Additional context:
Native speakers of my mother tongue do not all understand each other due to some pretty extreme dialects. Now that I’m in Europe, I’ve noticed multiple instances of people sometimes not understand the dialect of someone from a village 10-20 km away…
In contrast, for example most American, British, and Australian people can just… understand each other like that?? I never thought much about it before but it’s pretty incredible
Edit: thanks everyone, and clearly I didn’t think of certain parts of the UK when I was in the shower and thought of this…
Wow, lots of people picking out whole regions to say they cant understand and i… Have never had that problem. Honestly, really, english is easy to catch the ear and even people who barely speak it can usually get legible words out. You never make the sounds accidentally.
I’m not a big fan of mumbly accents, its just lazy about the sounds but if you’ve ever understood grumbling and mumbling you can get any accent.(Note: not true for dialects that have their own local words for things)
Do we? I remember watching movies like Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels when I was younger and never having a clue what they were talking about.
I remember having to interpret for my boyfriend when we drove through the Western end of Virginia. The accents get thick out in Appalachia. We’re both native speakers, he’s even from Virginia, but by the coast.
me and my wife have this dynamic. i’m from southern appalachia and she cannot understand the shanendoah or allegheny accent at all. if i say something particularly idiomatic she’ll ask me what i mean because our verb syntaxes carry a little extra information AND we have tonals
The overwhelming consensus here is that a strong brogue Scottish accent is the main exception.
Have you ever heard Scottish person speak?
Like, seriously nards-deep into full Scottish brogue? It’s like a language that bears zero resemblance to the English language.
Although TBH, have a pretty readheaded lass talk to me in Scottish, and fuck me she could read the phone book and I wouldn’t give a shit I’d just be sitting there catching flies trying to soak it all in.
You may be interested to learn that in Scotland there is a linguistically different language called Scots. It’s related to English but distinctly different. Similar to the differences in language between Norwegian and Swedish.
Oh you’ve never had to deal with a Scottish person before I see.
About 30 years ago I went to the Edinburgh festival and in one of the bars met a farmer from the north of Scotland. I literally talked to him for 10 minutes before I made out more than a word of what he was saying.
Binging limmys show will fix that for you
that’s the exception that put “most” in the title
Most English speakers certainly do not understand the bloody Scots.
As an Australian, it’s Irish accents that I struggle with the most.
Scottish I can deal with, probably from watching shows like Still Game and Burnistoun.
Most other UK accents are not to difficult to understand.
One odd thing, I was watching an USA wildlife documentary that was set in South Africa. I noticed they put forced subtitles on when ever the South African’s spoke in English. I found that bizarre as I’ve never had any trouble understanding when South Africans speak English.
I’ve seen subtitles on both Aussie and nz English in US shows
Parisians will never stop complaining about québécois. They even show subtitles in France when they speak québécois on TV. None of the French Canadians I know seem to have any issue understanding traditional French though.
Edit: Spanish is another language where we can mostly understand each other despite very varied dialects
Parisians will never stop complaining about québécois.
Because Paris French has a group keeping it consistent, whereas Quebecois has no regulation and it’s just driven by vapid famewhores making idiot memes popular (just like English).
I worked with someone in Ottawa who was from France. She went to Gatineau (Quebec), and tried to order a cheeseburger. They could not communicate effectively in French and had to both switch to English. The struggle is not imagined.
Also, My high-school French was Quebecois, but my Uni-level French was Caribbean. I cannot speak Quebecois even more than I can barely speak French.
Quebecois is definitely difficult. I can understand people the next province over (New Brunswick) no problem as they tend to speak slower and many of their dialects like chiac have a lot of English words in them. But Quebecois tends to be spoken very quickly, and in some cases words run together much more. I’m a bilingual French Canadian and I have a lot of issues with that accent, which is strange as my family mostly came from Quebec originally. My grandfather, whose first language was French could watch tv from France and understand it perfectly, but had a lot of trouble with Radio-Canada reporters.
Don’t french Parisians pride themselves on “purity” or whatever?
When it comes to language yeah they have a reputation
Ironically, due to the history of the region, québécois is closer to old French than what they speak in France today,.
I believe that’s true of American vs. British in many ways as well
I had a roommate from Manchester (UK) for a couple months back in college. I’m American (US). He seemed to have no trouble understanding me, but I usually couldn’t understand what he said without him repeating it multiple times.
Perhaps that has something to do with American’s being all over social media/most influencers?
My guess was that it was probably due to Hollywood, but some form of mass communication, almost certainly.
I would rather guess colonialism. Germans living 150 km from each other not understanding each other is because their languages were organically evolving from some 1000 year old protolanguage with barely any communication in medieval times.
The reason the world speaks English is because a relatively small group of speakers from within England colonised the world and kept communications up with those past colonies to this date.
India or the US didn’t have as much time to diverge from old colonial English as Bayern had time to do so from proto-German. Add to it that a sizeable chunk of the colonies are still Commonwealth.
I’ve got virtual friends or acquaintances in different parts of Argentina, Colombia, Mexico, Spain, etc. They all conjugate some verbal times ‘weirdly’ or say ‘funny’ things, but yeah, pretty normal communication. I actually adopted some words from their regions.
(No, I still won’t celebrate a fucking day for the Spanish speaking world, friend from Spain that leans a little heavily into Hispanism…).
Are you talking about Arabic? I understand it changes a lot. It must be amazing to speak Arabic. The oceans of culture, of old philosophers, poets, etc.
Have you seen the hedge scene from Hot Fuzz?
If I don’t see some authentic frontier gibberish in five seconds I’m gonna flip this goddamn table.
Ah hell, I’ll do it myself.
Yarp.
Idk, I recently heard some thick Scottish English and I couldn’t understand literally anything. That might be in part due to the fact that I’m not a native speaker, but still I believe people outside the British isles would struggle with it.
Some of the uniformity is a result of cultural domination of specific centres and now unavoidable loss of original dialectal variation.
Was it Scottish English or Scots? The line between the two is blurry because intelligibility varies a lot
Pretty sure it was Scottish English. Does anyone outside of super rural places actively use Scots anyway?
When I was in Glasgow I couldn’t understand anybody older than 40.
People inside the British Aisles would still struggle.
Especially if it was a Weegie
A definite exception would be the Newfie accent from eastern Canada. People in the same country cannot understand them.
Same with Quebecois!
We were taught Parisienne French in school in Canada even in my French Immersion school.
What is spoken in Quebec is so different they’re effectively different languages, outside of academic or linguistic analysis.
I excelled in French as a kid and that’s why I went to immersion school. Imagine my shock when I moved to QC for 4 years in my early 20’s… I could have a great conversation with the dude that literally came from France but neither of us could communicate in either direction with our French co-workers lol
As an American, Scots are the most difficult to understand. Most Brits, Welsh and Irish are fine. Australians and New Zealanders, too. Canadians can be almost indistinguishable to me with the exception of a couple of words here and there.
southern Ontario Canadians don’t sound much different. the more east you go, the more Letterkenny you get. and then you get the Quebecois, which are unique in oh so many ways. and then you start getting to the true east coast stuff as you go farther and farther, and that’s not going to be confused for american
Canadians can be almost indistinguishable
You’ve only heard the ones with the American accent then.
Even still I can’t understand your Boston or howdy talkers.
can
What do you think that word means?
