The way I understood it, Trainspotting was made as a film primarily for the UK market, so little effort was made to ‘water down’ the accents.
I’m English, but spent five years at university in Edinburgh. I can understand Robert Carlyle’s Begbie mostly - but I think the key is to understand the gist of what he’s saying rather than the actual words.
PS Have you tried reading the Irvine Welsh novel? If you had trouble with the film, it’ll take you forever to read the book (it took me a damn sight longer…)
I watched ‘Trainspotting’ a few days ago on (US) video, and parts had definitely been dubbed, but thankfully they’d left the swearing intact. I can’t say for sure that any single part was worded differently, but it seemed as though several spoken parts had been lifted and relaid with the removal of some background noise in order to increase clarity, and presumably the understanding for the non-Brit viewers (listeners). Most of the others watching were American…we didn’t seem to be laughing at the same time, so I don’t know if they didn’t understand it all or it was just a differece in senses of humour. Fortunately, i have an uncle from Glaaasgee…di ya thank Rangers 'e ginne wun tha Lig agaaain thus year? Yes.
Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing, spirit crushing game shows, stuffing junk food into your mouth.
If you think Monty Pyton is hard at first, try Coronation Street. ( I only get it on the Canadian Broadcast Company.) I haven’t a clue of what the plot line is, but dang, listening to all the accents is an education in itself.
Right let’s get one thing straight. We’re all using ENGLISH here on the SDMB. That means it’s OUR language, and all you OTHER chaps have got an accent. Us Brits dinnae, y’ken!
Actually, I’m trying for the sardonic Englishman award.
A few points:
‘dinnae y’ken’ is an attempt to reproduce the spoken Scots for ‘don’t you know’.
Dutch people usually speak English better than the English (hello, Coldfire!)
The reason that English is predominant is the tremendous energy of the USA, especially Hollywood (thanks to you, I don’t have to learn a second language!).
Britain does have several regional accents (e.g. Coronation Street is based in the North West), and some of these are pretty strong / incomprehensible, even to other Brits.
Finally there are some words and phrases that differ in meaning (pants, crisps), but we all like Monty Python!
Why doesn’t the sun come out at night when the light would be more useful? (Pratchett)
Dutch people usually speak English better than the English (hello, Coldfire!)
Oi, matey
Seriously, that’s a bit of an exageration. Although the English vocabulary of the average Dutchman is pretty impressive (for a foreigner, of course), the accent is usually pretty thick. Mine is not (or at least I hope it isn’t), but I’m sure you’d still be able to tell I am Dutch.
The Swedes and the Danes have similar problems: great vocabulary, easily recognisable accents
Android, re: Trainspotting, Spud’s interview scene and maybe one or two others were dubbed for American release. They just had the actors re-record the lines, speaking a bit more sharply (though personally I think in that scene, at least, the actual dialogue was a bit beside the point).
The book is quite difficult to read unless you’re familiar enough with the Scottish accent to be able to say the words in your head as you’re reading.
The 1980s children among us might remember that in the Scottish band Big Country’s heyday, every time they gave interviews on American TV subtitles were provided.
My mother is from Manchester, England and so are all my cousins on her side. At least a few of them think it’s cool somehow to use a Liverpool accent. One of my uncles is Scottish and his kids have, let’s say, rather unique accents (Scottish combined with fake Liverpudlian) So I have been deciphering thick British/Scottish accents my whole life.
Anyway, watching Trainspotting in the theater, my husband and I were the only people who didn’t get up and leave for lack of understanding the actors! Someone had mentioned the similarity between some thick southern accents and British dialects and that is true. However, the difference is that for the most part, the southerners speak much more slowly than the Brits so it’s not surprising that even southerners had quite a bit of trouble understanding Trainspotting and The Full Monty!
Born O.K. the first time…
If you are born again, do you have two belly-buttons?
