Ironically, US English is in many ways more traditional than UK English. The US uses many words and phrases that used to be common to both continents but later changed in the UK.
US did try to de-French most spellings with mixed success.
Yeah, but there’s still the tendency to simplify things (e.g. “color” vs “colour”) and the ever shortening of phrases as if it’s difficult to say the whole thing (“macaroni and cheese”).
Changing spellings to match pronunciation should happen more often, to ne honest. And I don’t think UK or Australian English get to throw any stones about shortening words and phrases, the US isn’t calling anything “spag bol”.
British should be eevee if anything. There are double the British accents compared to American ones. Cockney, London, Welsh, Scottish, Northern Ireland are extremely distinct let alone the hundreds of other distinct regional accents.
Tbf they only sound “extremely distinct” to British people. A lot of those accents are hard to distinguish for non-native speakers or people outside the UK.
Same for the us, though. NY, Boston, Midwestern, New England, Minnesota, Atlantic, Southern, Texan, Pacific Nw, Californian. And various specific regional like queens, Brooklyn, Philly. It goes on and on. The US is not the monolith it’s often described as.
Now comes the hard part of defining all the Eeveelutions.
I feel like there are a few very distinct regional accents, but I’m having trouble coming up with the right distinction from the top of my head.
There’s New England, the south in general, New York, Chicago which immediately trigger my brain to think of a very specific accent. Surely there is more to it though?
Tell that to someone from Bawston lol, the US has way more than 2 accents for sure. UK does have a lot though, not sure who actually has more. Let’s find a linguist!
A Boston accent is different from a New York accent, is different from a Missouri accent, is different from a Mississippi accent, is different from a Florida accent, is different from a Texas accent, is different from an Oklahoma accent, etc. Even within states, it fully depends on how rural you live, whether you went to college… hell, even your tax bracket in some cases.
I say this as an Australian that grew up in America: the sheer size of the place is enough to have something like fifty regional accents per state. Like everything with the US: it’s fucking insane.
Lmao to me Britain has two accents, Scottish and English. The rest sound the same. Y’all think your accents are so special to the point where it gets cringe sometimes.
Maybe for the regions that only speak one language. East Texas alone mixes English, Spanish, French and German dialects. It’s like a sitcom of bad accents down there.
They’re talking about native English speakers. Did you really not get that? There are also a lot of Chinese people, try yelling that out of context, also.
English is one of the official languages in India.
Even if only 1/10 of Indians grew up speaking it alongside Hindi or one of the other official languages (it’s a pretty big and varied country), it still adds up to 140 million people, so the previous poster has a valid point.
I have a buddy who learned English as a second language early in life and he has a fluent Irish accent. I’ve never been able to wrap my head around that one.
I once took a short trip through the south of Germany near Nuremberg … we were just on a random trip not knowing what we were doing in a rental car. We stopped at a gas station to get gas and got some help from an attendant, a young German teenager who spoke some English.
He talked to us in the weirdest accent I ever heard … a combination of English with a German accent and a touch of southern Texan or southern American. He had grown up learning English from army personnel from the American US base nearby.
I’m Canadian in Ontario and the first five years of my life, all I spoke or heard was my cultural language Ojibway-Cree. I went to school where I learned English but continued to only mostly speak my language.
Then I spent an awkward period as a teenager speaking English with a Native accent … a classic TV stereotypical Native accent and it was horrible. It took me about a decade to get over that phase, now I speak English as boringly as any Canadian. Not bad eh?
I once did one of those quizzes that figures out where your American accent is from and I got mostly LA and midwest. Makes sense since I learned from watching TV shows.
There’s many regional differences in American English.
First, pronunciation is always changing, and changes tend to happen regionally.
For example, there’s the Mary-merry-marry merger. A bit over half of American speakers pronounce all three of those words identically, as mɛri. About 17% of Americans have a full three-way contrast. In NYC, for example, they’d say meɹi, mæɹi, and mɛɹi. And other people merged two of the three.
The pen-pin merger is a famous feature of southern American dialects.
Some words have regional pronunciations - crayon can have one or two syllables, for example.
And then there’s regional words, like pop vs soda, bucket vs pail, firefly vs lightning bug, you vs y’all vs yinz vs youse vs you lot vs you all vs you guys etc.
By asking about all of those sorts of things, you can figure out where someone’s from.
Dialect tests. Think about how someone from boston might say “park” like “pahk” vs other parts of the country, or if someone uses “y’all” where they might be from. The way people pronounce o,a, ai, ough, augh type of sounds is very telling. Also phrases are very regional. There are many studies that compile that data. One famous dataset is used in a Times article that is behind a paywall, here are some people talking about it: peabodyawards.com/nytimesdialectquiz/
How about Northside Dubliners picking a Dub Southside accent to sound posher, or Southsiders picking a Northside Dub accent to sound more gangsta? It’s an actual thing. ^^
Speaking of Irish accents! First time I heard someone with a Cork accent I lost my shit. It sounds exactly like a Scanian (Southern Sweden) person speaking with an Irish accent. It’s delightful.
I’d rather dub the US variant a wildcard, based on it being the result of mixing English and all the other languages of settlers. Also, the US and its variations are very common and shadow the other variants which is somewhat sad.
No. Wild card is you learned English in a foreign non English native country and your accent is an absolute mess. You say Autumn but Taxi, color but wa(t)er, and maybe you call you cell phone your “Handy”.
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