I’m from Appalachia. I hated my accent so much growing up. I was ashamed of it, and would get made fun of when visiting anywhere. I did my best to lose it and I mostly have. I wish I’d known then that it was nothing to be ashamed of and the people mocking me were ignorant.
The "Scotch-Irish" dialect of U.S. English came out of southern Appalachia and spread from East Texas to Virginia and Southern Maryland. It's basically working class and rural Southern.
When the Appalachian started, I got such a big smile. My great-aunt spoke this way. Apparently my grandfather used to as well, but he did his best to tone it down so the grandkids could understand him. My great-aunt had no such reservation. She was a hoot, a huge storyteller, and I would listen to her tales for hours.
You guys need to watch Beau of the Fifth Column. He spent a long time hiding his accent too. In fact none of his friends new he had one. Then he got drunk one night and it came out. He now has a huge You Tube channel and uses his real accent for it and does just fine. Of course you have to be understood, being able to choose like Beau is pretty cool too.
i'm originally from nw Arkansas (Ozark mountains) and we talk pretty much the same way. I've had people in other parts of the country think I'm from one of the Carolinas.
Im South African. And married to an Englishman from Grantham. Also have a few Scottish friends. One from Glascow. Stayed in Cape Town for a while. I loved this
@@vertigo2894there's lots of ignorant people everywhere but scratch the surface and they are good to their families and easy to make friends with. Australians are generally fun and friendly and racism can be wiped out with a bit of communication.
@@joythought Of course there are wonderful Australians; I am guessing you are white? We don't tend to have the same experiences and it's often drastically different. From all the places I have been, it's sadly the worst in this context.
@@vertigo2894 not white australian here and I was wondering what type of racist situations are you referring to cause I personally don't find that bad.
Got Trinidad, Guyana, and Jamaica. Only because I'm West Indian 😅 Side note: Each English speaking Caribbean country has a unique and distinctive dialect also, so whenever Caribbean people meet, we usually can tell where they're from just by their dialect😊
if you ask all the english speakers of the caribbean to write a statement in propper english, you will not be able to tell where they are from. American english is dialect of standard english, be cause it has different spelling and grammer. we all use the same spelling and grammer in the carribean . So i am from jamaica and I speak two languges, Enhlish and Jamaican Potios, its not a dialect its a language
@JimCarner so what if @@nicholaswjamrock didn't capitalise some words to your liking. His statement is informative and intelligible, which puts him well ahead of half the USians I encounter online.
bajan (barbadian) here, can confirm. also, all the carribbean ones were quite easy for me to understand and differentiate since i speak in a bajan accent.
Yes!! I’m Guyanese and got the trini accent within one second lol (loved seeing so many West Indian countries in this). A lot of people say trini/Guyanese sound similar, but to us it is so different!
Appalachian English is such a comforting sound to me. My family lost it a few generations back when they moved to the cities for work, but I’m certain our ancestors all spoke that way. Incidentally, most folks from the region say “App-uh-LATCH-an” not “App-uh-LAY-shun.” I often hear the joke, “If I hear you say Appalaysha, I’ll throw an apple atcha!”
I'm not from here, but I've lived in western North Carolina for about nine years. I recognized Appalachian as being spoken somewhere in eastern North America, though I wasn't sure if it's in the mountains, the Outer Banks, or what.
I got Appa-LATCH-an immediately, as that’s where I’m from originally (and my family still lives there). I’ve lost most of it myself, but it’s like music to my ears now! Next time, Olly should do the Hoi Toiders of the Outer Banks.
I almost picked up a bit of an Appalachian accent when I went to school right near the mountains. Now I'm the only one in my family who says Appa-uh-latch-an and not the other way.
im ethnically guyanese and trini. one of my great grandmas was actually arawak and carib! im so happy to see caribbean culture featured in this video ❤ much love!
I trained with the Singapore military. Not all had the same accent, but I'd say 75% could easily converse with the American Marines. Great group of guys.
My late husband came from Appalachia, and his family speaks this way. He trained it out of his voice because he felt it was holding him back in his career, but when he'd speak to them on the phone, it would come right back. The accent he ended up with was so soft and lovely, I miss it. When my mom (native Philadelphian) came to our wedding at his parents' home, she didn't understand a thing anyone said!
Hello from Gatlinburg 😍 I trained it out of my voice as well... it's coming back as I get older though. I loved reading your comment, and I'm very sorry for your loss. I know what you mean too, everyone can tell if I've spent the day with my papaw bc my accent gets pretty heavy. I speak very fast though lol it can really confuse people...
Weird I get that, as a citizen of the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 I don’t hear many different ones unless I travel, and I have a posh accent as I grew up around Buckingham and never heard anything else and the first time I heard an American accent I had no idea what they were saying learnt the hard way though as I have had many different horse riding instructors and tutors
I love Singaporean English! I knew that one. My late wife and I lived there for a year. After six months, my daughter came to visit. "Dad! You talk like them!" My wife and I were so proud! 😀
‘My stomach thinks my throat is cut’ was an expression used by my mum to express feeling hungry. My family all born in Liverpool England but Mum’s heritage was Ireland / Welsh. Nice to know this expression is medieval Irish xx
Trinidadian here! Happened to stumble upon this video. Thank you for accurately capturing demonstrations of the accent as well as its historical origin!
I'm New Zealander/Australian and I have no trouble with Appalachian English. I did an online University course and some of the content was delivered by an agriculturalist in Scotland - could barely understand a word. I think maybe the english accents you think are difficult depend on which type of english accent you have.
Definitely the New World dialects were easier for this American than those further out, and Appalachian is no sweat. I've had more exposure to those and related dialects. Georgie- that's incomprehensible to my ear. 😂
I once called a customer service number in Australia from the U.S. I could not understand the guy. I felt terrible. I told him I knew we were both speaking english, but it wasn't helping. The one word I remember him having to spell was pin.
i agree, as a maritimer with a lot of family with newfie accents, and some with the western new brunswick accent (biggest giveaway of west new brunswick accent is they pronounce garage as gerrej) i find appalacean scottish and irish accents easy to understand, but then find many of the american accents in the south and carribean confusing.
I grew up in South Florida and later moved to Georgia so I got the Trinidadian, the Jamaican, and the Appalachian right off the bat. I really appreciated learning the history.
I'd highly recommend you confirm with your own research before taking what he presents as historical gospel. He has a few pretty blatant errors with history of some of the languages here. Most of it is great tho.
I'm from East Tennessee and my whole familys from Appalachia. My grandmother taught me to speak without my accent cause people would think I was stupid if I used my hillbilly English. Today I can speak without it but I'm proud to have my accent and usually just talk regular. We say things like toosdee for Tuesday, haint for haunt or ghost, holler for hollow, and use lots of phrases like ive know him since he was knee high to a grass hipper and well im finer than a frogs hair split 3 ways. I love that you included Appalachia in the video I only have one issue with you... its Appalachia with a soft 3rd A no with a long 3rd A. i aint really sore at you but it is a soft A lol
You have noting to be impressed by. He is a shame and disgrace to the British education system. Did you realize he got the basic history of the country wrong? He said GERMANS made up the population of Trinidad. He has the make-up of many of the countries wrong. His historical information on many of the places in this video area very wrong. He said that people in Trinidad / Caribbean only learned STANDARD ENGLISH recently...LOL When.... Jamaicans, Trinidadians and Guyanese and others have been citizens in the UK since the very early 1950's. How were they able to move to the UK if they didn't speak standard English.? and English has been the only language thats ever been used SCHOOLS, BUSINESS, AND GOVERNMENT and used in theses former BRITISH colonies, and the official language. This dunce is just disrespecting you .
I've never been to Trinidad but I had a strong hunch about the accent. That combination of how the people in the example look with that sound in their language was a giveaway to me.
Back in the mid 90's I met a young lady from Tobago and when that first clip came up I guessed 'Tobago'. Is it the same thing, do you have the same agent on both Islands? I suppose there has to be differences a local would pick up. She looked Indian, the country not Native American 'Indian'.
Enjoyed listening to the Appalachian speakers. My mom's people mostly came from Kentucky and Tennessee. The accent hasn't changed a great deal over the years.
Thank the Lord for that. Would you mind recording them before their dialect of English disappears completely because it will owing to generational changes in language use. It's a very normal progression. Cheers from NYC!!!
So long as they don't do that annoying mush mouth thing where they can't annunciate and sit there and buzz thru their nose. That's not an accent that's a speech impediment and it goes uncorrected among a lot of Appalachian zones
@@f0rmaggi0 I have cousins from there. Appalachian is very recognizable once you've heard it.. and you can hear echoes of it all throughout the south of the US.
Years ago I stopped at a cattle station in the Aussie outback that was larger than some European countries and spoke to the old bloke that had been left in charge of the homestead while the owner spent the next six weeks or so inspecting the boundary fences. Yep. Six weeks. His Aussie accent was so broad that I struggled to understand him and I’m actually Australian! What a character. Not many of them left now. I still think about him all the time…
The only one I knew about and understood with ease was #4 - Appalachian. While it isn't exactly the same, it shares enough of the characteristics of my native Southern English that communication isn't much hindered. My own accent has become much more 'standardized' American English over time, but my grandparents spoke in such a thick Southern that some of my friends from other places found it difficult or impossible to understand them. I find myself slipping back into it when I'm around others speaking it.
I'm Nigerian. We speak very different here. But whenever I hear Afrikaans English, I know it's them. It's almost Australian sounding, but with a lot of "A" sound to my ears. Friend sounds like Fr-Aynd Letter = L-Ay-tar (later?) Nigerians would say fr-EH-nd, or leh-ta
me as a zulu person ,i can hear you but some words can be difficult to understand jusl like the one in this video ,i doin't know the f what that kid said
I got all the Caribbean dialects, Newfie and Appalachian, but I’m a Jamaican Canadian who’s spent a lot of time in the South so that makes sense 😂 Respectfully: These days the Indigenous Caribbean peoples who migrated from the southern mainland are not usually referred to as ‘Arawaks’. Arawakan is a language family. Pre-contact, the eastern islands were populated by the Caribs and western islands by Taino. They were enemies, not one group referring to themselves as Arawaks. I believe the Ciboney were also a Caribbean group but I don’t know about them. It was common in colonial curriculum to call all of the groups “Arawaks” and claim they are fully extinct. Now curriculum teaches about the culture of the groups like Taino in Jamaica and Puerto Rico.
I'm from Toronto. Parents from Guyana. I got all but the Singapore one lol. I think we both are lucky having the upbringing we have. We expose to a lot more of the world than the average person both because of the Caribbean and being Canadian. Something I never realized until I was older.
Although we think it would be easier to understand for a broad group, that may not be the case. I tend to slip into a deeper Appalachian/southern accent when speaking with another southerner. A coworker who'd recently relocated to Atlanta from LA overheard one such conversation and couldn't understand us. She was totally lost.
Probably due to it being the closest to the general American dialect, but my wife grew up in California and it took her a good couple years to be able to understand my grampa that grew up in rural north Georgia in the 40s
Proud Appalachian and voice actor here! My grandaddy used to say "I'm so hungry, my stomach thinks my throat's cut," all the time!! It's true you can find Shakespearean phrases spoken by older people. I wish it wasn't dying out! My favorite Appalachian thing is adding an "a" to the beginning of "ing" verbs, as in, "I was just a-sittin' on the porch." I also love the addition of the word "done" to past -tense verbs: "I'm not hungry. I done et." I've heard dialects in the UK use the word "et" as past tense for "eat." I've also heard folks in the UK use "I reckon" in the same way we do. One more good'un: we pronounce "wh" at the beginning of a word differently than a "w." "White is not "wite," but 'whah-ite." (We push air through by pronouncing the "h" sound. Love this video!
That throat-cutting expression of hunger is widely used in England still, despite what this video says, as is ‘reckon’. I still say ‘et’, which is the more traditional Brummie way of saying ‘ate’, though many Brummies now say it as ‘ite’ and most of the rest of England as ‘eight’ unfortunately.
We still say my belly thinks my throats been cut in the UK. In many parts of Yorkshire we say thee, thou etc. We say reckon etc as well. Yorkshire has many accents and dialects hundreds every five to ten miles they can change a little.
Im from newfoundland! The accent has sadly died down quite a bit, although many of the youngsters have maintained the vocabulary. Yu most often find the accent as strong as that in the remote communities, and in our older population. Another piece of our interesting history is Newfoundland used to be an independent dominion of the UK, but due to economic crisis we became more dependant on the British until 1949 when we joined Canada. Also, its pronounced more like like newfenland, then newFOUNDLand which is how a lot of mainlanders and foreigners pronounce it!
I learned to pronounce it Newfenlin here in Michigan on the border. The city on the Canadian side had a lot of workers coming in from around Canada to work in the refineries. Newfies had to adjust their accent a lot to communicate with the other workers, and of course the other workers had to learn a bit of Newfie as well. The border used to be more open back then. Now I'm cut off from family over there.
All the Newfonies I sailed with sure did keep their accents. Especially the Murphy girls. There were three women's last names was Murphy, they could drink any hard core alcoholics into an early grave. Good folks! I definitely would have like to marry a girl from the rock!
Coming from Canada (Toronto area) I had no problem identifying and understanding Trinidadian accents ☺️ We have a large Trini (and in general, Caribbean) community 😍
I lived in New York City for a time, so that one, Jamaica, and Guyana were really easy to identify. I was waiting for Patois and Tangier to show up in this list.
Bruh I was dying the whole time when that part came on. Being from Grenada and growing up in Toronto you hear it a lot. The only time I've gotta confused is when I seen an Asian person with a Caribbean accent. But that was years ago
I’m from Indonesia 🇮🇩 , so I’m very familiar with Singlish 🇸🇬 and their sister Manglish 🇲🇾. Influences don’t only come from Chinese dialects (Hokkien, Teochew, Cantonese, etc) but also from Malay and Indian dialects (mainly Tamil). But as former British colonies, both Singapore and Malaysia have a high proficiency in English (especially the former) and they have no difficulty adjusting to your English level. It’s just that they prefer to speak Singlish and Manglish as they sound more natural and less pretentious 😁
Being Guyanese and Trini myself, we never thought what our communities were speaking wasn't English, we just thought it was just English with an accent- and most people around us found that to be the case too... At least, here in Toronto. Put a bunch of us together and the accent gets stronger, but there's a difference between that, and the patois or Creole that is much more difficult to understand.
I'm also a born Trinidadian with a Guyanese grandfather raised in Toronto and thought the same, that Trinidadians just spoke English with an accent not that it was a dialect. Oddly enough some Trinidadian expressions my Newfoundland born wife also knows.
