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…
There are parts of the United States, where I am from, where the English is almost unintelligible to me. Also, I have only been to England once, for a layover that would last 24 hours. I could barely understand any of the white service workers, however the Indian service workers? I could understand them very very well.
That’s… simply not true at all, not only is a common joke how native speakers from a typical remote area are easily unintelligible to geographically close cosmopolitan native speakers, but me, as a non native, have problems to understand most of the accents in English if I have not been exposed enough to them (skill issue probably, but I found it quite common in European English speaking environments)
Yea I live in the Netherlands and there is a fishing village just a 15 minute bike ride away from me. If the people there speak in their own dialect I can’t understand anything they say. If I drive to the north to the province Friesland, less than 100 km away, they have their own official language besides Dutch that only around 400k speak. That’s less people than half of the inhabitants of Amsterdam yet Frisian is fully recognized and official and you can spend your daily life there without speaking a word Dutch even though you are still in the Netherlands. Some kids there don’t even learn their first Dutch words until they go to school.
I can still barely understand the dialect where I have now lived for ~4 years. I can just about follow the topic of the conversation if I focus hard enough. And this is in the same country that I grew up in (Scotland).
It’s a very isolated place, which has allowed the old language to survive till now, though it’s only the older people that still speak it, and even then it’s likely still closer to english than their parents spoke.
In the larger towns nearby, the dialects have turned into an accent, with a few “cool” or useful words sprinkled in. The dialect here however, has different vowel and consonant sounds, maybe 30-50% different words (I’m just guessing), and a slightly different word order. Sadly it will die out in the next decade or so.
I guess this is pretty normal in some parts of the world, but quite rare in english.
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.
They even have a part with translated subtitles… You could’ve at least chosen Snatch for your reference for Brad Pitt’s Pikey impersonation.
Really never had an issue.
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.
Oh you’ve never had to deal with a Scottish person before I see.
that’s the exception that put “most” in the title
Most English speakers certainly do not understand the bloody Scots.
and you certainly appear to not understand the meaning of “most” and how it was used in that sentence lol
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.
Have you seen the hedge scene from Hot Fuzz?
Yarp.
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.
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 are such snooty fucks even other Fr*nch hate them.
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 any more even more than I can barely speak French any longer.
Quebecois French split from France ~400 years ago and has its own history. Acadian French has an even earlier split and can be very hard for Quebecois to understand.
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.
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?
Are you confusing Scots and Scottish Gaelic? Scottish Gaelic is the one that’s spoken in the western isles, Scots is across most of the rest of Scotland, including big cities
Scots is hard to tell from English sometimes because Scots has undergone near language death, where it adopted more and more features from English as it was taken over, and Scots was regarded for a decent while as nothing but bad English
Scots is common throughout the country. There’s also a local variant in the north east called Doric which to others is near impossible to understand. It’s perhaps more rural only, although there’s certainly still people in Aberdeen that speak it.
Do you know where in Scotland this person was from? That might help narrow it down.
Was there a lot of Fs? In Doric the “wh” from English questions is changed to an F.
What? - Fit?
Where? - Far?
When? - Fan?
How? - Foo?
Why? - often how is asked to mean why, or just fit why will be askedIf you are in a Doric shoe shop you can legitimately ask “Fit fit fits fit fit?” which means “Which foot fits which foot?”
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
I think it’s the harsh consonant sounds. I’m not a linguist and am sure there’s some term for it, but it seems like we identify words in English more from the distinct “framing” of the consonants and are more flexible about hearing variations in how the vowel sounds in between are pronounced.
For example, it’s the same reason that whispering (which largely takes out tone/pitch of vowel sounds) is super easy in English, but more difficult in some other languages.
I’d also guess that the large number of vowels in English has to do with it, General American English has around 16 vowels (counting both monophthongs and diphthongs, other varieties of English have similar amounts)
I feel that when there’s that many vowels, the exact quality of the vowel is less important and thus they can shift around more
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?
