NZ vs US vs British English: -ize, -ise

[GrumpyGoat]

It is very difficult to put one label on a country as large as the US.

Especially when we have so many regional accents*--to the point where Americans from Texas have difficulty sometimes understanding Americans from Boston.

Maybe there are a lot of German Americans but that is also regional. I don't recall having ANY German Americans around where I grew up.


*And even our regional accents have sub-groups. OH and I both have heavy Southern drawls but so do all the Southern states. Our Southern drawl is completely different than Alabama or Georgia.

And between OH and I, we have very different accents because we grew up about 2 hours apart--I was in the city and he was in the country in a tiny town.

[Dell]

It is very difficult to put one label on a country as large as the US.

Especially when we have so many regional accents*--to the point where Americans from Texas have difficulty sometimes understanding Americans from Boston.

Maybe there are a lot of German Americans but that is also regional. I don't recall having ANY German Americans around where I grew up.


*And even our regional accents have sub-groups. OH and I both have heavy Southern drawls but so do all the Southern states. Our Southern drawl is completely different than Alabama or Georgia.

And between OH and I, we have very different accents because we grew up about 2 hours apart--I was in the city and he was in the country in a tiny town.

But until you've been in the US for a while, it's not easy to tell the difference between Alabama and California - I couldn't hear the difference for quite a few years. There are still some American accents I can't understand - usually they're either Cajun or from the mountains of Virginia.

[dharder]

And what German dialect would these American speakers of English with German Accent have?

As pointed out for the US, of course every country has regional variations of their language. The very same goes for Germany, which has very different regional dialect, to the point of not being able to understand each other (or at least pretending not to...)

If you have an accent in a foreign language (as most people who learn a language later in life will have), that accent will most likely be in the regional variation of whatever native language.

The Austrian chef down the road (excellent food, btw) speaks a very different accented English than someone from Berlin would.

Daniela

[Familyofmonkeys]

As you say, supposedly - but I once sat in on an English lesson in a German school, in which the (German) English teacher spoke with an American accent (one of them!), although the spelling was British English.

That kind of reminds me of one of my Uni lecturers. I went to Uni in Wales and had just got my head around the different Welsh language regional accents (as opposed to English language Welsh accents). Then one of my courses had a native Welsh speaking American who spoke Welsh with an American accent....took a long time to understand what she was saying as she pronounced place names and many other words very differently to every other Welsh speaker I knew.

[dharder]

That kind of reminds me of one of my Uni lecturers

I went on an exchange type thing in an English secondary school, and thought the French they spoke was bizarre, to say the least.

One has to marvel at the ease with which ABBA managed to make 'Notre Dame' rhyme with 'traffic jam' and 'Seine' with 'rain' in 'Our Last Summer'

I still often don't get when someone uses Latin words or phrases with an English accent, or the names of Greek gods.

Daniela

[Skipjack]

Australian have resolved all conflicting spelling issues by removing the second half of all words and replacing with the letter O or IE.