@@Siloguy Yes I found out that people form Newfoundland understand alot of Caribbean English because....both are using old english words and terms from the 1800s, because both were isolated...they also use all the salt fish and salt beef. If you swear the older people could of understand
It IS English that I'm familiar with. There are simply some language...nuances...that differ from "standard" English. Living with people from the West Indies for any amount of time will make you familiar with them. That goes from Jamaica to Trinidad...and any island in between. In this video, the Guyanese dialect was the most difficult for me to understand...but not COMPLETELY. Trini was easy.
@@SiloguyThere’s a really fine line I guess. I suppose it’s considered a dialect because of the presence of unique set phrases and loan words not from English
I'm a native Dutchman, and I got Trinidad, Cape Town, Appalachia, Jamaica, Newfoundland, and Glasgow on first listen. I have to mention I enjoy exploring English dialects and accents, but I'm most familiar with those of the UK and Ireland.
Cape Town has several accents, and that can even differ from suburb to suburb. We have such a variety of cultures that it doesn't really come as a surprise. The German English from Tamboerskloof may differ from the Fresnaye (pron Fre-naye) French English, or the Bo Kaap Cape Malay English. The Afrikaans semigrants have several accents, and the worst among them have the various Highveld ones. They tend to speak Afrikaans that borrows directly from the Pedi languages and even that can be very regional. They turn "wil jy nog kos hê" for "would you like more food?" into "soek jy nog kos?" which means "are you in search of food?". Most don't know they speak a Afrikaans mingled with Setswana Sepedi Sesotho et . 🇿🇦
@@ilya.petersen hey man, ok. Have you heard of the Gulla Geechee people from South Carolina in America and I just found this out, we sound a little like they do but it's more of an island tone...I'm sure there is a good Bahamian creole vid on here. Real awesome that you can get the Trini, and New Foundland and more, the Glasgow had me at first listen lol but awesome man.
I'm a northern English man. My best mate was a witness in a murder trial in London. The court had to get a translator in because they couldn't understand him
I'm from Zimbabwe and grew up in South Africa so I had no issue with the accent in the video, we're exposed to it a lot in our comedy and movies tbh. I'd love to see a longer breakdown off all these dialects! So so interesting.
I guessed Appalachian, Jamaican, South African, Scottish accents. I've never heard the Newfoundland accent nor the Singaporean English. I loved this video, and felt like I learned something. So fun!
Every Canadian recognized the Newfies. They do tone it down when they talk to the rest of us but it's still pretty distinctive. BTW the emphasis is on LAND in both Newfoundland and Newfoundlander.
Actually there are a few acceptable pronunciations. Just never emphasize the second syllable (New FOUND Land). And never reduce the last vowel (Land not Lund). Mind you, no one will get upset if you get it wrong.
I knew it was Canadian, but I wasn't able to pinpoint it any closer than that. I don't know enough about Canada to be able to pick out any regional accents.
@@bigscarysteve It's found, but spoken very quickly so it sounds more like fnd. And the syllable emphasis is very much like the word understand. There are some slight variations, depending on where you're from on the island.
The O suffix in Liberian English is common in many other west African countries as well. Actually its the fastest way to tell someone is from Anglophone West Africa.
I was surprised the Australian indigenous dialect/s didn’t rate a mention. Their patois is very distinctive and most Aussies find it hard to understand unless you live amongst them
A lot of multiple generation cattle station managers, especially in the Kimberley, have picked up the lilt of the patios and I can tell you now, unless you've grown up around it, it's almost impossible to understand. My mum lived in the Kimberley for most of her childhood, and can understand it well, I get so lost because it's so foreign to me having grown up in the metro area.
I worked in Singapore for a year. I really liked all the variations of English there, influenced by the styles of all the different cultures that were present, and the hyper-brevity was awesome. I worked with a lot of Filipinos there as well and they had a huge language mashup too.
@@mingzmings88 Why? Singapore has developed as a country with a confident world identity, a nation that punches far, far above its weight. Singlish is a reflection of that. As an Australian I always think that about Singaporean.
@@mingzmings88 my education after moving there was discussing a bed delivery to my new apartment. I tried to explain that we were waiting for the redecoration to be completed and didn't know how long that would take as the landlord was dealing with it. At the end of my spiel the Singaporean woman on the other end of the phoneline just said "Can, Cannot ?". Genius.
The first accent for Glaswegian was actually an Edinburgh accent, Trainspotting is set in Edinburgh and Ewen Bremner is a native. Scottish people can hear the difference, but they're both lowland Scots accents. There's a different rhythm to the Edinburgh speech which is demonstrated in this clip. The second two people in your example did sound like west coasters though.
I'm Canadian, and lived in Glasgow for a few years. Even I could tell that first one wasn't a Glaswegian accent. I also did some research and his claim of Italians being lied to/not wanting to go to Glasgow and wanting to go to America but being taken to Glasgow instead seems to be insubstantiated as well. Odd!
@@ashleyfunnell2654 yeh and the example he used “gonnae nae do that” is just wrong, it’s “gonnae no dae that”. For the Italian thing, there are lots of Italian Scots, like I think 1 or 2% of the population. I’ve never heard they thought they were going to America though, that sounds dubious,
came to the comments to say the same things, especially to point out the "gonna nae do that" which just sounds awful to say out loud. Second clip is the guy who did that 'here you' ned song and he's from motherwell afaik
Yes, I immediately noticed the same thing, it's such a strange mistake to make since Trainspotting is so famously set in Edinburgh. It is THE quintessential Edinburghian movie, both in good and bad, so I was surprised when it was linked to Glasgow. Some of the scenes were filmed in Glasgow, but that's just a technicality, the movie or the accents are not representative of Glasgow at all.
As a Canadian who has lived in the Caribbean area of Toronto, I was able to identify the dialects from Trinidad, Guyana, and Jamaica. Of course, I also recognized the Newfoundland accent.
I guess I got to brag: As a Finn who has never been to Canada or the Caribbean, I was able to identify the Trinidad, Jamaica and Newfoundland accents! Not the Guyana one though.
Jamaican Patois is a lot more English influenced than many realize. The bulk of its vocabulary is actually derived from English. There are some other words from African languages like Akan. But the majority of the vocabulary derives from English with slight changes. For example "Look pon dah gyal dey", is literally "look upon that girl there!" They've contracted the word "upon", shortening it to "pon". It is these kinds of little changes and the variation in pronunciation that makes some of the words hard to understand for English speakers unfamiliar with it. Another interesting feature with Jamaica Patois is that it is filled with many idioms - phrases or sayings that don't literally mean what the literal words would suggest. So even if you can recognize the English equivalents of the string of words spoken, that doesn't mean you understand the idea being communicated by the phrase. So it's not just about recognizing the words, you have learn the meaning of whole phrases.
From my experiences after living in Canada for many years, most people here assume that Jamaicans only speak English with a heavy accent and are completely unaware that Jamaicans speak Patois.
He said the dialect was mainly african influenced but if we break down each word in the Jamaican patois we'll see that its mainly English based. Information was a bit off.
It depends on the region & dialect of patois being spoken. The more you get to the more tourist area it becomes more intelligible with English but the more you go inland the more it diverts into it's own language especially when it comes to the maroons. They speak deep patois
@@kevinmorris4994it's region based. The more closer you are to tourist areas vs far deep inland is different. A Kingstonian will find it difficult to understand someone from saint Elizabeth. Or even worse a maroon speaking deep patois
Glad you included Glaswegian. I went as a 16 year old, on my own, in 1971 and stayed a week or so. For the first couple of days l had no idea what people were saying but my ears adjusted. Love the city in the way people love rainy, grimy cities.
There was a Glaswegian guy that used to stay at my step mum's B&B when I was a kid. He used to sit in the living room watching Star Trek. Trying to understand a tough accent when they're speaking in sci-fi language is top tier difficulty. I've since worked in a lot of call centres so it just takes me a few sentences to tune in to someone's accent. Having security questions like name, date of birth and post code is super helpful to tune in to someone's speech patterns and match them up to letters, numbers and words.
I'm glad you included Liberian English, because there's a whole continuum of English-based pidgins and creoles stretching along the coast of West Africa from Cameroon (where I live) to Sierra Leone. Additionally, I'm from Canada so I picked up on the Newfie and Caribbean accents pretty quickly
What's important is to develop an "ear" to the way words are pronounced in different accents to help one selfs comprehension of what's being said , It takes training and perseverance
I lived in Maine for 35 years and I made a good friend at my first job. There are a lot of French Canadians there and it’s not uncommon to hear French being spoken. A version that might not be well understood in Paris. My friend bought me to his family and I was introduced to his grandfather. I couldn’t understand a single word he said and asked my friend what language his grandfather was speaking. He replied English! After he started interpreting for me his grandfather turned out to be a real hoot!
I'm in the Niagara region of southern Ontario, and besides small communities in Northern Ontario, very few speak, or even understand French. I sure don't. We can't understand them either, and we were forced to take French in school. And the dialect they speak is different from France after the British forced France out of North America cutting them off from native French speakers.
I'm 100% french Canadian and Acadian. My memere speaks Frenglish. 😆 I I have to pay close attention when she talks. I speak with a subsidiary of long island/ NY English. Wish I would have learned more French than the occasional cuss words.
@@janp2800 it's Chiac from Shediac, and it's got its own grammar rules, so it's more of a creole than plain Frenglish which is just mixing the two together based on your own vocabulary.
I'm a North Texan with Southeast Asian ancestry, and I surprised myself. I got Trini, Appalachian, Singaporean, Jamaican, Newfoundlander, Guyanese, and Glaswegian right! I do watch a lot of international film, which certainly helped, and I've moved around a lot within the United States which exposed me to more cultures.
This was fun to watch! When I was about 10 years old my cousins from Ireland came to visit us in Canada. I didn't understand a word they were saying when they arrived, but after a week or so of them speaking slowly for my benefit, I did learn to comprehend and appreciate my Irish heritage. As an adult I've worked with many people who've emigrated here from all over and love the challenge of interpreting there new found English.
I’m from Newfoundland. My brother and I were in a pub in Halifax. We met some Irish people. We had to show them our drivers licenses to prove we weren’t from Ireland. They were bewildered.
I’m from Appalachia and have and have mostly lost it from travel in the US. Where I live, my elders spoke like that gentleman. It’s wonderful to hear now that I’m getting to be their age. Music to my ears…
I think that makes Appalachian stand out from southern accents because southerners rarely lose their accent when they move out of the south. I grew up in NY but long since lost my NY accent and now have the rocky mountain region/rust belt non-accent (I call it a non-accent since it sounds about as close to English with no accent that I can think of).
Hi Olly. Ewan Bremner (Trainspotting clip) is from Edinburgh and his accent is East coast, not Glaswegian. He is speaking fast because he is speeding, not because he is a Weegie. The most difficult dialect in Scotland is probably Doric from one of the fishing villages along the Moray Firth coast, or some of the islands, like Orkney. th-cam.com/video/le3cBRlWSE8/w-d-xo.html
@@tonyennis1787 My wife, who is from Fife, has little problem with Glaswegian but needs me to translate Doric. Aberdeen residents speak quite slowly, but it gets faster the further west you travel, especially in the fishing villages, like Buckie, Banff and Burghead (less fishing and lots of incomers have diluted this somewhat.)
@@elaineb7065 i was at school in Forres, swam for the Bluefins, travelling round Grampian and my parents still live in Burghead. Most of the fishing villages and towns are indecipherable to anyone from outside the area.
I was once at a wedding in Cullen surrounded by fishermen and fisher's wife's. Nae fecking clue what they were sayin. I've live in Glasgow for 20 years now so know the accent pretty well. My biggest issue is getting taxi drivers to take me to Crow Road. They have no clue where I want to go! I just can't seen to shake the plumy English for that one!
I'm from New Zealand, it would be good to cover some of the English dialects spoken in the Pacific, as well as the creole (pigin) spoken in Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu, and the Solomon Islands. Even in relatively young countries, such as Australia and New Zealand, there are variances in accents.
I agree. As a kiwi, I'd love a side by side comparison with a strong kiwi and a strong Aussie accent. I find it frustrating that so many people can't tell the difference. It's not the mocking our accent that l mind, it's being mocked by someone using an Australian accent that they think is kiwi that gets to me.😊
@@elzelinakriek-breet3092 Yes and no. I taught English overseas for almost 20 years and was proudly "accentless". When l first came back, l used to have idiots asking me where l was from, then arguing with me that l couldn't possibly be a New Zealander when l told them. The stupidity and pointlessness of it all did my head in. I don't know where you're from but, when l first came back, Lyn of Tawa was all over the TV and l was HORRIFIED to think we sounded like THAT. Didn't realise for quite some time that it was a comedian playing a part. Been back 30 years and although I don't think l have a particularly strong kiwi accent, definitely NOT Lyn of Tawa level, l sometimes catch myself with a vowel sound that l'm not thrilled by. My point was more that l'd love someone to demonstrate the differences between the two. Although l don't really have a problem with accents, l DO find it offensive that many TV commercials are voiced by someone pretending to be a NZer and getting the accent wrong or that someone using it to make jokes about it can't even get it right. Our accent and manner of speaking here in Aotearoa, has been shaped by the forces that created us and l love that it tells our story. Also, without accents how could we tell the Canadians from the Yanks or the lrish from the Poms and, losing that glorious Welsh accent that sounds like they're singing even when they're not or the wonderful Scots lilt would be a crime against humanity!
That's not very accurate as in reality it some people sound like they have a British accent coz some teachers are from there whilst anothers sound American coz of Saturday morning cartoons whilst others sound more like their home language so the real answer would be it depends@@mrvwbug4423
As someone who comes from the middle of the Appalachian mountain range, I always have people trying to correct me when I say the word "Appalachia", in this part of the US, it's not actually pronounced as "App-ah-lay-sha", we actually pronounce it as "App-ah-latch-a". I love our unique dialect! And this video was wonderful!
I find it So Condescending when people correct other people's pronunciations! Like Mine Is Correct & You Are Wrong! My sister moved to Louisiana & lived there many years & her accent, dialect & pronunciations changed to where I couldn't understand a lot of her speech. Didn't matter if I, her sister, could understand her the people that she lived near her could!😊
I'm French and know close to nothing about English and its accents. The best I could do was roughly locate a few of them like "sounds Scottish" "somewhere in Africa" 😂 Although the clues helped actually finding a few ones, so that was cool. Interesting video as a whole, it's fun learning about how the language and its accents evolved in different parts of the world!
I'm a Canadian living in Jamaica for 12 years, and back and forth a lot for 10 years before that. It took me a while, probably too old when I started, but now understand Patois quite well. A correction, Jamaica wasn't first settled by Arawak, it was Taino.
I'm Australian and we say "My belly thinks my throat's cut" over here, too. I recognised four of the accents straight off - Newfoundland, Appalachian, Jamaican and Glaswegian and had a good idea of the other Caribbean accents as coming from that area although I couldn't pin them down. I found this a very interesting video and you've won another subscriber here!
Texan and guessed all the same ones. I could get Jamaican, Appalachian, and Glaswegian by sound, but could only guess Newfoundland after he gave the hints about the history of settlement.
