this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2023
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Americans have trouble with any accent that isn't the blandest, nails on chalkboard accent.
Once had one ask me if I was speaking English when I spoke to him (for context I am Irish, the north bit)
Lol yeah, it's just the Americans that don't understand you. Sure...
Well fucksake mate, when someone asks yous where you're from, yous go "NornIrn"
Naecunt can unnerstaund thon
Right so don't really know if this is bait... but that's one kind of accent (and the tickest pronunciation at that) in ulster, specifically greater Belfast/co. Antrim and very few people speak that thick. For the most part they should be quite understandable from the perspective of anyone who consumes any English language media outside of only American or only London (RP) English. The number of times I have had people have trouble with my accent in Europe and then I ask them what they watched when learning English and the answer is American TV is astounding.
This is me getting on my wee podium now but I have a huge problem with the Americans and Brits for this, they marginalise the fuck out if our dialect, make fun of it for being unitelligible (after making no effort to understand it), and often deny it any legitimacy.
In reality Irish English is spoken by 5-7million people, as large as some dialects of European languages (eg. Austrian/swiss German, Belgian/Swiss French, etc) and if you learn French or German you still get some exposure to those dialects and if you out your mind to it understand it.
I mean I know you're talking about the wider world and not just this thread, but you started the conversation by being disingenuous about Americans and their dialects. It's kind of hard for people to take "I have a legitimate dialect" seriously when you just got done trashing half a continent's worth of dialects
Maybe if we all broach the topic with a little more understanding, you and everyone will feel better about it. For example Appalachian English and Northern Ireland English are both dialects with their own rules of pronunciation and grammar. They're both legitimate. But it's not surprising they'd have trouble understanding each other because they have so little interaction. But with patience and mutual respect it can happen
Most German speakers make fun of how unintelligible the Austrian German dialect is. It's so bad sometimes that translators are required.
As a native german speaker I have to say swiss german is unintelligible gibberish.
You just also seem to have a problem of marginalizing US English and UK English. They vary drastically. Just like how you just stated accents in your own country can vary.
Before I read the rest of your comment, I thought you were going for a New York accent.
Bland and nails on chalkboard? That's like the opposite of bland. Not great, but definitely not bland. Bland is blunt and flat. Nails on chalkboard is shrill, sharp, and grating. I just don't understand how you can believe both at the same time.
Here, I mean more the reaction to it, I sometimes cringe at the pronunciation or intonation in the way one would to nails on a chalkboard (the idiom can have more than one meaning or reaction attached to it)
That doesn't change the argument. Bland and cringe are also not like each other. I'm all for you criticizing something because it's different than you, but at least use your language consistently and properly. How would anyone interpret a secondary analogy without knowing how you personally react? It already has a clear meaning on its surface. Occam's razor would indicate that's enough. Why would anyone invent a second possible scenario that's only knowable if you have access to information that isn't well known, and in this case, near certainty of being unknown? Just say hearing the accent from some other country makes you cringe. Communication doesn't have to be difficult unless you make it so.
I am dating a man from England and it’s amazing how many people don’t understand his accent. It might just be me getting to know him, but I don’t find his accent (or even tough accents like Irish or Scottish) hard to understand anymore.
I mean if you never leave the US (easy to do, it's gigantic and travel is expensive), it's kinda understandable that you'd struggle with accents because you rarely hear any, let alone other languages. I know americans that have trouble with english accents lmao
My god son, just how many marbles were you trying to eat while talking to those nice Americans? You do know that the untied states has around 30 dialects, and every accent from around the world, right? I'm sure you knew better than that when you generalized 300 million people into one anecdote.
You'll probably hear more and more varied accents in an average US city than in all of Ireland.