I’m an American native English speaker. I speak some, but not entirely fluent, German. I saw a movie while I lived in Frankfurt, My Name is Joe, set in Glasgow. For the first half of the film I had to read the German subtitles to understand what they were going on about in the story. After a while I was able to suss enough of it to get by without the subtitles. It was a combination of thick accent and different words. I worked with a few Glaswegians at the time and new what it was like when they got going talking at warp speed with each other, but this was an entirely new experience, to try and follow it and get the meaning. I don’t recall having a similar problem with Trainspotting or speaking with anyone in or from the UK.
Yes - in the time before mass media tuned our ears to varied accents and mass transit systems and the car made us mobile a geordie might as well have been speaking martian to a cockney. Only a decade ago when Rab C Nesbitt (comedy with central character having a deep Glasgow accent) first hit the screens many including myself found him unintelligible. Now my ear is trained it’s fine.
Just be thankful he didn’t speak Aberdonian - it bears almost no relationship to any language on Planet Earth.
I do know that the creole spoken by louisiana natives can be baffling, and a lot of the phrasing in plain english in new orleans is based on the grammer of creole…like I pass down meaning to go somewhere, or Im gonna pass with for to spend time with. I wish i could really remember more, but unfortunately I understand the creole as spoken and make the shift in my mind, but whenever I came home for a visit it took me a bit to switch back to standard english as my entire work crew were very old country creole and we pretty much spoke creole or creole-englishified all the time. Try watching some interviews of old time zydego musicians sometime and you can see what I mean.
mrAru is from Fresno in California, and they have a cholo-english combination that is sort of baffling as it is colloquial mexican mixed with english, and it has a lot of the same features of englishified creole, different sentance tructure, cadences and letter shifts
Stanley Unwin was born in South Africa but grew up in Essex… his language is self-invented, rather than a dialect.
Stanley Unwin dot com has lots of info on him. This site has some transcripts of some talks, etc. that he gave. Not sure if his Small Faces stuff is transcribed anywhere - not come across it.
What about BVE (Black Vernacular English aka “Ebonics”)?
Then, of course, there’s creole languages like Patois (spoken in Jamaica, New York and Miami, primarily) and Kreyol Lwiziyen (Louisiana creole as spoken by blacks in Louisiana). Or are we keeping creoles out of this discussion?
And how do urban dialects figure into this? I mean, Chicago English has some major divergences from Midwestern English. Different vocabulary, standardized use of double-negatives, use of “borrow” for “lend,” pronunciation of voiced “th” as “d” and unvoiced “th” as “t,” null expressions such as “can I come with?” and so forth. Almost all these characteristics seem to stem from either a German or Slavic influence on the language…at least that’s my guess.
Then, of course, we have Pennsylvania Dutch English.
There are plenty of differences in vocabulary across the US, though some of these (particularly in the case of consumer products) tend to get squished by mass culture. Check out the differences between a dragonfly and a darning needle sometime - or a glowworm, firefly, and lightning bug.
There are even some differences in syntax (at least with regards to spoken language) – of which I think the most striking is the area where “to need” is followed by a past participle rather than a progressive (“that fence needs mended”, for example).
Interestingly, English Canada is approximately the geographical area with the least dialectal variation in the world, since much of it was settled so recently – and still there are interesting distinctions (parkades, snard lumps, bunny hugs…)
That’s a much too narrow definition of dialect IMHO. It doesn’t account for differences between, to take only one example, Northern and Southern California. Dialect differences aren’t anywhere near as noticeable in the US as they are in Britain or Ireland, but they’re there if you really look for them.
As I understand it, a lightning bug and a firefly are the same thing, but a glowworm is the immature form of the beetle that flies around flashing its rump.
As the dictionary has it, the glowworm can be the immature form, but it’s apparently more commonly applied to the flightless female of the species:
Emphasis mine, of course. I’m an American, always have been, so I was never actually around any fireflies where the mature females are flightless. Thus, I learned of the larval form being called glowworms.