@@uppercut147 American, grew up in the US midwest. Although I didn't grow up in the US south my cousins grew up in Kentucky and I heard that a LOT.. so Appalachian was an easy one to identify. Jamaican I've known since I was a kid. Glaswegian also (part of my family is scottish) And my bro is married to a Newfie.. So those were fairly obvious.. The rest? As mystified as could be.
Dialect 2 🇹🇹 I am half Grenadian the accent is so similar. Just over the sea. The entire Caribbean has a very similar history. Every Island has a form of rice and peas.
There are some Cajuns down in Louziane, not just the French words. Many influences all spiced up! They got kicked out of Canada and kinda got stuck in them swamps. But when they speak 'English'...it's like Gumbo.
I'm from Alberta up in Canada, and my ancestors arrived in Acadia in 1605. Instead of heading south once kicked out, they went further west. What's crazy for me to think about is that I almost certainly share ancestry with some Cajuns.
@@WretchedRedoran Acadia = 'Acadie' in French - Acadiens - 'Cadiens' - 'Cajuns'. You DO share DNA with the swampers, shrimpers & fiddle-players down on the bayou. Laissez les bons temps roulez!
So glad we can now stream so many TV shows from the UK. A couple of times I have found one that it's hard for me to understand the dialect and accent. Fascinating how many versions of the English language exist. I enjoy learning a bit about the different accents and the history behind them.
I recognized the Appalachian accent immediately and understood everything. I moved to rural western NC as a kid/teenager. I had a really hard time understanding everyone at first!
I’m from central FL. I hear most of the north and south American accents everyday. The hardest accent here for me to understand is Cajun. It’s especially difficult if it’s an older Cajun person because they mix a little French in there by nature. When I’m in Europe the hardest accent to understand is Welsh. Out of the hundreds of Welsh I’ve spoken to, I’ve probably understood a handful of words.
I moved to central Florida in 2014 from New York state, I find it so interesting how many different accents I hear even from people born and raised here. One family can sound Southern and the people in the next house sound like me.
I was from Ohio, left at 18 fir the military, dealt with Germans, and Americans from all over. I left the military and came south (I'm now near the Florida-Georgia Boarder..) and my "Accent" went from plain to a mix mash.
@@brandonm8249 Florida is the real melting pot. I grew up in Miami and Orlando in the 70s and 80s and all my friends were either immigrants from Latin America or Northern transplants escaping the snow. And then there's my relatives, who identify with the Deep South and Dixie. I tell people that growing up here was like being in a foreign exchange program without ever leaving home.
I grew up in Polk County 50 years ago, and the accent was either Deep South or mainly Michigan with a little Upstate NY and Ohio. Now, of course, it'a much more diverse.
I’m from central NY, at the foothills of the adirondacks, and my father was from Saratoga. The Appalachia accent was no struggle. That’s how he sounds and some of my teachers back in school too. The phrases and pronunciation were the same. 😃 I should note that my husband, who is Romanian and learnt English in NYC as a teen, still complains and struggles with comprehending my father’s speech sometimes.
There is a similar one to Tangier found in the Cheseapeke bay on Smith island in MD just north of Tangier...spoken just by a couple of hundred of people. I have been there on a Smith and couldn't understand some of the elders, and I'm from NY!
I also got Guianese, Trinidadian, Jamaican, Singaporean, and the Newfies because I worked in tourism in NYC for 25 years. I have a Brooklyn accent that almost qualifies as a dialect. There is no R on Noo Yalk/ Noo yauk. When I was growing up in Brooklyn, people pronounced Oil, Earl, and Toilet Ter-let. And a battery was a Bat-Tree. They say the accent comes from the original Dutch settlers In New Amsterdam.
In our traditional Newfoundland dialect, oil is pronounced, “iol.” Toilet is pronounced as, “tylit.” Egg is pronounced, “aagg, or “haaggs.” The “L” sound within a word is flattened, last letter is a word may be dropped. Cold was be pronounced, “coo” rhymes with, “o.” We exaggerate or drop h. We inhale with a yes. Lots more.
I’m from Newfoundland. Our accent is a melange of West Country and Waterford/Wexford Irish. It is a fast vernacular whose calling card is maintaining 3 conversations at the same time at a house party. Peppered with arcane and archaic words, it’s a dialect like no other.
Got in with a newfie gang in my university days and since. Great people and the kitchen parties are certainly a thing! As a Canadian I can just barely keep up - a lot to like about the dialect.
@@vls179 I have friends who can talk fast enough to call a dog race. Eminem might have been the first white rapper, but there’s guys in St. John’s who can tell you a story at twice his speed.
@@mrwyatt6006 The Appalachian accent from north Georgia to the border of Tennessee and North Carolina has some similarities to Newfoundland English. The original population of Newfoundland was about 40 000 people. These people were pretty much hermetically sealed for 350 years. The dialect was frozen in time until Newfoundland became a Canadian province in 1949.
I had a friend from Nigeria. My hubby was raised in rural Arkansas. We all went to visit hubby's family and friends in rural Arkansas. We needed a translator. I understood my friend from Nigeria, so I would tell hubby what she said. He would tell his friends, again in English, what she said. They would reply and again, he would say what they said, I would have to tell my friend from Nigeria. It's a real thing to have to translate dialects.
Funny thing about people using thee and thine, here in my lart of West Virginia, we say yourn, which I didn't realize wasn't standard American English until I got "corrected" by a college professor in English 102. It is the old form of it, mine, thine, yourn.
Impressive research. Hands down one of the best I've come across in a long time. As a South African I attest, as a country we have about 9 different accents ,but the Cape coloured community is on another level.
I didn’t know you guys had 9 dialects. I’m a Californian who had to do to transcribing for a South African and it was very difficult 😅 but after that I’m usually able to understand pretty well…
as a fellow south african i am not so sure about having 9 different accents. why 9? i have lived here for all of my life (close to 50 years) and i would say there are a whole lot more than 9. but ja, ek stem, die kaapse kleurlinge praat 'n ingils wat net onse mense kan verstaan :)
And they have the most amazing funny way of telling the even the most tragic of stories, so much so that you need to stifle your laugh to not seem insensitive.
@@MsDrusilla666 yes, there is a lot more than 9, especially if you would get indepth, but i was merely highlighting a variety of accents amongst ourselves. If we were put in a room as strangers we would be able to pick up where one if from purely on the accent.
@@inlonging We do have 11 official languages. With each language and culture we have unique influences and ways to express ourselves. I once had a visitor from Brooklyn , I think the first phrase that confused him was telling him my ETA "I will arrive there now, now. Yes twice, that's when you know it's pretty close.
When I first moved from one part of South Africa to the Cape, I straggled a lot to understand both their English and Afrkaans, and had to learn to understand it for months before I could understand enough to work with them. But I absolutely love it, it's like their accent has a personality😂
Some accents in South Africa can be rather blunt. In the Western Cape, some have Deutsch ("German") influences, others French, and not as Nederlands ("Dutch") as one would expect. Sadly, despite RP taught in schools, not even the Anglophones can speak English properly, neither can they pronunciate. They can't even pronounce Brackenfell, let alone Thibault (tee-boo) or Llandudno.
@@unwoke1652 I'm a born and Bred Capetonian and I know the correct pronouciations of all the English relevant to Cape Town. I can slip into the Cape Flats way of speaking without any problems and can give you a nice Namaqualand accent as well. Oh by the way it is not correct to use the term pronunciate, I double-checked, you would either use pronounce or pronunciation. English can be bothersome sometimes, haha
I was born in Europe and live there now, but went to school in Cape Town and I am proud that I understood every word of the Cape Flats accent! Reminds me of my childhood.
I thought for sure you would mention the Outter Banks of North Carolina. Their accent is the closest English to 1500's English, and is very beautiful to hear. It is even "more English" than Tangier Island.
Fun! I am from the western USA. I grew up speaking standard English. I knew the Appalachian English instantly. Here it is referred to as 'southern' or 'hillbilly' English. I understood everything that was said. I didn't know about NewFoundland English but I did understand almost everything in the video clip. The other English video clips I had to listen carefully to understand about half of the words. :)
I'm also from the western USA, but having lived elsewhere (namely NYC), I've exposure to a lot of other dialects. Like, I recognized all the Caribbean accents even if I only caught a word or two in the clips. Newfie isn't so bad, though the clips increased my respect for a friend who lived there for a while. I find it fascinating, though, that I can fairly easily understand both the Appalachian and Glaswegian accents/dialects. Even more so since I've been to Glasgow and there was at least one person whom I understood ONE word that she said and nothing more, but that guy in the clip I didn't have too much trouble with.
@@rutht2023 They are fine lines between accents, dialects, and languages, and then it would depend which ones you're talking about and who's defining them!
I was not expecting to see Trinidad on this list. I grew up with this and the Jamaican accent and I never fully appreciated that most people can't understand what is being said. I got every Carib accent. The Liberian accent sounds like the Belter accent in The Expanse.
@@bigscarysteve that might be possible because in the school system they might have stressed a more English accent. I'm Trinidadian by birth but know some Trinis that sounds as if they were raised in England.
I love hearing all people and their tones, nuances. I feel bad when I don't understand and I always try to. It's important to be able to ask questions to grow knowledge instead of judgement of differences. Thank you for the video 👌🏼
As someone who lives in a multicultural city in Canada (with family in Newfoundland), and is ethnically Guyanese with family who grew up in the UK, I got all of these right except the last two! Loved seeing my ancestors’ little Caribbean country on this list :)
I knew the second to last one, only because a few of my friends grew up in watermen families, in that part of the state. I've met a few people from New(finlin) and they don't sound at all like the 1st example, but the second example sounded more like them.
I lived in the Caribbean for years. Trinidadian sounds like most West Indian "dialects" that you hear ALL OVER the Caribbean. I'm sure there are differences but I understood them perfectly well, even though I never lived in Trinidad.
Honey one grandmother is Jamaican the other is Trinidadian and they sound nothing alike. I’ve spent a year in Trinidad and it sounds nothing like the other islands except maybe Guyana. Not all Caribbean islands are the same just because you can understand.
I'm Trinidadian-American and I sometimes confuse Guyanese people with us. Jamaicans sound completely different but I understand them for the most part.
Singlish isn't just influenced by dialects of Chinese. On top of the dialects you mentioned, there's also Malay and Tamil influence. Because like you said, Singapore is a multicultural country, so while the majority of Singapore is ethnically Chinese, they aren't the only ones there. For example, lah comes from Malay, and is simply used to add emphasis after an expression or a statement. Shiok also comes from Malay and it's used to describe something delicious or simply good like "This burger is so juicy, so shiok!” Dey comes from Tamil, and this is just their way of saying hey! Goondu is another one from Tamil, and...let's just say if a Singaporean called you this, it's not a compliment. There is more Hokkien and Malay influence in Singlish because of Singapore being a historically important fishing and trading port. Hokkiens first made it to Malacca in the 15th century, and were known to have established trading networks in the region. As Singapore grew to become a center of trade and commerce, many Hokkiens moved from Malacca to Singapore in the 1820s to seize the business opportunities. The indigenous of Singapore are the Orang (Orang is Malay for people) Laut and was once an outpost of the Srivijaya Empire, an empire formerly based in Sumatra. And the English part, well, they like to keep it short and sweet and I don't blame them. Like "Oh you don't have to do that. I'll do it in a while" becomes "No need. Later I do".
Yeah it was a big omission not to mention the non-Chinese languages that influence Singlish! Sometimes just ordering a kopi (coffee) in Singapore uses words from 3 different languages!
One of the reasons Singlish is so efficient is because in the early years, the natives aren't aren't educated in English. So when they learn bits and pieces of English, they will combine some English with native languages or dialects. And to minimize grammatical errors, they will cut the words used in an English sentence structure to the minimum, mirroring what they may speak in a native languages or dialect which can be typically much shorter and or a specific word or phrase understood by the locals.
I live very close to Appalachia and used to live in Appalachia. The accents range from very thick and difficult to understand, to much more subtle with only a noticeable accent to those living outside of Appalachia. There are also different dialect throughout the Appalachian region because it covers such a large area.
I think every accent probably has degrees of depth compared to the accents around their region. I think middle-class city dwellers might have more neutral accents (meaning more common and understandable to others). In the US South, I've noticed a loose distinction along political party lines. (Consider George W. Bush's accent compared to Al Gore's.) The more Republican a person wants to seem, the deeper their particular southern accent seems to be. And for some reason, at least in my experience, a disproportionate number of Evangelical Christian pastors seem to have strong southern accents. I'm a Minnesotan who lived in Tennessee for a couple years, and I knew many people who had very little accent at all (to my ear - of course we all have an accent), and I knew many people who seemed to take pride in mangling Standard American English as far beyond recognition as they could. My boss at a printing shop (the owner) once asked me "How much you like [on] your job?" (I didn't hear "on", but I trust it was there.) I said I liked it just fine. I was new, and I was doing ok there, but the language differences were kinda worrying. The boss got irritated. He thought I was mocking him. I was just confused. He was asking how much work was remaining (lacking) on the job (customer order) that I was working on. (He was a wealthy, hardcore Republican.) I had to laugh when a coworker there asked me (the only other person in the room), "Is this yall's screwdriver?" But in office work I never met anyone with such thick accents. Everybody had a bit of an accent, but most seemed quite neutral to me. I think the depth of the accent is a matter of identity, with thicker accents identifying primarily with their local in-group, and more neutral accents more commonly identifying with a broader worldview. I know these comments might seem politically charged, but that's how I see it. It was just like that in Virginia too.
I have worked all over the world. I have a Scottish accent (but speak “Scottish-accented-English”, not Scots) and have never had any difficulty being understood. In my experience many non native English speakers can’t recognise anything but major accent differences in native English speakers and will struggle to tell Australian from English, Scottish from Irish etc. (and why would they?) . Similarly I’ve rarely had any difficulty understanding colleagues’ or clients’ English through their accents. With just one exception - a client in West Africa had a factory manager in Nigeria whose accent I really struggled with. I admitted this to the regional training manager (a Ghanaian) who said it was OK because “not even other Nigerians understand him when he gets excited about a topic - just tell him to slow down.”
I have a fairly strong Glaswegian accent and when I lived in Europe for a year when I was a student, and when we spoke English with each other I felt quite isolated at first because many people found it difficult to understand me. I lived with people from all over the world and realised very quickly that I'd have to code switch to make myself more understandable and help me bond with the others. Many of them had never really been exposed to Scottish accents before, and I am also a very fast speaker especially when i'm anxious, stressed or drunk which I was about 90% of the time. What was interesting is another girl who lived in our student accommodation was from Edinburgh and she was fully intelligible to them from the get go. But the more people spoke to me the more they got used to it which I think is best way to understand an accent or dialect you're unfamiliar with.
