Mark Odegard wrote:
>I marvel even more at how you have to travel to Great Britain or
>Ireland to find something that gets difficult to understand
>dialect-wise (but just about everyone whose native dialect gives a
>problem can code-switch to something resembling MidAtlantic). Yeah;
>the Brits are listening to us USians, and modifying their speech
>accordingly.
Many people in North America would not agree... I have met many people (born
here in North America, like me) who insist that they have a very hard time
comprehending regional dialects other than their own. The Pacific Northwest
and the Deep South seem to be given the worst marks in comprehensibility,
especially to people from the Northeast.
Speaking personally... I don't find any American English dialect that I have
heard incomprehensible, but having visited cousins in Tennessee, in the
South, it was sometimes a little difficult to understand the locals. And,
living in New York City (the "forgotten" borough of Staten Island), I often
have a hard time understanding the speech of native Brooklynites, despite
having been exposed to it most of my life. :) And Brooklynites are
apparently the most likely people to have a hard time understanding me... my
own speech is the local variant of educated American Standard English, but
sprinkled with archaisms and occasional Celticisms.
Mark DeFillo
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