Page 2 | Is spelling over?

longdistanceclaraclara · 2024-08-31T18:23:22+00:00

Caveat this by posting in pedants corner that I'm bound to make a mistake. My kids are dyslexic. Their spelling is shit. However when I check their phones (with consent) the spelling is awful, never mind the grammar. Our local radio is employing 'dialect'. It enrages me because it's just wrong. We wasn't going anywhere, for example. We're going Tesco etc etc. It's making me angry and want to send the kids through LAMDA.

upinaballoon · 20/09/2024 09:44

Seymour5 · 20/09/2024 07:05

I like to hear different accents, but I also want to understand what is being said. Ken whit eh mean hen?

Yes, I do understand what you mean and you made your point without a stitherum.

Meadowfinch · 20/09/2024 09:46

Change radio station !

Fethard · 20/09/2024 09:51

upinaballoon · 20/09/2024 09:44

Yes, I do understand what you mean and you made your point without a stitherum.

Show quote history

That’s an excellent word!

BarbaraHoward · 20/09/2024 10:05

upinaballoon · 20/09/2024 09:42

In a foreign country, the young man in the big shop was serving me. English was not his first language. He asked me if I was English and he said he could understand me, but he couldn't always understand the English which customers spoke. That was probably because I was speaking standard English and also speaking slowly. I always find that if French, Italian and Spanish speakers would speak slowly to me I would cotton on to what they were saying more easily. I told him that I was deliberately speaking slowly. That way he learns English better than if he's overwhelmed by someone rattling off in a thick accent, and just switches off. 2019, Egypt.

Show quote history

A lot of English learners find English accents tricky to understand because they're largely non-rhotic.

And a friend who is from Ballymena (and thus unintelligible to all!) was told by friends that they found him the easiest native speaker in their workplace to understand - because they speak slavic languages where apparently consonants are more important than vowels, so his unusual vowels didn't particularly bother them, whereas the Western Europeans and the English speakers themselves found his vowels made him hard to understand.

There's no one way, and it's all very interesting.

Fethard · 20/09/2024 10:12

upinaballoon · 20/09/2024 09:42

In a foreign country, the young man in the big shop was serving me. English was not his first language. He asked me if I was English and he said he could understand me, but he couldn't always understand the English which customers spoke. That was probably because I was speaking standard English and also speaking slowly. I always find that if French, Italian and Spanish speakers would speak slowly to me I would cotton on to what they were saying more easily. I told him that I was deliberately speaking slowly. That way he learns English better than if he's overwhelmed by someone rattling off in a thick accent, and just switches off. 2019, Egypt.

Show quote history

Respectfully, ideas of what constitutes a ‘thick accent’ to the point of incomprehension are extremely subjective.

ErrolTheDragon · 20/09/2024 15:02

@upinaballoon

Obviously we adapt the way we talk according to who we're talking to. My colleagues are from many different countries, they're well educated and mostly speak good English but it can be variable. It's best to avoid idiomatic language - even idioms which would pass unnoticed as such in 'standard' English. Highly technical scientific English is fine though!

Last year we went on a cruise to Norway, sailing from Rosyth so there were a high proportion of Scots and north-east English. I'm not sure but I think their accents and some dialect words might be more readily comprehensible to Scandinavians than other U.K. accents.