@@minimarsbars “Code-switching” is something everyone has to do to some extent. One of the pieces of advice we used to give British, American (and Australian, Indian etc) business people was not to use the sports metaphors that are so common in anglophone “management speak” but which might refer to sports that no one else plays and they might not understand, or are very localised and colloquial. So if you are facing a difficult situation it isn’t a sticky wicket, so don’t step up to the plate, rise to the challenge - that way you’ll achieve your goals, not the back of the net.
I'm native Dutch speaking and I know the Trinidadian, Jamaican, Guyanese, Scottish, South African and Apalachian accent... A lot of English-only speakers should probably learn another language and stop assuming the abilities of others who do speak several languages. Dead giveaway accents for most non-native English speakers are US English, "English" (UK) English, Scottish English, Irish English, Jamaican English and Australian English. Non-English speaking countries import A LOT OF English media (songs, tv shows, movies, etc), not to mention the internet, so there's a lot of exposure.
@@jakke1975 Three things. Firstly, I said “many” not “all” non native speakers - I am certain there are quite a few who can and I’d be even less surprised if many of that minority were native Dutch speakers given the legendary familiarity with the English language of so many. Secondly, your ability to distinguish among Trinidadian, Guyanese and Jamaican accents is remarkable - “most” native English speakers couldn’t do that though I am sure those who live in the Caribbean could (perhaps you have lived in NL Antilles?) - I shared a flat with a Jamaican 50 years ago and could still reliably pick that out from others but I doubt I could distinguish say Antigua from Barbados. Thirdly, I was describing my own experience - not inventing a universal rule. I lived in the Middle East and some fluent English speakers knew that my accent was not “English” or “American” (recognising that there are of course many of each) but it was rare for anyone to recognise its origin (a Kuwaiti once startled me by immediately recognising it as not just Scottish but West Coast - but he had gone to Glasgow university and married a girl from Perth!). I worked a lot throughout Africa, where many people speak English at native-speaker/bilingual level, and did encounter some people who recognised it, but I was just as often asked if I was Irish - but that never surprises me as my particular Scottish accent isn’t too far removed from the accent of some parts of Northern Ireland (I’ve been mistaken for that in England, never mind Africa). By the way, I have also worked throughout Europe and lived in France for a while and I know that there are many people who can recognise a Scottish accent, particularly in NL and Scandinavian countries with high familiarity with English, for the reasons you describe - maybe rather less so in “dubbing countries” however? French English-speakers could often also tell my accent wasn’t English or American but recognising it specifically as Scottish was unusual. .
That’s so true. I’m a Portuguese speaker and I’ve been in the UK for almost a decade now. I still struggle to tell an Englishman from an Australian. I do notice something is off but I can’t tell what hahaha
I understood all of them for the most part once I tuned my ear into each dialect. Some easier than others but all were intellegable. Being Scottish I think helps. We seem to understand everyone, even if it feels like a one way street lot of the time.
I live in Vancouver Canada. I only got the Newfoundland accent. My wife is from Cape Breton - northern Nova Scotia. Their accents can be challenging too.
Aiseh. So happy to see my native Singlish represented sia! 🇸🇬 And love to see many of the other fellow creole languages around the world get so much representation here as well. So many narrow-minded people imagine the Anglosphere to only be "Standard UK, USA, and Australian English" and ignore the diversity of the English language and its many native forms and speakers around the world.
Singlish is absolutely rubbish, it’s pretty much only the proletariats and nouveau riche who speak it. People who spoke English in the 50s and earlier all spoke it properly. Aside from English, people in Singapore can’t speak proper mandarin either. What an embarrassing bunch of people.
@@AbAb-th5qe Singapore isn't a dialect its a pidgin. A dialect is a natural variation of English over time. A pidgin is when non-native English speakers attempt to teach English to their own people, which is what happened in Singapore. Its just bad English that perpetuates because there were no native speakers around to correct them.
In Newfoundland, we still use old Irish words such as "Sleeveen." Many parts of Newfoundland have their own distinct dialect. I was at a foot all game in Alberta a month ago, and a man sitting next to me asked, "Are you from town?" Meaning are you from St. Johns? He was from another area of Newfoundland. He could tell I was from St. Johns by my accent.
We still use 'sleeveen' in Ireland. It's funny, I was at an airport in south America a few years back and overheard a lad on a phone with a bizarre Irish-sounding accent. I got chatting to him out of curiosity and yes, he was from Newfoundland. It was fascinating to listen to him speaking. 😊
@musashidanmcgrath That's a great story, I can imagine your surprise. I was transferred to Scotland in 1998, and they all thought I was Irish. They were quite surprised to learn I was actually Canadian. My hometown was settled by O'Brien, Madden, Doyle, Hannaford, Kielly, Hearn, and McGrath, among others.
Its not hard to tell a townie. You do speak different from the rest of the island. My family is from the western part of the island and I can hear a townie a mile away.
@samurphy Yes, we speak a different dialect compared to the rest of Newfoundland. What's surprising is that I left Newfoundland in 1998 and didn't return until 2019. Then I moved to Edmonton in 2023, but he could still hear that Townie accent.
I was visiting my sister in Texas and asked for something in the store one day and the clerk asked if I was from Ireland….when I said Nfld. he said he never heard of it… @@jaydawg4632
My dad raised 'Appalachia/Ozarks"....first in family to go to college, worked hard to loose accent and vocabulary. I worked to reappropriate the language of my grandparents! I love the comfortable, homey sound-and colorful vocabulary!
While in the Army I attended a technical briefing in West Germany conducted by a Scottish officer. His accent was so thick, I couldn't understand a thing he said. I politely interrupted him and asked him if he spoke German, he said yes. I then asked him to continue in German so I might understand him. The rest of the presentation was in German, he was brilliant!
I remember living in England and deciding to stay south for university. Now in NI and it took a few months to fully understand what some people were saying, but it's been great.
I completely understood Appalachian English. Probably because, despite being raised in Florida, my mom’s side of the family was from Kentucky. Particularly from the more farm areas. So I definitely heard a lot of it growing up from my mom, not to mention from the many visits to Kentucky I made as a kid. I don’t know if there were a lot of Canadians where I lived or what, but I was also able to pretty much perfectly understand Newfoundland English.
I grew up in Georgia and also understood the Appalachian speakers just fine. That whole area (South Carolina, Georgia, and north Florida) was largely settled by Scots-Irish immigrants as well. Our accents aren't exactly the same, but I think the influence of those common roots is still pretty strong.
Blends into the southern (country?) accent a bit. (More than one southern accent, btw.) Time in military and some cousins living in rural areas of the country, so understood the example here just fine.
Appalachian was the only one where I could understand what was being said. American here, grew up in part of the Appalachian mountain range, but I'm not culturally "Appalachian" so my own accent is pretty standard. Interesting how English (and other languages) can admit of so many varieties all over the world.
My family has lived in Appalachia for 250 years. My ancestors were from Germany and England, but culturally, my family is 100% Scots-Irish Appalachian.
The Appalachian accent was the only one I truly for sure knew! I was born and raised in and around the Monroe, Louisiana area so I KNOW most southern accents! :) Certain expressions my maternal grandmother used, I just didn't understand why she used them. Reading novels set in 18th century and before England made me realize where some came from! Someone would ask how she was and she'd say tolerable. My sister and I would ask her if she meant did she barely tolerate how she felt? There were a lot of things similar that she said that finally made sense when reading those novels! I've never tried to get rid of my southern accent BUT I vividly remember my 5th grade teacher trying to make us pronounce certain words correctly! Like it is FIRE, not far, WINDOW, not winder, etc!
I love the Trini accent. Years ago I worked with an Indo-Trinidadian and his accent was still strong, having lived in the UK 15+ years, but so nice to listen too. Unless he was having a rant there was rarely a time he couldn’t be understood.
I’m from Northern Ireland and got all these except Tangier. Appalachian accents are very very familiar to my ear, Glaswegian is heard around here quite a bit.
I got most of them from the first clip, didn't know about three of them. I'm an unusual case though... My Dad was Scots/Irish and a language professor, my Mum is Scandinavian and fluent in 4 languages. I grew up in a commune with people from all over the world, so when I was learning to talk I had to tune my ear, and learn to speak clearly. I'm from Yorkshire, and often get accused of sounding "posh", because I enunciate clearly. Britain is a multicultural nation, and learning the way I did as a young child has been very beneficial over the years of me working in customer facing roles.
Love this. Reminds me of the time I took a 23 hour flight from Sydney to London seated next to very talkative 8 year old girl from Ulster with an accent unlike anything I’d ever heard. Couldn’t understand a word she said so spent most of the flight smiling politely wishing she’d go to sleep.
I loved watching this video which shows the varieties of English accents spread around the world . How beautiful it is to see the stunning linguistic diversity amongst the people around the world just as if the language is alive and grows .
I traveled in the Navy. I loved talking to the locals no matter how challenging it was! A night in a Dublin pub had me laughing so hard i don't know how I didn't piss my pants! They were great.
I nailed these. Step father grew up in Sunderland, probably one of the ones most people can't understand, it prepared me for the worst. Recognized most of these accents and generally can understand them. Picked out Newfie quick, they have some crazy slang. I've spent a lot of time around Guyanese, Trini, Jamaicans. Uncle was Scottish too. Libeerian was probably the toughest for me
I have a friend from the Caribbean. He spoke his dialect with his family and speak normally with people. He still spoke English but it was hard to follow but in a instant he could speak English I understood . And their culture is so cool
I’m from Appalachia. I hated my accent so much growing up. I was ashamed of it, and would get made fun of when visiting anywhere. I did my best to lose it and I mostly have. I wish I’d known then that it was nothing to be ashamed of and the people mocking me were ignorant.
aw. I am sorry to hear that.
Just keep going
@@dalubwikaan161thank you. It’s totally fine. It’s just I wish I’d known then what I know now.
I'm from Appalachia to and you did the right thing
I'm right there with you!
Very sorry to hear that. I grew up with kids from all over the world, so I learned a lot about accents.
I’m a Texan, and I understand my Appalachian countrymen perfectly well. I love hearing all the dialects!
Appalachian is easy to understand.
The "Scotch-Irish" dialect of U.S. English came out of southern Appalachia and spread from East Texas to Virginia and Southern Maryland. It's basically working class and rural Southern.
He should have done a Texan dialect segment.
I am from Boston and didn't understand about half of it.
I'm a New Yorker and understood Appalachian easily.
When the Appalachian started, I got such a big smile. My great-aunt spoke this way. Apparently my grandfather used to as well, but he did his best to tone it down so the grandkids could understand him. My great-aunt had no such reservation. She was a hoot, a huge storyteller, and I would listen to her tales for hours.
It's just the language of the elder story teller to me.
That was the only accent I could understand.
Dude same. I’ve spent my whole life trying to avoid it because my mom spent her whole life trying to lose it…
You guys need to watch Beau of the Fifth Column. He spent a long time hiding his accent too. In fact none of his friends new he had one. Then he got drunk one night and it came out. He now has a huge You Tube channel and uses his real accent for it and does just fine. Of course you have to be understood, being able to choose like Beau is pretty cool too.
i'm originally from nw Arkansas (Ozark mountains) and we talk pretty much the same way. I've had people in other parts of the country think I'm from one of the Carolinas.
Im South African. And married to an Englishman from Grantham. Also have a few Scottish friends. One from Glascow. Stayed in Cape Town for a while. I loved this
I’m Australian. I understood significant parts of most of the accents. The development of accents and dialects is super interesting.
I love the Australian accent! It's my fav hehe! Too bad there is a lot of racism in Australia, it actually shocked me.
@@vertigo2894there's lots of ignorant people everywhere but scratch the surface and they are good to their families and easy to make friends with. Australians are generally fun and friendly and racism can be wiped out with a bit of communication.
@@joythought Of course there are wonderful Australians; I am guessing you are white? We don't tend to have the same experiences and it's often drastically different. From all the places I have been, it's sadly the worst in this context.
@@vertigo2894 not white australian here and I was wondering what type of racist situations are you referring to cause I personally don't find that bad.
@@RockinFootball_23 Are you a black male?
Got Trinidad, Guyana, and Jamaica.
Only because I'm West Indian 😅
Side note: Each English speaking Caribbean country has a unique and distinctive dialect also, so whenever Caribbean people meet, we usually can tell where they're from just by their dialect😊
if you ask all the english speakers of the caribbean to write a statement in propper english, you will not be able to tell where they are from. American english is dialect of standard english, be cause it has different spelling and grammer. we all use the same spelling and grammer in the carribean . So i am from jamaica and I speak two languges, Enhlish and Jamaican Potios, its not a dialect its a language
@JimCarner so what if @@nicholaswjamrock didn't capitalise some words to your liking. His statement is informative and intelligible, which puts him well ahead of half the USians I encounter online.
bajan (barbadian) here, can confirm. also, all the carribbean ones were quite easy for me to understand and differentiate since i speak in a bajan accent.
From Trinidad and can confirm. A lot of times our islands can't understand each other.
Yes!! I’m Guyanese and got the trini accent within one second lol (loved seeing so many West Indian countries in this). A lot of people say trini/Guyanese sound similar, but to us it is so different!
Appalachian English is such a comforting sound to me. My family lost it a few generations back when they moved to the cities for work, but I’m certain our ancestors all spoke that way.
Incidentally, most folks from the region say “App-uh-LATCH-an” not “App-uh-LAY-shun.” I often hear the joke, “If I hear you say Appalaysha, I’ll throw an apple atcha!”
Yep, lived there for almost a decade and you're right.
I'm not from here, but I've lived in western North Carolina for about nine years. I recognized Appalachian as being spoken somewhere in eastern North America, though I wasn't sure if it's in the mountains, the Outer Banks, or what.
I got Appa-LATCH-an immediately, as that’s where I’m from originally (and my family still lives there). I’ve lost most of it myself, but it’s like music to my ears now!
Next time, Olly should do the Hoi Toiders of the Outer Banks.
And EOSborne, thank you! Every time he said “appa-lay-sha”, it was like finger nails on a chalk board!
I almost picked up a bit of an Appalachian accent when I went to school right near the mountains. Now I'm the only one in my family who says Appa-uh-latch-an and not the other way.
im ethnically guyanese and trini. one of my great grandmas was actually arawak and carib! im so happy to see caribbean culture featured in this video ❤ much love!
I trained with the Singapore military. Not all had the same accent, but I'd say 75% could easily converse with the American Marines. Great group of guys.
We can code switch easily. ;)
Yeah, they are real filli faleh! (filli faleh, filli faleh).
Who knows what I'm talking about?
My Singaporean sister-in-law used to say this.
Yes, that's why the government is trying eradicate Singlish.
@@Fuzzy_Llama many just think they can 😜
@@Fuzzy_Llama ORD loh !
My late husband came from Appalachia, and his family speaks this way. He trained it out of his voice because he felt it was holding him back in his career, but when he'd speak to them on the phone, it would come right back. The accent he ended up with was so soft and lovely, I miss it. When my mom (native Philadelphian) came to our wedding at his parents' home, she didn't understand a thing anyone said!