I seriously doubt you’ll find more than 0.05% difference in total vocabulary across even 3000 miles in the US. If you have to go to “dragonfly” before you find words to use as examples of variation in vocabulary, I think that suggests that American English is pretty well homogenous. We tend to fixate on the differences. I could go several years before needing to say “dragonfly”; consider that variations on Hochdeutsch have different forms of “to have.” Saying that these both constitute language barriers at the same level strikes me as incorrect.
Probably just a coincidence, but Welsh for five is "pump’ (pronounced “pimp”), and ten is “deg”.
Now I’m going to re-confuse matters again. I can actually see where the OP was coming from. There is a difference between an accent and a dialect. In Dutch I speak with my native south-east accent, but I can’t speak the dialect from my home city very well (because my parents where not from there we didn’t speak it at home). I think some of the examples being given of “dialect” are just accents with some odd words thrown in.
I don’t know about other European countries, but I do think Dutch has this more strongly than English. Every city will have its distinct dialect in Holland. We’re talking dictionaries, poetry, prose, the lot. Villages will have their own dialect too. Of course places nearby are similar enough for mutual understanding, but natives will assure you their town or village’s dialect is unique.
This does not mean that I think English sounds the same everywhere, heaven forfend, just that actual dialect rather than accent, though it does exist, is much more rare.
I have a theory that this has to do with the Netherlands federal history. (United provinces, and all that.) The same phenomen is very clear in Italy, Germany and Switzerland, just to mention three countries where the provinces for a long time have enjoyed significant independence. )
For an example of the opposite, look at France. The rule has been centralised to Paris for almost a millenium, and the Parisian dialect has become the norm all over the country. (Sure there are still other dialects in places like Brittany and Marseille, but not at all to the same extent as in e.g. Germany.)
This is very true - the discussion has veered towards accents rather than dialect. It’s possible to speak with an accent in English without using a dialect, and it’s possible to use a dialect without the relevant accent (although you’d sound silly doing so).
But there are definitely many distinct dialects in England - there’s a few audio examples of northern dialects here.
Just thought I’d mention the Carribbean as an English dialect, mon.
IIRC the “Yan, tan, tethera” counting is originally Celtic in origin
(rather than being taken from one of the various “off-comers” like the Vikings, who left their mark on the language and place names e.g. “Mun-Grisedale” originally meant “valley of the monk’s pigs” in Norse I think)
The number system differs slightly from place to place in Cumbria (and some areas beyond)
BTW Wordsworth, although he wrote in Standard English rather than dialect, did rhyme water with chatter – suggesting he had a broad Cumbrian accent
Good point. I had a Jamaican roommate in college who, as best as I could tell, spoke three different dialects. To me and other non-Jamaicans she spoke British English with a Jamaican accent. When talking to her mother on the phone she spoke what I think of as “Jamaican English” (not sure what linguists call it), which was intelligable to me but obviously differed from standard British English not just in terms of pronunciation and vocabularly, but grammatically too. For instance, “No mummy, him no go there.”
With her Jamaican friends she spoke Jamaican patois, which was completely unintelligable to me. In fact, if not for the political reasons alluded to by others in this thread, Jamaican patois might be considered an independant lanaguage and not an English dialect at all.
Similar site for Wigan dialect: http://www.wiganworld.co.uk/stuff/dialect1.asp?opt=dialect1
Indeed. The Cumbrian language was a Celtic language akin to Welsh and Cornish, and was even around as late as the 1000s, though it went extinct soon after. The Cumbrian counting system is one of the only traces of it left.
Mostly elderly? When I was doing my junior year abroad at Goettingen, a few students in my area proudly displayed stickers proclaiming their ability to speak Plattdeutsch. Of course, that was in 1977, so maybe we are getting ‘elderly’! 