Racing Turtles

The World of Arabic Dialects.

Made in RAWgraphs and Figma, Data >>

by SignificanceFar4092

The Article for those who don't want to hunt it down. Hattip to @brunettewho for the link in the comments.

Oh this! 

I learned to speak Chinese with a Dongbei accent because I used to live not far from the OP (which definitely gets me weird looks as a white lady originally from Kansas.) Native Mandarin speakers are often SO confused by my accent. But yes...Taiwanese speakers do sound really melodic and beautiful. And I sound like I’m angry shouting all the time. 

In Germany and Austria, the Swiss are well-known for speaking Scweizerdeutsch. For reasons unknown, they use diminutive forms of a ton of nouns. The result is that Swiss people speaking German sound like if you found a city in Appalachia where it was 100% normal to baby-talk to everyone, all the time.

On the flip side, no one can understand a goddamn thing coming out of a Viennese person's mouth.

The dialect variance within the German language is insane at times

This is not exactly a new thing tho - here have a video from 1973 about it:

Beautiful addition, thank you so much!!

cc: @petermorwood

sorry I saw a post about AAVE and got fired up and had to make this

+H4+5 4N 3XC3113N+ QU35+10N

I’m going to have to insist that if you’re going to mock me in 1337, @7 |_3^57 |_|53 7|-|3 |216#7 |)14|_3(7. =P

For any of you who are writing ‘across the pond’-here is a little guide I put together of some common differences between British and American English!

‘pop’ is pretty heinous but like, I’ll accept it, yknow? it’s just the other half of ‘soda-pop,’ like how ‘cab’ and ‘taxi’ are the two halves of ‘taxicab.’ it’s fine. it’s chill.

but coke? that’s a fucking brand name! of a specific drink with a specific flavor! that shits RUDE, it’s CONFUSING, it’s DOWNRIGHT NONSENSICAL! fuckin misusing the art of language to confound your fellow man! the gall! learn some fucking respect

No one tell OP that the Scottish call it Juice

In Ireland, we call them “Minerals”.

pop discourse in the strilonde household

When English isn’t taught correctly…

Check this bellend who doesnae ken that Scots, and indeed all “improper” dialects an accents ay English, arenae incompatible wi intelligence oar eloquence ay expression

(I mean, the original post insnae exactly the most poetic ay thoughts, but neither’s fuckin off tae bed wioot gien yer mate a cover, whit the fuck’s wrang wi you, were you raised in a fuckin shed)

Scottish Tumblr ™ came through

things i say that confuse and worry my coworkers:

at what point in history do you think americans stopped having british accents

Actually, Americans still have the original British accent. We kept it over time and Britain didn’t. What we currently coin as a British accent developed in England during the 19th century among the upper class as a symbol of status. Historians often claim that Shakespeare sounds better in an American accent.

whAT THE FUCK

I’m too tired for this

Always add in the video that according to linguists, Native southern drawl is a slowed down British.

T’ be or not t’be, y’all.

Fun fact: Same thing happened with the French accent. French Canadians still have the original French accent from the 15th century.

Êt’e ou n’pô zêt’e, vous z’auts.

I’ve been trying to find this post for months. I’m freakishly obsessed with this and want the truth of what early colonists sounded like.

@zenosanalytic what do your snake eyes know

It’s both right and wrong; though not really wrong enough that it ever bugged me(though I’m not a linguist so maybe I just don’t care enough about this). Here’s a Good Summary of the issue from MentalFloss, though even that’s got some issues with it.

To give my own summary-take on it, there really wasn’t any attempt to standardize English, because it was generally considered “low class”, until around the later half of the 100 Years War; and, really, the first serious, top-down, government-backed attempts at promoting a standardized English were under the Tudors(particularly Elizabeth), who invested a lot in a “Nationalizing” campaign to define England against and out of France(after the final loss of the Plantagenet lands in France and claim to the French throne and in the wake of the chaos of the War of the Roses), foster a sense of national English identity, and sever the old French connections of their Plantagenet and Norman roots, which were once markers of status for English nobility and gentry. As a result of this neglect(and just the normal way language devs when left to its own devices), there were hundreds of different English accents, not to mention English-influenced Gaelic accents and Gaelicized English accents(scots english, for instance) running around during the American colonial period, and these all acted as the base material the USian and Canadian accents grew out of. And this rich milieu of accents and dialects remained until much later; it first started to retreat in a small way during the late 1800s with elocution books and classes teaching “Recieved Pronunciation”(and standardized spelling, which undercut plenty of dialects) in England, but at a much more accelerated pace after the invention of mass-media in the early 1900s, when radio(and later television) first created the ability for geographically distant audiences to all hear(and emulate) the same voices.

So to talk of “A English Accent” pre-colonization, or even pre-radio really, is kind of anachronistic. There were many of them, and most of them Sounded Like THIS(Here’s Another Good One). That’s a modern reconstruction of what scholars believe Elizabethan English sounded like, and it’s called “OP”, or “Original Pronunciation”. Now, listening to that, I’m sure plenty of folks can hear where the argument that USian is closer to the “original” English accent comes from(and are probably laughing about how the theatrical pirate accent of modern Hollywood is probably the closest modern English accent to the “original”, pre-colonial, 15-1600s one :p). That has a much more gaelic twang to it -like USian English where Scots-, Irish-, Cornish-, and Welsh-English and accents all had a huge influence on speech- and it keeps its ‘R’ sounds like USian does; it is “rhotic”. Also some of the vowels, particularly the ‘O’s, sound more USian than English. But at the same time, there are plenty of elements recognizable in modern “Received Pronunciation” English too; like the broad ‘A’s and ‘E’s, which are typically shortened in USian accents today. And then there are qualities to it shared by both modern accents, like how ‘of” and “-ing” get shortened out of existence in both colloquial modern USian and colloquial British Accents, whether English or from the Gaelic regions.

So, like most things, It’s Complicated, and it’d probably be more accurate to say both accents are descended from the “original” and close to it in their own ways and far from it in their own ways. The argument about Southern USian English being a slowed down version of “original” posh English is obviously contradictory though, and doesn’t fit the timeline since RP was a later development. But, the claim about USian being “closer” is understandable, in spite of both modern USian- and England-English being generally “clearer” sounding accents than “original”. And another thing to remember, as that MentalFloss article points out, is that the influence of England-English on US-English didn’t end with the revolution; once RP was established, it jumped the Atlantic and influenced upper-class accents both in the South(which is where the real similarity comes from) and in the financial/maritime cities North AND South. But, I like this post anyway, despite its simplifications :)

Erik Singer is a dialect coach who works with actors to perfect different accents and dialects. In this video, he quickly analyzes the performances of 32 actors based on their use of accents. Pretty fascinating to watch. He singles out Philip Seymour Hoffman’s portrayal of Truman Capote as an exemplary use of the proper accent. High marks also go to Kate Winslet doing a Polish accent, Idris Elba’s South African accent while portraying Nelson Mandela (and his Bal’more accent in The Wire), and Cate Blanchett playing Katherine Hepburn in The Aviator.

Nicolas Cage in Con Air and Tom Cruise in Far and Away? Well, let’s just say they couldn’t pahk the cah in Hahvahd Yahd.

(via Actors’ movie accents, rated)

i loved this