Since half my family is English, I have the ear for and usually have no trouble with any of the British accents (even Glasgow, Sheffield, and Yorkshire given a moment to acclimatize), but I have to act as a translator for Mom (American side). Whenever she rents a British film she insists I be around to tell her what’s going on - the Full Monty nearly wiped her out.
The dialects of remoter regions of the American south - up in the mountains, or on some of the barrier islands - are supposedly reminiscent of dialects found among the Elizabethan or Jacobean English. That would mean the dialects had to have been pretty isolated for around 500 years. Folks in Houston or Atlanta would not be mistaken as English yoeman, I think.
This is more or less a fiction, as has been suggested elsewhere. What is true is that there are usages – vocabulary, phrases, etc. – that persisted at least until recently in Appalachian dialects (primarily in the Smoky Mountains of eastern Tennessee, western North and South Carolina, and northern Georgia, and in the Ozark Mountains of northern Arkansas and sourthern Missouri) which were current in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English but which have otherwise passed out of general use. But I don’t believe that there’s much evidence to support the notion that the pronunciation, cadence, and intonation of either Appalachian dialect or, more broadly, of Southern American English is somehow a preservation of the English of Shakespeare, or even of provincial English, Scottish, or Irish dialects of that time.
Partially, I believe, the Southern-accent-as-older-English idea is promulgated as a result of a patronization of Southerners and mountain folk as some sort of noble savages who preserve an older, purer form of life. But you do hear this argument put forth (whether in earnest or as a diversionary tactic) by Southerners or mountain folk themselves – I’m thinking of a booklet entitled “How to talk hillbilly” (or something to that effect) that I remember being commonly sold in tourist trap gift shops in Newton County, Arkansas, when I lived there as a child some twenty-five years ago. The “Elizabethan English = Appalachian dialect” argument was explicitly made in this booklet, and I suspect in plenty of other places. There’s also a penchant among Southerners of a certain romantic bent of mind for identifying with Cavalier English society that no doubt contributes to this.
Another linguistic phenomenon that’s used to support the idea that Southern speech is a preservation of Tudor/Stuart English is the pronunciation of certain vowel sounds in the accent of the Tidewater region of Virginia. In particular, the “ou” vowel sound in “house”, “mouse”, “about”, etc. is pronounced more like the “oo” in “moon”; this pronunciation was characteristic of English before the Great Vowel Shift. However, the Great Vowel Shift was well underway (indeed, approaching completion) by the time Virginia was settled, and I don’t know whether it’s ever been established that this is in fact a preservation of, and not a return to, an earlier pronunciation. And in any case it’s a fairly localized phenomenon, not characteristic of the general run of speech in the southern U.S.
So while some Southerners may be difficult to understand, and some mountain dwellers nearly impossible for the unaccustomed ear, I don’t think it’s because they sound like the English did several centuries ago. Rather, it’s hard to understand for the same reasons that any accent we’re unused to is hard. Partially, it’s that the pronunciation of individual words is slightly different, and partially it’s because the vocabulary may not be exactly the same. But I think most of us underestimate the role that speech rhythm and intonation play in helping us decode the utterances of others. Rhythmic cues and tone of voice provide us with a lot of information we’re not even conscious of that we use in breaking up a nearly continuous stream of sound into phrases, words, and syllables. Faced with unfamiliar rhythms and intonation, these mechanisms break down or are forced to work much harder.
We tend to hear well what we expect to hear – even as the words are leaving someone else’s lips, our brains are drawing on a wide range of audible and (where available) visible clues, combining them with cultural norms, customs, half-remembered tropes, etc., and using them to construct a hypothesis about what the next words will be. The closer the match between what we expect to hear and what our ears bring us, the higher the degree of certainty we have that we have heard correctly.
And you’re right – no one in Atlanta is likely to be mistaken for an English yeoman. Except of course, for all the Brits we have running around here these days. Practically no one in Atlanta has a real Southern accent, for the simple reason that practically no one in Atlanta is from the South.
