all. Who decides whether two dialects are separate languages? It’s subjective.
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### Author:  [@SciFiSam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SciFiSam)
#### Post date: [August 16, 2011, 10:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ok-so-what-exactly-do-the-americans-think-is-a-british-accent/591305/65 "2011-08-16T22:32:04Z")
> [@Ximenean](#):
>
> That’s just shunting the question somewhere else, like a lump in the carpet. All languages develop, all the time. Some people would say that Afrikaans and Dutch are dialects of the same language. They have a certain amount of mutual intelligibility, after all. Who decides whether two dialects are separate languages? It’s subjective.
By that standard you could say that _all_ languages are immigrants, or none.
Do you really think the differences between the languages the Angles spoke and modern English is the same as the difference between Punjabi spoke in England by people only a generation or two removed from the Punjab, and Punjabi spoken in the Punjab?
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### Author:  [@Ximenean](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ximenean)
#### Post date: [August 16, 2011, 10:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ok-so-what-exactly-do-the-americans-think-is-a-british-accent/591305/66 "2011-08-16T22:37:36Z")
> [@SciFiSam](#):
>
> Do you really think the differences between the languages the Angles spoke and modern English is the same as the difference between Punjabi spoke in England by people only a generation or two removed from the Punjab, and Punjabi spoken in the Punjab?
Nope.
I am interested in the question of whether Punjabi, say, could be considered a native language of Britain, given that many people born in Britain speak it as a native language.
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### Author:  [@An\_Gadai](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/An_Gadai)
#### Post date: [August 16, 2011, 10:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ok-so-what-exactly-do-the-americans-think-is-a-british-accent/591305/67 "2011-08-16T22:48:19Z")
> [@Ximenean](#):
>
> Irish Gaelic is an official language of the UK, btw, as it is spoken in Northern Ireland. Technically that’s not Great Britain, of course.
You also have Ulster-Scots in NI.
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### Author:  [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)
#### Post date: [August 16, 2011, 11:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ok-so-what-exactly-do-the-americans-think-is-a-british-accent/591305/68 "2011-08-16T23:50:13Z")
> [@Ximenean](#):
>
> That’s just shunting the question somewhere else, like a lump in the carpet. All languages develop, all the time.
Given. But if you’re going to use words like immigrant, even in jest, you have to give weight to \*where \*a language develops.
> [@](#):
>
> Some people would say that Afrikaans and Dutch are dialects of the same language.
They’d be wrong. Closely related, but Afrikaans isn’t even mostly descended from the dialect that gave rise to the mainstream Dutch of today, it incorporated everything from Frisian to Flemish, and it started diverging in the early 1700s.
Afrikaans is the Scots to Dutch’s English. Hell, 2/3 as many people can speak Afrikaans as can speak Dutch. And of those, way more people speak it as a second language than speak Dutch as second language.
> [@](#):
>
> They have a certain amount of mutual intelligibility, after all.
So do Dutch and Flemish and Low German. So do English and Scots. Hell, so do French and Italian. That’s not the only determining factor.
> [@](#):
>
> Who decides whether two dialects are separate languages? It’s subjective.
[Linguists](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect#.22Dialect.22_or_.22language.22) [do](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differences_between_Afrikaans_and_Dutch).
It’s true that there’s \*some \*subjectivity[and the whole thing is clinal](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ausbausprache,_Abstandsprache_and_Dachsprache), but there’s[a whole field of study](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_method) to it, with rules and all. Rough guide:
[
> [@](#):
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> Language varieties are often called dialects rather than languages:
>
> [ul]
> [li]because they have no standard or codified form,[/li][li] because the speakers of the given language do not have a state of their own,[/li][li] because they are rarely or never used in writing (outside reported speech)[/li][li] or because they lack prestige with respect to some other, often standardised, variety.[/li][/ul]
]([Dialect - Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect#.22Dialect.22_or_.22language.22))
Most linguists consider Afrikaans a [daughter language](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daughter_language) of Dutch, because while there is genetic descent, Afrikaans has diverged and incorporated a bit of other languages. Hasn’t diverged a lot in the lexicon, but quite a bit in other ways. And diverged into having several dialects of its own, both regiolects and sociolects. And it met the [other criterion](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_an_army_and_navy)for distinguishing the two a while ago, of course.