Hello from Gatlinburg 😍 I trained it out of my voice as well... it's coming back as I get older though. I loved reading your comment, and I'm very sorry for your loss. I know what you mean too, everyone can tell if I've spent the day with my papaw bc my accent gets pretty heavy. I speak very fast though lol it can really confuse people...
@@rosemadder5547My Philly comes back when I've been talking on the phone w/ back-home friends! We all adapt.
I understand applacian english better then the weird uk accents
@@DeezNuts- I watch a lot of UK tv, so I understand most of them by now!
Weird I get that, as a citizen of the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 I don’t hear many different ones unless I travel, and I have a posh accent as I grew up around Buckingham and never heard anything else and the first time I heard an American accent I had no idea what they were saying learnt the hard way though as I have had many different horse riding instructors and tutors
I love Singaporean English! I knew that one. My late wife and I lived there for a year. After six months, my daughter came to visit. "Dad! You talk like them!"
My wife and I were so proud! 😀
@@mingzmings88why lmao??? It’s a valid way of speaking. Stop trying to cater to white people
@@mingzmings88sad for u 😊
‘My stomach thinks my throat is cut’ was an expression used by my mum to express feeling hungry. My family all born in Liverpool England but Mum’s heritage was Ireland / Welsh. Nice to know this expression is medieval Irish xx
My dad use to say the same thing and he was from Barbados. Many irish were sent to Barbados by Cromwell.
We say it in Rochdale too.
We say it in Newfoundland too
I can't even get my head around the saying, makes no sense to me haha
Trinidadian here! Happened to stumble upon this video. Thank you for accurately capturing demonstrations of the accent as well as its historical origin!
Also Trini here! My sister's sent this to me haha
Not Trini, however I LOVE a Trni accent! ❤Beautiful!
I'm New Zealander/Australian and I have no trouble with Appalachian English. I did an online University course and some of the content was delivered by an agriculturalist in Scotland - could barely understand a word. I think maybe the english accents you think are difficult depend on which type of english accent you have.
Definitely the New World dialects were easier for this American than those further out, and Appalachian is no sweat. I've had more exposure to those and related dialects. Georgie- that's incomprehensible to my ear. 😂
The whole South is heavily Scots-Irish.
I once called a customer service number in Australia from the U.S. I could not understand the guy. I felt terrible. I told him I knew we were both speaking english, but it wasn't helping. The one word I remember him having to spell was pin.
i agree, as a maritimer with a lot of family with newfie accents, and some with the western new brunswick accent (biggest giveaway of west new brunswick accent is they pronounce garage as gerrej) i find appalacean scottish and irish accents easy to understand, but then find many of the american accents in the south and carribean confusing.
What do you mean that you're New Zealand/Australian are you half and half?
I grew up in South Florida and later moved to Georgia so I got the Trinidadian, the Jamaican, and the Appalachian right off the bat. I really appreciated learning the history.
Grew up in Georgia! My wife is British and I have to translate my uncles for her lol
I'd highly recommend you confirm with your own research before taking what he presents as historical gospel. He has a few pretty blatant errors with history of some of the languages here.
Most of it is great tho.
@@yondie491 I totally agree - you want to seem kind saying "most of it is great" - most of it is actually for likes/money and not correct
I'm from East Tennessee and my whole familys from Appalachia. My grandmother taught me to speak without my accent cause people would think I was stupid if I used my hillbilly English. Today I can speak without it but I'm proud to have my accent and usually just talk regular. We say things like toosdee for Tuesday, haint for haunt or ghost, holler for hollow, and use lots of phrases like ive know him since he was knee high to a grass hipper and well im finer than a frogs hair split 3 ways. I love that you included Appalachia in the video I only have one issue with you... its Appalachia with a soft 3rd A no with a long 3rd A. i aint really sore at you but it is a soft A lol
I'm Trinidadian and was pretty impressed with the view of my nation's accent. The Cape Flats was fascinating. Thanks for the knowledge.
You have noting to be impressed by.
He is a shame and disgrace to the British education system.
Did you realize he got the basic history of the country wrong?
He said GERMANS made up the population of Trinidad. He has the make-up of many of the countries wrong.
His historical information on many of the places in this video area very wrong.
He said that people in Trinidad / Caribbean only learned STANDARD ENGLISH recently...LOL
When....
Jamaicans, Trinidadians and Guyanese and others have been citizens in the UK since the very early 1950's.
How were they able to move to the UK if they didn't speak standard English.?
and English has been the only language thats ever been used SCHOOLS, BUSINESS, AND GOVERNMENT and used in theses former BRITISH colonies, and the official language.
This dunce is just disrespecting you .
I've never been to Trinidad but I had a strong hunch about the accent. That combination of how the people in the example look with that sound in their language was a giveaway to me.
It's crazy because I can hear the carribean, Indian, Chinese accents all mixed up in there.
Back in the mid 90's I met a young lady from Tobago and when that first clip came up I guessed 'Tobago'. Is it the same thing, do you have the same agent on both Islands?
I suppose there has to be differences a local would pick up. She looked Indian, the country not Native American 'Indian'.
Enjoyed listening to the Appalachian speakers. My mom's people mostly came from Kentucky and Tennessee. The accent hasn't changed a great deal over the years.
Thank the Lord for that. Would you mind recording them before their dialect of English disappears completely because it will owing to generational changes in language use. It's a very normal progression. Cheers from NYC!!!
So long as they don't do that annoying mush mouth thing where they can't annunciate and sit there and buzz thru their nose. That's not an accent that's a speech impediment and it goes uncorrected among a lot of Appalachian zones
My best friend is from Kentucky and calls is ‘Kentuckian”.
@@f0rmaggi0
I have cousins from there. Appalachian is very recognizable once you've heard it.. and you can hear echoes of it all throughout the south of the US.
Appalachian English sounds normal to me here in San Antonio.
Years ago I stopped at a cattle station in the Aussie outback that was larger than some European countries and spoke to the old bloke that had been left in charge of the homestead while the owner spent the next six weeks or so inspecting the boundary fences. Yep. Six weeks. His Aussie accent was so broad that I struggled to understand him and I’m actually Australian! What a character. Not many of them left now. I still think about him all the time…
Strewth! lol
> *I still think about him all the time*
You should definitely go pay him a visit!
@@RendallRen it was about 30 years ago near Lake Eyre in SA. He was an old fella then. Long gone by now I’m afraid
The only one I knew about and understood with ease was #4 - Appalachian. While it isn't exactly the same, it shares enough of the characteristics of my native Southern English that communication isn't much hindered. My own accent has become much more 'standardized' American English over time, but my grandparents spoke in such a thick Southern that some of my friends from other places found it difficult or impossible to understand them. I find myself slipping back into it when I'm around others speaking it.
I’m Afrikaans and living in Cape Town, since I understand it, it was so weird to think others can’t understand it..haha. Happy to be respresented 🙌
Right? Seems clear to me, lol
I'm Nigerian. We speak very different here. But whenever I hear Afrikaans English, I know it's them. It's almost Australian sounding, but with a lot of "A" sound to my ears. Friend sounds like Fr-Aynd Letter = L-Ay-tar (later?)
Nigerians would say fr-EH-nd, or leh-ta
I fink you fweeky an i lahk you a lot
Same , from sa too here, its so eazy to understand😭
me as a zulu person ,i can hear you but some words can be difficult to understand jusl like the one in this video ,i doin't know the f what that kid said
I got all the Caribbean dialects, Newfie and Appalachian, but I’m a Jamaican Canadian who’s spent a lot of time in the South so that makes sense 😂 Respectfully: These days the Indigenous Caribbean peoples who migrated from the southern mainland are not usually referred to as ‘Arawaks’. Arawakan is a language family. Pre-contact, the eastern islands were populated by the Caribs and western islands by Taino. They were enemies, not one group referring to themselves as Arawaks. I believe the Ciboney were also a Caribbean group but I don’t know about them. It was common in colonial curriculum to call all of the groups “Arawaks” and claim they are fully extinct. Now curriculum teaches about the culture of the groups like Taino in Jamaica and Puerto Rico.
Excellent information! Thank you! Gracias!
I'm from Toronto. Parents from Guyana. I got all but the Singapore one lol. I think we both are lucky having the upbringing we have. We expose to a lot more of the world than the average person both because of the Caribbean and being Canadian. Something I never realized until I was older.
Much appreciated insight.
The cibony I think we're on carriocou island
Yeah, nobody cares. Were you there? How do you know any of what you said is true? Where are these people now, eh?
As an American Southerner, the Appalachian was super easy to understand. I hear the north GA version of it daily in north metro Atlanta.
Im certainly accustomed to it but i imagine it’s not nearly as hard to understand as the previous ones even for others who are not used to it
I'd have to agree.
I think the Appalachian is probably the easiest in this list for a broad English speaking audience to understand aside from Singaporean English.
Although we think it would be easier to understand for a broad group, that may not be the case. I tend to slip into a deeper Appalachian/southern accent when speaking with another southerner. A coworker who'd recently relocated to Atlanta from LA overheard one such conversation and couldn't understand us. She was totally lost.
Probably due to it being the closest to the general American dialect, but my wife grew up in California and it took her a good couple years to be able to understand my grampa that grew up in rural north Georgia in the 40s
I love that you included the South African Cape Town English.
Proud Appalachian and voice actor here! My grandaddy used to say "I'm so hungry, my stomach thinks my throat's cut," all the time!! It's true you can find Shakespearean phrases spoken by older people. I wish it wasn't dying out! My favorite Appalachian thing is adding an "a" to the beginning of "ing" verbs, as in, "I was just a-sittin' on the porch." I also love the addition of the word "done" to past -tense verbs: "I'm not hungry. I done et." I've heard dialects in the UK use the word "et" as past tense for "eat." I've also heard folks in the UK use "I reckon" in the same way we do. One more good'un: we pronounce "wh" at the beginning of a word differently than a "w." "White is not "wite," but 'whah-ite." (We push air through by pronouncing the "h" sound. Love this video!
That throat-cutting expression of hunger is widely used in England still, despite what this video says, as is ‘reckon’. I still say ‘et’, which is the more traditional Brummie way of saying ‘ate’, though many Brummies now say it as ‘ite’ and most of the rest of England as ‘eight’ unfortunately.
Me too. I love my home. I never want to leave.
My mother, who was born and brought up in the US State of Maine, used the expression, my stomach thinks my throat’s been cut.”
We still say my belly thinks my throats been cut in the UK. In many parts of Yorkshire we say thee, thou etc. We say reckon etc as well. Yorkshire has many accents and dialects hundreds every five to ten miles they can change a little.
Im from newfoundland! The accent has sadly died down quite a bit, although many of the youngsters have maintained the vocabulary. Yu most often find the accent as strong as that in the remote communities, and in our older population.
Another piece of our interesting history is Newfoundland used to be an independent dominion of the UK, but due to economic crisis we became more dependant on the British until 1949 when we joined Canada.
Also, its pronounced more like like newfenland, then newFOUNDLand which is how a lot of mainlanders and foreigners pronounce it!
whale oil beef hooked
I learned to pronounce it Newfenlin here in Michigan on the border. The city on the Canadian side had a lot of workers coming in from around Canada to work in the refineries. Newfies had to adjust their accent a lot to communicate with the other workers, and of course the other workers had to learn a bit of Newfie as well. The border used to be more open back then. Now I'm cut off from family over there.
Rhyme it with understand...un-der-stand New-fen-land, or at least that's what I've been telling people for decades.
@@tomfitzpatrick8303 smart! I'll have to use that one
All the Newfonies I sailed with sure did keep their accents. Especially the Murphy girls. There were three women's last names was Murphy, they could drink any hard core alcoholics into an early grave. Good folks! I definitely would have like to marry a girl from the rock!
Coming from Canada (Toronto area) I had no problem identifying and understanding Trinidadian accents ☺️ We have a large Trini (and in general, Caribbean) community 😍
I lived in New York City for a time, so that one, Jamaica, and Guyana were really easy to identify. I was waiting for Patois and Tangier to show up in this list.
Aye, I think most of my Guyanese family are in or around Toronto these days
Bruh I was dying the whole time when that part came on. Being from Grenada and growing up in Toronto you hear it a lot. The only time I've gotta confused is when I seen an Asian person with a Caribbean accent. But that was years ago
Wow, the girl who says everybody have an accent... omg she beautiful 😊❤
I’m from Indonesia 🇮🇩 , so I’m very familiar with Singlish 🇸🇬 and their sister Manglish 🇲🇾. Influences don’t only come from Chinese dialects (Hokkien, Teochew, Cantonese, etc) but also from Malay and Indian dialects (mainly Tamil).
But as former British colonies, both Singapore and Malaysia have a high proficiency in English (especially the former) and they have no difficulty adjusting to your English level. It’s just that they prefer to speak Singlish and Manglish as they sound more natural and less pretentious 😁
You nailed it.
Can la 👍🏻
I Heard singlish isn’t even intelligible to standard English (uk, Canada, Merica, australia)
@@Worldaffairslover I don’t know, did you understand what they’re saying in the video?
Don’t forget about Taglish in the Philippines. I’m surprised that didn’t make the list.
Being Guyanese and Trini myself, we never thought what our communities were speaking wasn't English, we just thought it was just English with an accent- and most people around us found that to be the case too... At least, here in Toronto.
Put a bunch of us together and the accent gets stronger, but there's a difference between that, and the patois or Creole that is much more difficult to understand.
I'm also a born Trinidadian with a Guyanese grandfather raised in Toronto and thought the same, that Trinidadians just spoke English with an accent not that it was a dialect. Oddly enough some Trinidadian expressions my Newfoundland born wife also knows.
@@Siloguy Yes I found out that people form Newfoundland understand alot of Caribbean English because....both are using old english words and terms from the 1800s, because both were isolated...they also use all the salt fish and salt beef. If you swear the older people could of understand
@@zochbuppet448 love that!
It IS English that I'm familiar with. There are simply some language...nuances...that differ from "standard" English. Living with people from the West Indies for any amount of time will make you familiar with them. That goes from Jamaica to Trinidad...and any island in between. In this video, the Guyanese dialect was the most difficult for me to understand...but not COMPLETELY. Trini was easy.
@@SiloguyThere’s a really fine line I guess. I suppose it’s considered a dialect because of the presence of unique set phrases and loan words not from English
I'm a native Dutchman, and I got Trinidad, Cape Town, Appalachia, Jamaica, Newfoundland, and Glasgow on first listen. I have to mention I enjoy exploring English dialects and accents, but I'm most familiar with those of the UK and Ireland.
