burkphoto wrote:
Once you know a few simple rules, being American and hearing non-Americans speak English gets a lot easier. For instance, vowels in American English are different from the vowels in most European languages, including British English and most other English-speaking countries.
British English, Spanish, Italian, French, and Portuguese all use the Latin vowel sounds Ahh, Ehh, EEE, Ohh, and OOO, with Yih or Ih often used for Y. H comes out Haitch, and J comes out 'h' in some cases. Bilingual Mexicans generally speak English more like Americans, because many of their teachers are American. There are, of course, many exceptions.
In college, I worked summers in textile mills back when there still were textile mills in SC. I was working with a Pakistani and two working class Brits, one from Oldham and one from Accrington. Occasionally, they had a visiting manager from Manchester. The four or five of us were repairing and re-conditioning textile machinery made by the British company my Dad worked for. The mill "fixers" (maintenance workers) working with us were native South Carolinians of Scots-Irish and Irish descent. They had spent 98% of their lives within 50 miles of home. It was as if they spoke a COMPLETELY different language from the Brits. Many of them had no more than an 8th grade education. The Pakistani sounded more like the Brits, because he learned English from British-sounding teachers and college professors as he grew up.
Anyway, I often played translator within that group. I understood all their accents, and most of their word usage differences, because I'd taken a LOT of English lit classes by then. They would laugh uproariously when I would translate, "Dat dough-un lukk rahht. Gee-me dat dere wree-inch" ("That doesn't look right, hand me that wrench," in "mill worker-ese") into, "Ah dough-aunt like thaaht. An' me thaaht spannah," in the particular regional British vernacular of my coworkers.
English has many variants all over the world. To this day I marvel at how we can speak the same language and yet make no sense to one another. Throw in its usage as a second language, and things can get interesting! Thank goodness for subtitles on TV shows from Britain, Australia, India, and New Zealand.
Once you know a few simple rules, being American a... (
show quote)
Burk...Consider the richness and variation of two things before mass communication in America: accents and music.