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### Author:  [@SciFiSam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SciFiSam)
#### Post date: [August 17, 2011, 12:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ok-so-what-exactly-do-the-americans-think-is-a-british-accent/591305/69 "2011-08-17T00:08:32Z")
> [@Ximenean](#):
>
> Nope.
>
> I am interested in the question of whether Punjabi, say, could be considered a native language of Britain, given that many people born in Britain speak it as a native language.
You’d have a hard time making a case for Punjabi being a native language of Britain just because some people speak it - the same goes for loads of languages. It’d take more than a couple of generations learning it from their parents in whatever dialect their parents speak for it to be a native language.
You could state that it’s a very widely-used language. Bengali, similarly, is very widely-used even to the extent that it appears on some street signs and hospital signs as standard in East London. So I kinda SWYM, that there are many languages in use here, but ‘native language’ is the wrong term to use.
I can’t remember who first claimed that the US has three native languages -whoever you are, which languages were you thinking of?
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### Author:  [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)
#### Post date: [August 17, 2011, 12:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ok-so-what-exactly-do-the-americans-think-is-a-british-accent/591305/70 "2011-08-17T00:13:47Z")
> [@Ximenean](#):
>
> Nope.
>
> I am interested in the question of whether Punjabi, say, could be considered a native language of Britain, given that many people born in Britain speak it as a native language.
I’d say no. Not until the people who speak it in England diverge sufficiently from the mother language for it to be considered a different language, or at least a regional variant. It’s a native language for Punjabis, but not a native language for Britain - yet.
I think if we looked we’d find _most of the British first-language_ Punjabi speakers are immigrants, and most native-born Punjabis speak it as a second (and more formal) language in the context of madrassa and mosque, which, I think, tends to lessen dialect formation. Couple that with the likelihood that there’s a lot of influence from media like cinema, which tends to unify a language too (look at English, for instance - not much diversion happening there today)
I think it’s more likely that Kashmiri would develop an English form, given the more insular and less socially-advantaged circumstances of the general Kashmiri community. But even there I’m not so sure. Again, media and assimilation are the barriers to divergence.
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### Author:  [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)
#### Post date: [August 17, 2011, 12:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ok-so-what-exactly-do-the-americans-think-is-a-british-accent/591305/71 "2011-08-17T00:18:03Z")
> [@SciFiSam](#):
>
> I can’t remember who first claimed that the US has three native languages -whoever you are, which languages were you thinking of?
I’d think the US had a lot more than that. Are you thinking of the UK? That was **Scheidt-Hoch** , and I assumed they mean Gaelic, Welsh and English. It was my nitpicking the exclusion of Scots that led to that tangent…I’m sorry. :o
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### Author:  [@Bytegeist](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bytegeist)
#### Post date: [August 17, 2011, 12:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ok-so-what-exactly-do-the-americans-think-is-a-british-accent/591305/72 "2011-08-17T00:29:09Z")
> [@SciFiSam](#):
>
> I can’t remember who first claimed that the US has three native languages -whoever you are, which languages were you thinking of?
I’m not the person you’re addressing, but I’ll have a guess that he or she meant English, Spanish, and French (Cajun).
Obviously those are just the European languages. Aboriginal languages (e.g. Navajo) are still around too, but including them would make a number much larger than three.
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### Author:  [@SciFiSam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SciFiSam)
#### Post date: [August 17, 2011, 12:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ok-so-what-exactly-do-the-americans-think-is-a-british-accent/591305/73 "2011-08-17T00:30:19Z")
> [@MrDibble](#):
>
> I’d think the US had a lot more than that. Are you thinking of the UK? That was **Scheidt-Hoch** , and I assumed they mean Gaelic, Welsh and English. It was my nitpicking the exclusion of Scots that led to that tangent…I’m sorry. :o
No. Sheidt-Hoch made his post in response to someone claiming that the US had three native languages.
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### Author:  [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)
#### Post date: [August 17, 2011, 12:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ok-so-what-exactly-do-the-americans-think-is-a-british-accent/591305/74 "2011-08-17T00:34:08Z")
> [@SciFiSam](#):
>
> No. Sheidt-Hoch made his post in response to someone claiming that the US had three native languages.
