Comment by dhosek
1 day ago
Indeed, I remember being in Oxford in the 90s and an older man approached me and spoke to me in English and I couldn’t understand a word he said. My ex-wife, who’s an ESL speaker who speaks fluently and without an accent has trouble with English accents in general. Similarly, in Spanish, I find it’s generally easier for me to understand Spanish speakers than Mexican speakers even though I learned Mexican Spanish in school and it’s been my primary exposure to the language. Likewise, I generally have an easier time understanding South American speakers than Caribbean speakers and both sound little like Mexican Spanish. (The Spanish I understand most easily is the heavily accented Spanish of non-native Spanish speakers.)
Accents have diverged a lot over time and as I recall, American English (particularly the mid-Atlantic seaboard variety) is closer to what Shakespeare and his cohort spoke than the standard BBC accent employed in most contemporary Shakespeare productions).
I think I read it's more "hillbilly" English that sounds like Shakespeare? Like coal mining towns where words like "deer" and "bear" are two syllables. Probably a combination of that and eastern seaboard.
I only learned recently that the vowel shift and non-rhotic R's in Britain happened after the colonization of America. Americans still talk "normally" whereas the English got weird. Also why Irish accents sound closer to American than British I think. Linguistics is cool
Also why the non-rhotic American accents are all by the East Coast, they were influenced by the non-rhotic British visitors while the inland areas were spared.
I live in London, I can drive a little over an hour from where I live and hardly understand the people working at the petrol station. A few more hours and they start to speak French.
I have had to interpret between an Ulsterman and a South African, who were both speaking English. I think those accents have vowel shifted in opposite directions.
I was also taught a bit of Chaucer (died 1400) in English at school. Although not any of the naughty bits.
My funniest moment working in Singapore was translating between an Indian and a Chinese co-worker. The translation was repeating what each said in English in English.
I imagine a current generation high school English class would be giggling right from the first line about gooning while on pilgrimages.
Having interpreted for a guy speaking with a broad Glaswegian accent on the east coast main line, I can totally believe this.
This sounds like a Hot Fuzz scene.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cun-LZvOTdw
> older man approached me and spoke to me in English and I couldn’t understand a word he said
like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hs-rgvkRfwc ?
I was expecting the hooligans from Eurotrip.
> The Spanish I understand most easily is the heavily accented Spanish of non-native Spanish speakers.
Are you sure this is because of their accent? I have the same experience with French (the non-native speakers are easier to understand), but I always thought that was because they use fewer and simpler words.
As an ESL I'd say it depends on the native language of who's speaking. I'll have no trouble with a thick spanish, italian or romanian language (I'm french), but indians speaking english are completely incomprehensible to me.
It took months of being exposed to Indian English on a regular basis for me to start to understand it (and I still find it requires significant mental effort). Context: I'm a Swede who regularly thinks and dreams in English (and when I did an English language test for exchange student purposes I got top marks in all categories).
If you want to be able to understand them, you should probably stop thinking of them as a monolithic groupd of "Indians". Individual states in India are comparable in size and greater in population than Spain or Italy; and some cities and their suburbs are comparable to Romania. Overall, India's population is more than 3x that of Europe.
A lot of Indians have English that's influenced by the specific region they come from and the native language. A couple examples:
- Specific regions of Northwestern India have the "e-" prefixing (e.g. "stop" turns into "estop") while speaking English
- Southern Indians tend to y-prefix due to their native languages having more of that sound (e.g. "LLM" can turn into "yell-ell-em").
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I didn't think it was possible to speak "without an accent."
It depends on who you ask.
There is a "dialect" called General American English, which is essentially how national news anchors and some actors are trained, so that they don't sound like they are too obviously from anywhere in particular to the public.
A large percentage of Midwesterners and Canadians speak _mostly_ General American, if you allow for the occasional drawl or shifted vowel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_American_English
Who taught you Mexican Spanish in school? Im always hearing about how Spanish speakers not from Spain struggle with Spanish in school. You didn't learn vosostros?
Different person, but I learned Mexican Spanish in school. The teacher taught us vosotros “for the test, and it’s not any harder than the others once you learn it, so might as well, but you’ll never need this again unless you go to Europe”. She seems to have been right. To this day, I’ve never needed vosotros.
Anecdata, but I took Spanish all four years in high school in Southern California—I knew of vosotros, but was never really taught it