Cape Town has several accents, and that can even differ from suburb to suburb. We have such a variety of cultures that it doesn't really come as a surprise. The German English from Tamboerskloof may differ from the Fresnaye (pron Fre-naye) French English, or the Bo Kaap Cape Malay English. The Afrikaans semigrants have several accents, and the worst among them have the various Highveld ones. They tend to speak Afrikaans that borrows directly from the Pedi languages and even that can be very regional. They turn "wil jy nog kos hê" for "would you like more food?" into "soek jy nog kos?" which means "are you in search of food?". Most don't know they speak a Afrikaans mingled with Setswana Sepedi Sesotho et . 🇿🇦
Think you can get Bahamian Dialect? I have alot of Jamaican friends, Haitian, Trini and alot of them tell me they can't understand me.
@@X_Bless90 I don't know, I'm not sure I've ever heard it.
@@ilya.petersen hey man, ok. Have you heard of the Gulla Geechee people from South Carolina in America and I just found this out, we sound a little like they do but it's more of an island tone...I'm sure there is a good Bahamian creole vid on here. Real awesome that you can get the Trini, and New Foundland and more, the Glasgow had me at first listen lol but awesome man.
I'm a northern English man. My best mate was a witness in a murder trial in London. The court had to get a translator in because they couldn't understand him
no surprise there, the level of ignorence from that lot down south, knows few limits, greetings from Wales
@jukeseyable 😂
I'm from Zimbabwe and grew up in South Africa so I had no issue with the accent in the video, we're exposed to it a lot in our comedy and movies tbh. I'd love to see a longer breakdown off all these dialects! So so interesting.
I guessed Appalachian, Jamaican, South African, Scottish accents. I've never heard the Newfoundland accent nor the Singaporean English. I loved this video, and felt like I learned something. So fun!
As someone from Newfoundland there are many different accents on the island depends where they are from on the island.
Skooshin…..the act of jumping on the clampers.
What about English accents from England?
Every Canadian recognized the Newfies. They do tone it down when they talk to the rest of us but it's still pretty distinctive. BTW the emphasis is on LAND in both Newfoundland and Newfoundlander.
Non - Canadians tend to pronounce it and "-Lund", too, instead the typical pronunciation of "Land".
Actually there are a few acceptable pronunciations. Just never emphasize the second syllable (New FOUND Land). And never reduce the last vowel (Land not Lund). Mind you, no one will get upset if you get it wrong.
I knew it was Canadian, but I wasn't able to pinpoint it any closer than that. I don't know enough about Canada to be able to pick out any regional accents.
@@corinna007 How do Canadians pronounce the "found" part? Like "found," or like "fund"?
@@bigscarysteve It's found, but spoken very quickly so it sounds more like fnd. And the syllable emphasis is very much like the word understand. There are some slight variations, depending on where you're from on the island.
The O suffix in Liberian English is common in many other west African countries as well. Actually its the fastest way to tell someone is from Anglophone West Africa.
I was surprised the Australian indigenous dialect/s didn’t rate a mention. Their patois is very distinctive and most Aussies find it hard to understand unless you live amongst them
I was surprised too but then I realised it's easier to understand than most of these.
None of these seemed any more difficult than West Texas English “es geets” (let’s go out for lunch).
😂 I love that video of the public health announcement being translated by the aboriginal lady. I remember she says "sick one".
'pucken' oath :-)
A lot of multiple generation cattle station managers, especially in the Kimberley, have picked up the lilt of the patios and I can tell you now, unless you've grown up around it, it's almost impossible to understand. My mum lived in the Kimberley for most of her childhood, and can understand it well, I get so lost because it's so foreign to me having grown up in the metro area.
I worked in Singapore for a year. I really liked all the variations of English there, influenced by the styles of all the different cultures that were present, and the hyper-brevity was awesome. I worked with a lot of Filipinos there as well and they had a huge language mashup too.
Yeah, it's terrible... can barely understand what they're saying...
@@mingzmings88 Why? Singapore has developed as a country with a confident world identity, a nation that punches far, far above its weight. Singlish is a reflection of that. As an Australian I always think that about Singaporean.
@@adrianlean9628 suffer from Australian slang? Err what?
@@adrianlean9628❤
@@mingzmings88 my education after moving there was discussing a bed delivery to my new apartment. I tried to explain that we were waiting for the redecoration to be completed and didn't know how long that would take as the landlord was dealing with it. At the end of my spiel the Singaporean woman on the other end of the phoneline just said "Can, Cannot ?". Genius.
The first accent for Glaswegian was actually an Edinburgh accent, Trainspotting is set in Edinburgh and Ewen Bremner is a native. Scottish people can hear the difference, but they're both lowland Scots accents. There's a different rhythm to the Edinburgh speech which is demonstrated in this clip. The second two people in your example did sound like west coasters though.
I'm Canadian, and lived in Glasgow for a few years. Even I could tell that first one wasn't a Glaswegian accent. I also did some research and his claim of Italians being lied to/not wanting to go to Glasgow and wanting to go to America but being taken to Glasgow instead seems to be insubstantiated as well. Odd!
@@ashleyfunnell2654 yeh and the example he used “gonnae nae do that” is just wrong, it’s “gonnae no dae that”. For the Italian thing, there are lots of Italian Scots, like I think 1 or 2% of the population. I’ve never heard they thought they were going to America though, that sounds dubious,
came to the comments to say the same things, especially to point out the "gonna nae do that" which just sounds awful to say out loud. Second clip is the guy who did that 'here you' ned song and he's from motherwell afaik
Absolutely. Ewen Bremner’s accent is an Edinburgh accent. And it should be “Gonnae no dae that” rather than “Gonnae nae do that”.
Yes, I immediately noticed the same thing, it's such a strange mistake to make since Trainspotting is so famously set in Edinburgh. It is THE quintessential Edinburghian movie, both in good and bad, so I was surprised when it was linked to Glasgow. Some of the scenes were filmed in Glasgow, but that's just a technicality, the movie or the accents are not representative of Glasgow at all.
As a Canadian who has lived in the Caribbean area of Toronto, I was able to identify the dialects from Trinidad, Guyana, and Jamaica. Of course, I also recognized the Newfoundland accent.
I guess I got to brag: As a Finn who has never been to Canada or the Caribbean, I was able to identify the Trinidad, Jamaica and Newfoundland accents! Not the Guyana one though.
Jamaican Patois is a lot more English influenced than many realize. The bulk of its vocabulary is actually derived from English. There are some other words from African languages like Akan. But the majority of the vocabulary derives from English with slight changes. For example "Look pon dah gyal dey", is literally "look upon that girl there!" They've contracted the word "upon", shortening it to "pon". It is these kinds of little changes and the variation in pronunciation that makes some of the words hard to understand for English speakers unfamiliar with it. Another interesting feature with Jamaica Patois is that it is filled with many idioms - phrases or sayings that don't literally mean what the literal words would suggest. So even if you can recognize the English equivalents of the string of words spoken, that doesn't mean you understand the idea being communicated by the phrase. So it's not just about recognizing the words, you have learn the meaning of whole phrases.
From my experiences after living in Canada for many years, most people here assume that Jamaicans only speak English with a heavy accent and are completely unaware that Jamaicans speak Patois.
He said the dialect was mainly african influenced but if we break down each word in the Jamaican patois we'll see that its mainly English based. Information was a bit off.
It depends on the region & dialect of patois being spoken. The more you get to the more tourist area it becomes more intelligible with English but the more you go inland the more it diverts into it's own language especially when it comes to the maroons. They speak deep patois
@@kevinmorris4994it's region based. The more closer you are to tourist areas vs far deep inland is different. A Kingstonian will find it difficult to understand someone from saint Elizabeth. Or even worse a maroon speaking deep patois
@@kevinmorris4994 Jamaican Creole/Patois is actually a creole "language" and not a dialect.
Other than that, you are correct.
Glad you included Glaswegian. I went as a 16 year old, on my own, in 1971 and stayed a week or so. For the first couple of days l had no idea what people were saying but my ears adjusted. Love the city in the way people love rainy, grimy cities.
Not sure why he included a clip from Edinburgh based Trainspotting though! 😂😂😂
There was a Glaswegian guy that used to stay at my step mum's B&B when I was a kid. He used to sit in the living room watching Star Trek. Trying to understand a tough accent when they're speaking in sci-fi language is top tier difficulty. I've since worked in a lot of call centres so it just takes me a few sentences to tune in to someone's accent. Having security questions like name, date of birth and post code is super helpful to tune in to someone's speech patterns and match them up to letters, numbers and words.
I'm glad you included Liberian English, because there's a whole continuum of English-based pidgins and creoles stretching along the coast of West Africa from Cameroon (where I live) to Sierra Leone. Additionally, I'm from Canada so I picked up on the Newfie and Caribbean accents pretty quickly
What's important is to develop an "ear" to the way words are pronounced in different accents to help one selfs comprehension of what's being said ,
It takes training and perseverance
I understood most of them. Growing up in London is a blessing
I lived in Maine for 35 years and I made a good friend at my first job. There are a lot of French Canadians there and it’s not uncommon to hear French being spoken. A version that might not be well understood in Paris. My friend bought me to his family and I was introduced to his grandfather. I couldn’t understand a single word he said and asked my friend what language his grandfather was speaking. He replied English! After he started interpreting for me his grandfather turned out to be a real hoot!
@@curmudgeonaf don't forget the Acadians also speak Shiac
I'm in the Niagara region of southern Ontario, and besides small communities in Northern Ontario, very few speak, or even understand French. I sure don't. We can't understand them either, and we were forced to take French in school. And the dialect they speak is different from France after the British forced France out of North America cutting them off from native French speakers.
They aren’t French Canadians. They’re Acadians.
I'm 100% french Canadian and Acadian. My memere speaks Frenglish. 😆 I I have to pay close attention when she talks.
I speak with a subsidiary of long island/ NY English. Wish I would have learned more French than the occasional cuss words.
@@janp2800 it's Chiac from Shediac, and it's got its own grammar rules, so it's more of a creole than plain Frenglish which is just mixing the two together based on your own vocabulary.
I'm a North Texan with Southeast Asian ancestry, and I surprised myself. I got Trini, Appalachian, Singaporean, Jamaican, Newfoundlander, Guyanese, and Glaswegian right! I do watch a lot of international film, which certainly helped, and I've moved around a lot within the United States which exposed me to more cultures.
You got Glasgow right did you?
Lol he mistakingly used two examples from Edinburgh and one speaking gibberish for comedic effect. 😂😂
Good job, man!
This was fun to watch! When I was about 10 years old my cousins from Ireland came to visit us in Canada. I didn't understand a word they were saying when they arrived, but after a week or so of them speaking slowly for my benefit, I did learn to comprehend and appreciate my Irish heritage. As an adult I've worked with many people who've emigrated here from all over and love the challenge of interpreting there new found English.
I find that interesting as everyone in Nova Scotia apparently sounds straight up fucking Irish to me (English born, Irish grandfather)
I’m from Newfoundland. My brother and I were in a pub in Halifax. We met some Irish people. We had to show them our drivers licenses to prove we weren’t from Ireland. They were bewildered.
I’m from Appalachia and have and have mostly lost it from travel in the US. Where I live, my elders spoke like that gentleman. It’s wonderful to hear now that I’m getting to be their age. Music to my ears…
I think that makes Appalachian stand out from southern accents because southerners rarely lose their accent when they move out of the south. I grew up in NY but long since lost my NY accent and now have the rocky mountain region/rust belt non-accent (I call it a non-accent since it sounds about as close to English with no accent that I can think of).
Hi Olly. Ewan Bremner (Trainspotting clip) is from Edinburgh and his accent is East coast, not Glaswegian. He is speaking fast because he is speeding, not because he is a Weegie. The most difficult dialect in Scotland is probably Doric from one of the fishing villages along the Moray Firth coast, or some of the islands, like Orkney.
th-cam.com/video/le3cBRlWSE8/w-d-xo.html
I was able to pick out about half of it
@@tonyennis1787 My wife, who is from Fife, has little problem with Glaswegian but needs me to translate Doric. Aberdeen residents speak quite slowly, but it gets faster the further west you travel, especially in the fishing villages, like Buckie, Banff and Burghead (less fishing and lots of incomers have diluted this somewhat.)
Fraserburgh is by far the thickest Doric ever!!! I live in Doric-land
@@elaineb7065 i was at school in Forres, swam for the Bluefins, travelling round Grampian and my parents still live in Burghead. Most of the fishing villages and towns are indecipherable to anyone from outside the area.
I was once at a wedding in Cullen surrounded by fishermen and fisher's wife's. Nae fecking clue what they were sayin. I've live in Glasgow for 20 years now so know the accent pretty well. My biggest issue is getting taxi drivers to take me to Crow Road. They have no clue where I want to go! I just can't seen to shake the plumy English for that one!
My Grandpa spoke with a deep Appalachian accent. That was perfect like listening to one of his stories right there.
I'm from New Zealand, it would be good to cover some of the English dialects spoken in the Pacific, as well as the creole (pigin) spoken in Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu, and the Solomon Islands. Even in relatively young countries, such as Australia and New Zealand, there are variances in accents.
Pidgin English.
@@elzelinakriek-breet3092 yes, or Tok pisin, or Bislama.
I agree. As a kiwi, I'd love a side by side comparison with a strong kiwi and a strong Aussie accent. I find it frustrating that so many people can't tell the difference. It's not the mocking our accent that l mind, it's being mocked by someone using an Australian accent that they think is kiwi that gets to me.😊
@@nikiTricoteuse - I hate a kiwi accent, even worse is an Aussi accent! No need to have an accent, except when it is your second language!
@@elzelinakriek-breet3092 Yes and no. I taught English overseas for almost 20 years and was proudly "accentless". When l first came back, l used to have idiots asking me where l was from, then arguing with me that l couldn't possibly be a New Zealander when l told them. The stupidity and pointlessness of it all did my head in. I don't know where you're from but, when l first came back, Lyn of Tawa was all over the TV and l was HORRIFIED to think we sounded like THAT. Didn't realise for quite some time that it was a comedian playing a part. Been back 30 years and although I don't think l have a particularly strong kiwi accent, definitely NOT Lyn of Tawa level, l sometimes catch myself with a vowel sound that l'm not thrilled by. My point was more that l'd love someone to demonstrate the differences between the two. Although l don't really have a problem with accents, l DO find it offensive that many TV commercials are voiced by someone pretending to be a NZer and getting the accent wrong or that someone using it to make jokes about it can't even get it right. Our accent and manner of speaking here in Aotearoa, has been shaped by the forces that created us and l love that it tells our story. Also, without accents how could we tell the Canadians from the Yanks or the lrish from the Poms and, losing that glorious Welsh accent that sounds like they're singing even when they're not or the wonderful Scots lilt would be a crime against humanity!
South Africa has so many different accents. Each group has their own accent. Very diverse. The cape colored accent is very unique in itself
The main thing I've noticed with SA accents, is they all have the slight afrikaaner sound to them. And that is unique to SA I believe.