Aaah, that was **Raguleader** , and he said [“continent”](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=14098207&postcount=34) and “North America” as a whole, so I assume he meant Spanish, French and English. And he said “natively speaks” which is not quite the same as “language native to -” to me.
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### Author:  [@Ximenean](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ximenean)
#### Post date: [August 17, 2011, 1:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ok-so-what-exactly-do-the-americans-think-is-a-british-accent/591305/75 "2011-08-17T01:29:38Z")
> [@SciFiSam](#):
>
> You’d have a hard time making a case for Punjabi being a native language of Britain just because some people speak it - the same goes for loads of languages. It’d take more than a couple of generations learning it from their parents in whatever dialect their parents speak for it to be a native language.
>
> You could state that it’s a very widely-used language. Bengali, similarly, is very widely-used even to the extent that it appears on some street signs and hospital signs as standard in East London. So I kinda SWYM, that there are many languages in use here, but ‘native language’ is the wrong term to use.
So what does “native language” mean?
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### Author:  [@SciFiSam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SciFiSam)
#### Post date: [August 17, 2011, 1:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ok-so-what-exactly-do-the-americans-think-is-a-british-accent/591305/76 "2011-08-17T01:55:32Z")
> [@MrDibble](#):
>
> Aaah, that was **Raguleader** , and he said [“continent”](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=14098207&postcount=34) and “North America” as a whole, so I assume he meant Spanish, French and English. And he said “natively speaks” which is not quite the same as “language native to -” to me.
Ah, OK, makes sense to me now.
> [@Ximenean](#):
>
> So what does “native language” mean?
One thing it can’t mean is ‘language that a few people speak only because their parents, who are immigrants, speak it.’ C’mon, do you really, really think that Punjabi is a native language of Britain?
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### Author:  [@Ximenean](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ximenean)
#### Post date: [August 17, 2011, 2:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ok-so-what-exactly-do-the-americans-think-is-a-british-accent/591305/77 "2011-08-17T02:11:31Z")
> [@SciFiSam](#):
>
> One thing it can’t mean is ‘language that a few people speak only because their parents, who are immigrants, speak it.’ C’mon, do you really, really think that Punjabi is a native language of Britain?
It’s not a few people, it’s hundreds of thousands of people, many of them born in Britain. Excuse me for using a perfectly reasonable definition of the word “native”
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### Author:  [@AK84](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AK84)
#### Post date: [August 17, 2011, 9:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ok-so-what-exactly-do-the-americans-think-is-a-british-accent/591305/78 "2011-08-17T09:53:08Z")
On the issue of Punjabi, I would point out that there is no one language known as Punjabi; there are dozens spoken in the Punjab\* most which are not completely mutually intelligible. It should be noted that various Punjabis haves never been a “court” or official language. There have always been overshadowed by Turkish, Persian, Urdu and today English. As a result there has been less standardization; the language spoken by second and third generation has already deviated quite a lot.
- Admittedly the part of Punjab in India has one fairly unified language; but the Pakistani Punjab has three main languages and about a dozen minor one.
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### Author:  [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)
#### Post date: [August 17, 2011, 9:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ok-so-what-exactly-do-the-americans-think-is-a-british-accent/591305/79 "2011-08-17T09:57:43Z")
> [@AK84](#):
>
> On the issue of Punjabi, I would point out that there is no one language known as Punjabi; there are dozens spoken in the Punjab\* most which are not completely mutually intelligible. It should be noted that various Punjabis haves never been a “court” or official language. There have always been overshadowed by Turkish, Persian, Urdu and today English. As a result there has been less standardization; the language spoken by second and third generation has already deviated quite a lot.
I stand corrected. Would you say it’s diverted enough for there to be uniquely English dialects that are hard for Pakistanis to understand?
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### Author:  [@SciFiSam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SciFiSam)
#### Post date: [August 17, 2011, 11:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ok-so-what-exactly-do-the-americans-think-is-a-british-accent/591305/80 "2011-08-17T11:04:06Z")
> [@Ximenean](#):
>
> It’s not a few people, it’s hundreds of thousands of people, many of them born in Britain. Excuse me for using a perfectly reasonable definition of the word “native”
I think, before claiming that Punjabi is a native language of anywhere, you should have checked that it exists; it kinda damages your credibility otherwise.
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