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I seem to remember a statistic where UK is reputed to have a greater number of dialects than any other country in the world, which probably has a lot to do with
by wildjim 16y ago
I seem to remember a statistic where UK is reputed to have a greater number of dialects than any other country in the world, which probably has a lot to do with the difficulty people have with understanding some accents (tried Glaswegian, anyone?)
Also, IIRC, the colonies tended to have a commonality in heritage of the colonists, too. E.g. at one time, Australia had a "large number" of criminals, there are quite a lot of Dutch in NZ -- there are large parts of NZ with very strong Scots heritage -- New York is famous for Irish heritage, other parts of USA are famous for German, etc.
The UK hasn't really had the same homogenisation outside the big cities.
- barrkel 16y agoIreland has a distinct accent for almost every county too. The fine differences can be subtle, but sampling Cork/Kerry sing-song, Northern Ireland ("Norn Iron"), northside / inner city Dublin and Dublin 4 / southside are all quite different range in the spectrum.
- waterlesscloud 16y agoThe US has a large number of distinct accents. I'm originally from Georgia (Atlanta, not Tbilisi) and there are at least 5-6 accents in that state alone. I'm willing to bet a trained specialist could narrow down someone's origin pretty closely. The idea of a "southern" accent is very, very broad. The thing with US accents is that we're a very mobile country. People move around and lose much of their accent. I lost a lot of my own living in Atlanta, which is over half non-Georgian, and then a lot more living in California the last decade or so. It's there, but only in traces. A lot of Americans are the same...
- mahmud 16y agoThe BBC has recordings of various dialects from the U.K. that you might find interesting: http://www.bbc.co.uk/voices/recordings/ http://www.bbc.co.uk/voices/recordings/