That's not very accurate as in reality it some people sound like they have a British accent coz some teachers are from there whilst anothers sound American coz of Saturday morning cartoons whilst others sound more like their home language so the real answer would be it depends@@mrvwbug4423
cant confuse the afrikaner accent
As someone who comes from the middle of the Appalachian mountain range, I always have people trying to correct me when I say the word "Appalachia", in this part of the US, it's not actually pronounced as "App-ah-lay-sha", we actually pronounce it as "App-ah-latch-a". I love our unique dialect! And this video was wonderful!
This East Tennessean applauds your comment.
@@bryanmcdermott4204 We have to stick together brother!
I find it So Condescending when people correct other people's pronunciations! Like Mine Is Correct & You Are Wrong! My sister moved to Louisiana & lived there many years & her accent, dialect & pronunciations changed to where I couldn't understand a lot of her speech. Didn't matter if I, her sister, could understand her the people that she lived near her could!😊
FWIW, I've always pronounced it 'App-ah-latch-a', and I'm English (my accent is the first one in the video).
I'm a proponent of making people pronounce names properly (its basic respect) so I applaud you for that
I'm French and know close to nothing about English and its accents. The best I could do was roughly locate a few of them like "sounds Scottish" "somewhere in Africa" 😂 Although the clues helped actually finding a few ones, so that was cool.
Interesting video as a whole, it's fun learning about how the language and its accents evolved in different parts of the world!
I'm a Canadian living in Jamaica for 12 years, and back and forth a lot for 10 years before that. It took me a while, probably too old when I started, but now understand Patois quite well. A correction, Jamaica wasn't first settled by Arawak, it was Taino.
The Taíno are an Arawak people
@@cthrugrl They spoke an Arawakan language. Here in Jamaica, they aren't regarded as having been Arawak.
,
@JCO2002 Taino are a subgroup of Arawak. Saying Taino aren't Arawak is like saying a banana isn't a fruit because it's a banana and not a fruit.
@@Kaneki6386 aye
I'm Australian and we say "My belly thinks my throat's cut" over here, too. I recognised four of the accents straight off - Newfoundland, Appalachian, Jamaican and Glaswegian and had a good idea of the other Caribbean accents as coming from that area although I couldn't pin them down. I found this a very interesting video and you've won another subscriber here!
Aussie here too, found Appalachian and Glaswegian accents understandable.
Texan and guessed all the same ones. I could get Jamaican, Appalachian, and Glaswegian by sound, but could only guess Newfoundland after he gave the hints about the history of settlement.
Hi-I've never heard the "My belly thinks my throat's cut" idiom before. Do you know why people say this?
@@RS54321 Hungry 😂
@@uppercut147
American, grew up in the US midwest.
Although I didn't grow up in the US south my cousins grew up in Kentucky and I heard that a LOT.. so Appalachian was an easy one to identify.
Jamaican I've known since I was a kid. Glaswegian also (part of my family is scottish)
And my bro is married to a Newfie.. So those were fairly obvious..
The rest? As mystified as could be.
Dialect 2 🇹🇹 I am half Grenadian the accent is so similar. Just over the sea. The entire Caribbean has a very similar history. Every Island has a form of rice and peas.
Tru dat 🇯🇲
There are some Cajuns down in Louziane, not just the French words. Many influences all spiced up! They got kicked out of Canada and kinda got stuck in them swamps. But when they speak 'English'...it's like Gumbo.
So interesting!
Yes! Cajun is fun to listen to.
@@rutht2023 Well... Cajuns in general are fun; food, music, dance, fiddles, crawdads, especially when you add some hot sauce!
I'm from Alberta up in Canada, and my ancestors arrived in Acadia in 1605. Instead of heading south once kicked out, they went further west. What's crazy for me to think about is that I almost certainly share ancestry with some Cajuns.
@@WretchedRedoran Acadia = 'Acadie' in French - Acadiens - 'Cadiens' - 'Cajuns'. You DO share DNA with the swampers, shrimpers & fiddle-players down on the bayou. Laissez les bons temps roulez!
So glad we can now stream so many TV shows from the UK. A couple of times I have found one that it's hard for me to understand the dialect and accent. Fascinating how many versions of the English language exist. I enjoy learning a bit about the different accents and the history behind them.
I recognized the Appalachian accent immediately and understood everything. I moved to rural western NC as a kid/teenager. I had a really hard time understanding everyone at first!
I’m from central FL. I hear most of the north and south American accents everyday. The hardest accent here for me to understand is Cajun. It’s especially difficult if it’s an older Cajun person because they mix a little French in there by nature. When I’m in Europe the hardest accent to understand is Welsh. Out of the hundreds of Welsh I’ve spoken to, I’ve probably understood a handful of words.
I moved to central Florida in 2014 from New York state, I find it so interesting how many different accents I hear even from people born and raised here. One family can sound Southern and the people in the next house sound like me.
I was from Ohio, left at 18 fir the military, dealt with Germans, and Americans from all over. I left the military and came south (I'm now near the Florida-Georgia Boarder..) and my "Accent" went from plain to a mix mash.
@@brandonm8249 Florida is the real melting pot. I grew up in Miami and Orlando in the 70s and 80s and all my friends were either immigrants from Latin America or Northern transplants escaping the snow. And then there's my relatives, who identify with the Deep South and Dixie. I tell people that growing up here was like being in a foreign exchange program without ever leaving home.
I grew up in Polk County 50 years ago, and the accent was either Deep South or mainly Michigan with a little Upstate NY and Ohio. Now, of course, it'a much more diverse.
I grew up in southern Louisiana and I was hoping he would include that area.
I’m from central NY, at the foothills of the adirondacks, and my father was from Saratoga. The Appalachia accent was no struggle. That’s how he sounds and some of my teachers back in school too. The phrases and pronunciation were the same. 😃
I should note that my husband, who is Romanian and learnt English in NYC as a teen, still complains and struggles with comprehending my father’s speech sometimes.
There is a similar one to Tangier found in the Cheseapeke bay on Smith island in MD just north of Tangier...spoken just by a couple of hundred of people. I have been there on a Smith and couldn't understand some of the elders, and I'm from NY!
I also got Guianese, Trinidadian, Jamaican, Singaporean, and the Newfies because I worked in tourism in NYC for 25 years. I have a Brooklyn accent that almost qualifies as a dialect. There is no R on Noo Yalk/ Noo yauk. When I was growing up in Brooklyn, people pronounced Oil, Earl, and Toilet Ter-let. And a battery was a Bat-Tree. They say the accent comes from the original Dutch settlers In New Amsterdam.
*Guyanese*
@@SonWsp Heh, I'm from Manhattan so my accent is short Os and colored Rs. "The KAH-fee is in the AH-rinj AH-fis down the LAHNG KAH-rid-orr."
fun
In our traditional Newfoundland dialect, oil is pronounced, “iol.”
Toilet is pronounced as, “tylit.”
Egg is pronounced, “aagg, or “haaggs.” The “L” sound within a word is flattened, last letter is a word may be dropped. Cold was be pronounced, “coo” rhymes with, “o.” We exaggerate or drop h. We inhale with a yes. Lots more.
I’m from Newfoundland. Our accent is a melange of West Country and Waterford/Wexford Irish. It is a fast vernacular whose calling card is maintaining 3 conversations at the same time at a house party. Peppered with arcane and archaic words, it’s a dialect like no other.
Got in with a newfie gang in my university days and since. Great people and the kitchen parties are certainly a thing! As a Canadian I can just barely keep up - a lot to like about the dialect.
@@vls179 I have friends who can talk fast enough to call a dog race. Eminem might have been the first white rapper, but there’s guys in St. John’s who can tell you a story at twice his speed.
I grew up in SE Kentucky and I realized that Newfoundland English is similar to my family’s accent. So I understood a lot of what he said.
@@mrwyatt6006 The Appalachian accent from north Georgia to the border of Tennessee and North Carolina has some similarities to Newfoundland English. The original population of Newfoundland was about 40 000 people. These people were pretty much hermetically sealed for 350 years. The dialect was frozen in time until Newfoundland became a Canadian province in 1949.
I had a friend from Nigeria. My hubby was raised in rural Arkansas. We all went to visit hubby's family and friends in rural Arkansas. We needed a translator. I understood my friend from Nigeria, so I would tell hubby what she said. He would tell his friends, again in English, what she said. They would reply and again, he would say what they said, I would have to tell my friend from Nigeria. It's a real thing to have to translate dialects.
Separated by a common language!
Funny thing about people using thee and thine, here in my lart of West Virginia, we say yourn, which I didn't realize wasn't standard American English until I got "corrected" by a college professor in English 102. It is the old form of it, mine, thine, yourn.
Impressive research. Hands down one of the best I've come across in a long time. As a South African I attest, as a country we have about 9 different accents ,but the Cape coloured community is on another level.
I didn’t know you guys had 9 dialects. I’m a Californian who had to do to transcribing for a South African and it was very difficult 😅 but after that I’m usually able to understand pretty well…
as a fellow south african i am not so sure about having 9 different accents. why 9? i have lived here for all of my life (close to 50 years) and i would say there are a whole lot more than 9. but ja, ek stem, die kaapse kleurlinge praat 'n ingils wat net onse mense kan verstaan :)
And they have the most amazing funny way of telling the even the most tragic of stories, so much so that you need to stifle your laugh to not seem insensitive.
@@MsDrusilla666 yes, there is a lot more than 9, especially if you would get indepth, but i was merely highlighting a variety of accents amongst ourselves. If we were put in a room as strangers we would be able to pick up where one if from purely on the accent.
@@inlonging We do have 11 official languages. With each language and culture we have unique influences and ways to express ourselves. I once had a visitor from Brooklyn , I think the first phrase that confused him was telling him my ETA "I will arrive there now, now. Yes twice, that's when you know it's pretty close.
When I first moved from one part of South Africa to the Cape, I straggled a lot to understand both their English and Afrkaans, and had to learn to understand it for months before I could understand enough to work with them.
But I absolutely love it, it's like their accent has a personality😂
Some accents in South Africa can be rather blunt. In the Western Cape, some have Deutsch ("German") influences, others French, and not as Nederlands ("Dutch") as one would expect. Sadly, despite RP taught in schools, not even the Anglophones can speak English properly, neither can they pronunciate. They can't even pronounce Brackenfell, let alone Thibault (tee-boo) or Llandudno.
@@unwoke1652Speaking English “properly” is for losers! 😌😌🇿🇦🇿🇦 (light hearted)
@@unwoke1652 I'm a born and Bred Capetonian and I know the correct pronouciations of all the English relevant to Cape Town. I can slip into the Cape Flats way of speaking without any problems and can give you a nice Namaqualand accent as well. Oh by the way it is not correct to use the term pronunciate, I double-checked, you would either use pronounce or pronunciation. English can be bothersome sometimes, haha
I was born in Europe and live there now, but went to school in Cape Town and I am proud that I understood every word of the Cape Flats accent! Reminds me of my childhood.
I really enjoyed this. Thank you. I got 2,3,4,6 & 7. As a Canadian I am lucky to have been exposed to many of these beautiful dialects.
I thought for sure you would mention the Outter Banks of North Carolina. Their accent is the closest English to 1500's English, and is very beautiful to hear. It is even "more English" than Tangier Island.
Same here!
Fun! I am from the western USA. I grew up speaking standard English. I knew the Appalachian English instantly. Here it is referred to as 'southern' or 'hillbilly' English. I understood everything that was said.
I didn't know about NewFoundland English but I did understand almost everything in the video clip.
The other English video clips I had to listen carefully to understand about half of the words. :)
I'm also from the western USA, but having lived elsewhere (namely NYC), I've exposure to a lot of other dialects. Like, I recognized all the Caribbean accents even if I only caught a word or two in the clips. Newfie isn't so bad, though the clips increased my respect for a friend who lived there for a while. I find it fascinating, though, that I can fairly easily understand both the Appalachian and Glaswegian accents/dialects. Even more so since I've been to Glasgow and there was at least one person whom I understood ONE word that she said and nothing more, but that guy in the clip I didn't have too much trouble with.
@@thealexfiles303 I never considered them different dialects. Thanks for sharing.
@@rutht2023 They are fine lines between accents, dialects, and languages, and then it would depend which ones you're talking about and who's defining them!
I'm from the English Midlands, and I understood every word too.
I was not expecting to see Trinidad on this list. I grew up with this and the Jamaican accent and I never fully appreciated that most people can't understand what is being said. I got every Carib accent. The Liberian accent sounds like the Belter accent in The Expanse.
I had a teacher from Trinidad, none of us could understand him. We live in Canada
I've never heard the Trinidadian accent before, but it was one of the few on this list that I could understand.
@@bigscarysteve that might be possible because in the school system they might have stressed a more English accent. I'm Trinidadian by birth but know some Trinis that sounds as if they were raised in England.
I love hearing all people and their tones, nuances. I feel bad when I don't understand and I always try to. It's important to be able to ask questions to grow knowledge instead of judgement of differences. Thank you for the video 👌🏼
As someone who lives in a multicultural city in Canada (with family in Newfoundland), and is ethnically Guyanese with family who grew up in the UK, I got all of these right except the last two! Loved seeing my ancestors’ little Caribbean country on this list :)
Okay, I am impressed!
I knew the second to last one, only because a few of my friends grew up in watermen families, in that part of the state.
I've met a few people from New(finlin) and they don't sound at all like the 1st example, but the second example sounded more like them.
Love Newfoundland, Canada way of talking.
Yeah, it sounds like you're nearly all of English colonialism wrapped up in one person. I'm jealous.
@@toni2065 haha, thanks! Didn’t realize before this how many accents I’ve been exposed to 😂
I lived in the Caribbean for years. Trinidadian sounds like most West Indian "dialects" that you hear ALL OVER the Caribbean. I'm sure there are differences but I understood them perfectly well, even though I never lived in Trinidad.
Honey one grandmother is Jamaican the other is Trinidadian and they sound nothing alike. I’ve spent a year in Trinidad and it sounds nothing like the other islands except maybe Guyana. Not all Caribbean islands are the same just because you can understand.
I'm Trinidadian-American and I sometimes confuse Guyanese people with us. Jamaicans sound completely different but I understand them for the most part.
Trinidadian sounds very similar to Gullah-Geechee
Singlish isn't just influenced by dialects of Chinese. On top of the dialects you mentioned, there's also Malay and Tamil influence. Because like you said, Singapore is a multicultural country, so while the majority of Singapore is ethnically Chinese, they aren't the only ones there. For example, lah comes from Malay, and is simply used to add emphasis after an expression or a statement. Shiok also comes from Malay and it's used to describe something delicious or simply good like "This burger is so juicy, so shiok!” Dey comes from Tamil, and this is just their way of saying hey! Goondu is another one from Tamil, and...let's just say if a Singaporean called you this, it's not a compliment.
There is more Hokkien and Malay influence in Singlish because of Singapore being a historically important fishing and trading port. Hokkiens first made it to Malacca in the 15th century, and were known to have established trading networks in the region. As Singapore grew to become a center of trade and commerce, many Hokkiens moved from Malacca to Singapore in the 1820s to seize the business opportunities. The indigenous of Singapore are the Orang (Orang is Malay for people) Laut and was once an outpost of the Srivijaya Empire, an empire formerly based in Sumatra. And the English part, well, they like to keep it short and sweet and I don't blame them. Like "Oh you don't have to do that. I'll do it in a while" becomes "No need. Later I do".
Talk less, say more. The world could take a lesson.
Yeah it was a big omission not to mention the non-Chinese languages that influence Singlish! Sometimes just ordering a kopi (coffee) in Singapore uses words from 3 different languages!
Can? Can.
Why say many word when few word do trick?
One of the reasons Singlish is so efficient is because in the early years, the natives aren't aren't educated in English. So when they learn bits and pieces of English, they will combine some English with native languages or dialects. And to minimize grammatical errors, they will cut the words used in an English sentence structure to the minimum, mirroring what they may speak in a native languages or dialect which can be typically much shorter and or a specific word or phrase understood by the locals.
When I was in school back in the 50s and 60s, Guyana was British Guiana (ghee-AH-nuh), and its neighbor, Suriname was Dutch ghee-AH-nuh.
Proud Trini here! So good to see a brief bit of our history being featured. Blessings!
I live very close to Appalachia and used to live in Appalachia. The accents range from very thick and difficult to understand, to much more subtle with only a noticeable accent to those living outside of Appalachia. There are also different dialect throughout the Appalachian region because it covers such a large area.
I think every accent probably has degrees of depth compared to the accents around their region. I think middle-class city dwellers might have more neutral accents (meaning more common and understandable to others). In the US South, I've noticed a loose distinction along political party lines. (Consider George W. Bush's accent compared to Al Gore's.) The more Republican a person wants to seem, the deeper their particular southern accent seems to be. And for some reason, at least in my experience, a disproportionate number of Evangelical Christian pastors seem to have strong southern accents.
I'm a Minnesotan who lived in Tennessee for a couple years, and I knew many people who had very little accent at all (to my ear - of course we all have an accent), and I knew many people who seemed to take pride in mangling Standard American English as far beyond recognition as they could. My boss at a printing shop (the owner) once asked me "How much you like [on] your job?" (I didn't hear "on", but I trust it was there.) I said I liked it just fine. I was new, and I was doing ok there, but the language differences were kinda worrying. The boss got irritated. He thought I was mocking him. I was just confused. He was asking how much work was remaining (lacking) on the job (customer order) that I was working on. (He was a wealthy, hardcore Republican.) I had to laugh when a coworker there asked me (the only other person in the room), "Is this yall's screwdriver?" But in office work I never met anyone with such thick accents. Everybody had a bit of an accent, but most seemed quite neutral to me. I think the depth of the accent is a matter of identity, with thicker accents identifying primarily with their local in-group, and more neutral accents more commonly identifying with a broader worldview.
I know these comments might seem politically charged, but that's how I see it. It was just like that in Virginia too.
I have worked all over the world. I have a Scottish accent (but speak “Scottish-accented-English”, not Scots) and have never had any difficulty being understood. In my experience many non native English speakers can’t recognise anything but major accent differences in native English speakers and will struggle to tell Australian from English, Scottish from Irish etc. (and why would they?) . Similarly I’ve rarely had any difficulty understanding colleagues’ or clients’ English through their accents. With just one exception - a client in West Africa had a factory manager in Nigeria whose accent I really struggled with. I admitted this to the regional training manager (a Ghanaian) who said it was OK because “not even other Nigerians understand him when he gets excited about a topic - just tell him to slow down.”
I have a fairly strong Glaswegian accent and when I lived in Europe for a year when I was a student, and when we spoke English with each other I felt quite isolated at first because many people found it difficult to understand me. I lived with people from all over the world and realised very quickly that I'd have to code switch to make myself more understandable and help me bond with the others. Many of them had never really been exposed to Scottish accents before, and I am also a very fast speaker especially when i'm anxious, stressed or drunk which I was about 90% of the time. What was interesting is another girl who lived in our student accommodation was from Edinburgh and she was fully intelligible to them from the get go. But the more people spoke to me the more they got used to it which I think is best way to understand an accent or dialect you're unfamiliar with.
@@minimarsbars “Code-switching” is something everyone has to do to some extent. One of the pieces of advice we used to give British, American (and Australian, Indian etc) business people was not to use the sports metaphors that are so common in anglophone “management speak” but which might refer to sports that no one else plays and they might not understand, or are very localised and colloquial. So if you are facing a difficult situation it isn’t a sticky wicket, so don’t step up to the plate, rise to the challenge - that way you’ll achieve your goals, not the back of the net.
I'm native Dutch speaking and I know the Trinidadian, Jamaican, Guyanese, Scottish, South African and Apalachian accent...
A lot of English-only speakers should probably learn another language and stop assuming the abilities of others who do speak several languages. Dead giveaway accents for most non-native English speakers are US English, "English" (UK) English, Scottish English, Irish English, Jamaican English and Australian English. Non-English speaking countries import A LOT OF English media (songs, tv shows, movies, etc), not to mention the internet, so there's a lot of exposure.
@@jakke1975 Three things. Firstly, I said “many” not “all” non native speakers - I am certain there are quite a few who can and I’d be even less surprised if many of that minority were native Dutch speakers given the legendary familiarity with the English language of so many. Secondly, your ability to distinguish among Trinidadian, Guyanese and Jamaican accents is remarkable - “most” native English speakers couldn’t do that though I am sure those who live in the Caribbean could (perhaps you have lived in NL Antilles?) - I shared a flat with a Jamaican 50 years ago and could still reliably pick that out from others but I doubt I could distinguish say Antigua from Barbados. Thirdly, I was describing my own experience - not inventing a universal rule. I lived in the Middle East and some fluent English speakers knew that my accent was not “English” or “American” (recognising that there are of course many of each) but it was rare for anyone to recognise its origin (a Kuwaiti once startled me by immediately recognising it as not just Scottish but West Coast - but he had gone to Glasgow university and married a girl from Perth!). I worked a lot throughout Africa, where many people speak English at native-speaker/bilingual level, and did encounter some people who recognised it, but I was just as often asked if I was Irish - but that never surprises me as my particular Scottish accent isn’t too far removed from the accent of some parts of Northern Ireland (I’ve been mistaken for that in England, never mind Africa).
By the way, I have also worked throughout Europe and lived in France for a while and I know that there are many people who can recognise a Scottish accent, particularly in NL and Scandinavian countries with high familiarity with English, for the reasons you describe - maybe rather less so in “dubbing countries” however? French English-speakers could often also tell my accent wasn’t English or American but recognising it specifically as Scottish was unusual.
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That’s so true. I’m a Portuguese speaker and I’ve been in the UK for almost a decade now. I still struggle to tell an Englishman from an Australian. I do notice something is off but I can’t tell what hahaha
I understood all of them for the most part once I tuned my ear into each dialect. Some easier than others but all were intellegable. Being Scottish I think helps. We seem to understand everyone, even if it feels like a one way street lot of the time.
I live in Vancouver Canada. I only got the Newfoundland accent. My wife is from Cape Breton - northern Nova Scotia. Their accents can be challenging too.
Aiseh. So happy to see my native Singlish represented sia! 🇸🇬
And love to see many of the other fellow creole languages around the world get so much representation here as well. So many narrow-minded people imagine the Anglosphere to only be "Standard UK, USA, and Australian English" and ignore the diversity of the English language and its many native forms and speakers around the world.
Tbh was shocked to see it featured too 😆
Singlish is absolutely rubbish, it’s pretty much only the proletariats and nouveau riche who speak it. People who spoke English in the 50s and earlier all spoke it properly.
Aside from English, people in Singapore can’t speak proper mandarin either. What an embarrassing bunch of people.
As a native Brit I think dialects are great and something to celebrate. Seems to me the ones who object the most learned English as a second language.
@@AbAb-th5qe Singapore isn't a dialect its a pidgin. A dialect is a natural variation of English over time. A pidgin is when non-native English speakers attempt to teach English to their own people, which is what happened in Singapore. Its just bad English that perpetuates because there were no native speakers around to correct them.
@@haydengalloway5177 i always thought pidgin was a combo of the local language with English, and pretty basic. I always associate it with PNG
In Newfoundland, we still use old Irish words such as "Sleeveen." Many parts of Newfoundland have their own distinct dialect. I was at a foot all game in Alberta a month ago, and a man sitting next to me asked, "Are you from town?" Meaning are you from St. Johns? He was from another area of Newfoundland. He could tell I was from St. Johns by my accent.
We still use 'sleeveen' in Ireland. It's funny, I was at an airport in south America a few years back and overheard a lad on a phone with a bizarre Irish-sounding accent. I got chatting to him out of curiosity and yes, he was from Newfoundland. It was fascinating to listen to him speaking. 😊
@musashidanmcgrath That's a great story, I can imagine your surprise. I was transferred to Scotland in 1998, and they all thought I was Irish. They were quite surprised to learn I was actually Canadian. My hometown was settled by O'Brien, Madden, Doyle, Hannaford, Kielly, Hearn, and McGrath, among others.
Its not hard to tell a townie. You do speak different from the rest of the island. My family is from the western part of the island and I can hear a townie a mile away.
@samurphy Yes, we speak a different dialect compared to the rest of Newfoundland. What's surprising is that I left Newfoundland in 1998 and didn't return until 2019. Then I moved to Edmonton in 2023, but he could still hear that Townie accent.
I was visiting my sister in Texas and asked for something in the store one day and the clerk asked if I was from Ireland….when I said Nfld. he said he never heard of it…
@@jaydawg4632
My dad raised 'Appalachia/Ozarks"....first in family to go to college, worked hard to loose accent and vocabulary. I worked to reappropriate the language of my grandparents! I love the comfortable, homey sound-and colorful vocabulary!
While in the Army I attended a technical briefing in West Germany conducted by a Scottish officer. His accent was so thick, I couldn't understand a thing he said. I politely interrupted him and asked him if he spoke German, he said yes. I then asked him to continue in German so I might understand him. The rest of the presentation was in German, he was brilliant!
I remember living in England and deciding to stay south for university. Now in NI and it took a few months to fully understand what some people were saying, but it's been great.
I'm Scottish and I sometimes I don't understand what Scottish people are saying.
I completely understood Appalachian English.
Probably because, despite being raised in Florida, my mom’s side of the family was from Kentucky.
Particularly from the more farm areas.
So I definitely heard a lot of it growing up from my mom, not to mention from the many visits to Kentucky I made as a kid.
I don’t know if there were a lot of Canadians where I lived or what, but I was also able to pretty much perfectly understand Newfoundland English.
From Florida too. The common working class accent is very similar.
I grew up in Georgia and also understood the Appalachian speakers just fine. That whole area (South Carolina, Georgia, and north Florida) was largely settled by Scots-Irish immigrants as well. Our accents aren't exactly the same, but I think the influence of those common roots is still pretty strong.
@@redessa01 I lived mostly about 2 hours south of Orlando on the west cost.
So I guess it’s reach went further south than I thought.
I sat here trying to figure out why I understood Appalachian English when I'm from the Midwest and only lived down south for 7 years of my life
Blends into the southern (country?) accent a bit. (More than one southern accent, btw.) Time in military and some cousins living in rural areas of the country, so understood the example here just fine.
I live in Cornwall, U.K. … I think ppl here would be blown away knowing a little island in Chesapeake Bay sound just like the Cornish!
Yeah same here I heard it and thought it was my people but it’s in America!
IMHO, ths british accent is the best! Woddah, Harry Pottah, Milky Wái...
Terrific!
Congrats to every country, every language, every accent.
Appalachian was the only one where I could understand what was being said. American here, grew up in part of the Appalachian mountain range, but I'm not culturally "Appalachian" so my own accent is pretty standard.
Interesting how English (and other languages) can admit of so many varieties all over the world.
My family has lived in Appalachia for 250 years. My ancestors were from Germany and England, but culturally, my family is 100% Scots-Irish Appalachian.
I got more out of Jamaican than Appalachian. They are sorta common in new York city. The other 8 accents are a blur.
The Appalachian accent was the only one I truly for sure knew! I was born and raised in and around the Monroe, Louisiana area so I KNOW most southern accents! :) Certain expressions my maternal grandmother used, I just didn't understand why she used them. Reading novels set in 18th century and before England made me realize where some came from! Someone would ask how she was and she'd say tolerable. My sister and I would ask her if she meant did she barely tolerate how she felt?
There were a lot of things similar that she said that finally made sense when reading those novels! I've never tried to get rid of my southern accent BUT I vividly remember my 5th grade teacher trying to make us pronounce certain words correctly! Like it is FIRE, not far, WINDOW, not winder, etc!
Nacogdoches, TX, and I wanted to hear some coonass, or Houston hood rat.
I love the Trini accent. Years ago I worked with an Indo-Trinidadian and his accent was still strong, having lived in the UK 15+ years, but so nice to listen too.
Unless he was having a rant there was rarely a time he couldn’t be understood.
I’m from Northern Ireland and got all these except Tangier. Appalachian accents are very very familiar to my ear, Glaswegian is heard around here quite a bit.
I got most of them from the first clip, didn't know about three of them. I'm an unusual case though... My Dad was Scots/Irish and a language professor, my Mum is Scandinavian and fluent in 4 languages. I grew up in a commune with people from all over the world, so when I was learning to talk I had to tune my ear, and learn to speak clearly. I'm from Yorkshire, and often get accused of sounding "posh", because I enunciate clearly. Britain is a multicultural nation, and learning the way I did as a young child has been very beneficial over the years of me working in customer facing roles.
Love this. Reminds me of the time I took a 23 hour flight from Sydney to London seated next to very talkative 8 year old girl from Ulster with an accent unlike anything I’d ever heard. Couldn’t understand a word she said so spent most of the flight smiling politely wishing she’d go to sleep.
I loved watching this video which shows the varieties of English accents spread around the world . How beautiful it is to see the stunning linguistic diversity amongst the people around the world just as if the language is alive and grows .
I traveled in the Navy. I loved talking to the locals no matter how challenging it was! A night in a Dublin pub had me laughing so hard i don't know how I didn't piss my pants! They were great.
I nailed these. Step father grew up in Sunderland, probably one of the ones most people can't understand, it prepared me for the worst. Recognized most of these accents and generally can understand them. Picked out Newfie quick, they have some crazy slang. I've spent a lot of time around Guyanese, Trini, Jamaicans. Uncle was Scottish too. Libeerian was probably the toughest for me
I have a friend from the Caribbean. He spoke his dialect with his family and speak normally with people. He still spoke English but it was hard to follow but in a instant he could speak English I understood . And their culture is so cool