Challenge: American English as a separate language

[Rounin Ryuuji]

Let's see if I can puzzle things out:

[ˈkʰʊː.ae̯.ˈɛːv.n̩ː.ˌɑ̃ː.ʁ̃ˤɯːp̚ˈpʰɑː.mʁ̩ˤː]

Could I have an Arnold Palmer?

[ˈtjɛːv.ˈɜ̃ːj.ˌae̯ˈdiː.əː.ˈwʌə̯m.ˈsʲpi.kɘ̃.ˌɪːʁˤ]

Do you have any idea what I'm speaking here?

It looks rather outlandish, but when I articulate it, I understand, and it isn't that different from how I sound, albeit with more elision and a bit less diphthong-y.

[Travis B.]

Let's see if I can puzzle things out:

[ˈkʰʊː.ae̯.ˈɛːv.n̩ː.ˌɑ̃ː.ʁ̃ˤɯːp̚ˈpʰɑː.mʁ̩ˤː]

Could I have an Arnold Palmer?

[ˈtjɛːv.ˈɜ̃ːj.ˌae̯ˈdiː.əː.ˈwʌə̯m.ˈsʲpi.kɘ̃.ˌɪːʁˤ]

Do you have any idea what I'm speaking here?

It looks rather outlandish, but when I articulate it, I understand, and it isn't that different from how I sound, albeit with more elision and a bit less diphthong-y.

Hey! You weren't supposed to give it away!

But yeah, you got those exactly right.

[äreo]

The biggest sort of interdialectal influence through the media I have noticed is increased familiarity with other dialects' vocabulary; e.g. in my dad's generation it was common for the name Randall to be shortened to "Randy", but in my generation people know what "randy" means in EngE and have stopped doing that.

"Randy" historically has had that meaning in AmE too, but fell away at some point (though not entirely). Even stronger example would be "fag" for cigarette which we now take as a pure Britishism.

There are many English features that I myself perceive as foreign (i.e. non-Milwaukeean) yet which I have zero problem understanding myself. For instance, the pin-pen merger is markedly foreign to me -- it by itself indicates that one is not from the Upper Midwest -- yet it isn't something that would affect intelligibility for me at all. Similarly, there are many features of, say, SSBE such as yod-retention and a rounded LOT which immediately mark it as foreign to me, yet I personally have no problem understanding SSBE.

Exactly--perceived foreignness (or nonstandardness) doesn't imply unintelligibility. My point about the pin-pen merger is that here in Texas, younger speakers perceive many traditional features of Southern American English to be low-status, but the pin-pen merger is entirely spared this stigma. I'm suggesting that there are a lot of features like this--that are regionally distinct but not associated with low status, at least in the minds of people from that region--so that even as younger speakers abandon more marked features of the traditional accent, they hold onto these others which are less obvious to them.

[Torco]

One key thing is that global telecommunications has allowed speakers of the English standard varieties to be familiar with one another's speech, which over time likely would reduce the impact of the drifting apart of the English standard varieties more than it would actually put a damper on said drift. On that note, I feel like I just have to mock my parents' needing subtitles when watching TV in SSBE, General Australian, or what I suspect is whatever standard variety they have in NZ, which to me are very intelligible. This is despite the fact that their speech is almost certainly more standard than my own, and that I would have no expectation that a Brit would readily understand my own speech unless I was deliberately approximating GA. This leads to the conclusion that the standardness of one's own speech does not correlate to how well one understands other standard varieties of English.

i think so, yeah: just based on personal observation the dialects of spanish i and people i know better understand is those that they've heard on TV (or personally, but we tend to hear more foreigners on TV unless they're from high-migration countries, like argentina and venezuela), so besides making it harder for dialects to drift away, global telecoms make it so they have to drift even further before they become properly different languages.

[Darren]

[ˈkʰʊː.ae̯.ˈɛːv.n̩ː.ˌɑ̃ː.ʁ̃ˤɯːp̚ˈpʰɑː.mʁ̩ˤː]

[ˈtjɛːv.ˈɜ̃ːj.ˌae̯ˈdiː.əː.ˈwʌə̯m.ˈsʲpi.kɘ̃.ˌɪːʁˤ]

Kind of on a tangent, but do you have any idea what kind of quantitative vowel length difference you have? When I try and read out your examples they always seem pretty reasonable, except the vowel length feels forced. I'm wondering if your dialect has like a 1:1.5 length ratio rather than the roughly 1:2 of AusEng?

[Raphael]

Since Travis brought up subtitles: I have the impression that movies, TV shows, etc. rarely get different BE and AE subtitles, while, at least on Netflix, you can apparently often choose between Spanish Spanish, Latin American Spanish, Portuguese Portuguese, and Brazilian Portuguese subtitles.

[Travis B.]

[ˈkʰʊː.ae̯.ˈɛːv.n̩ː.ˌɑ̃ː.ʁ̃ˤɯːp̚ˈpʰɑː.mʁ̩ˤː]

[ˈtjɛːv.ˈɜ̃ːj.ˌae̯ˈdiː.əː.ˈwʌə̯m.ˈsʲpi.kɘ̃.ˌɪːʁˤ]

Kind of on a tangent, but do you have any idea what kind of quantitative vowel length difference you have? When I try and read out your examples they always seem pretty reasonable, except the vowel length feels forced. I'm wondering if your dialect has like a 1:1.5 length ratio rather than the roughly 1:2 of AusEng?

A key thing here is that a long vowel in an unstressed syllable is about as long as a short vowel in a stressed syllable.

As for the length itself, I have not measured it per se, but when I used Praat to examine spectrographs where it was obvious that there was a significant difference between the vowel lengths before /s/ and /z/ in stressed monosyllables.

More anecdotally, a friend of mine who grew up in the same suburb as myself said that people she knew in Chicago said that Wisconsinites had very "long" vowels.

[Travis B.]

Since Travis brought up subtitles: I have the impression that movies, TV shows, etc. rarely get different BE and AE subtitles, while, at least on Netflix, you can apparently often choose between Spanish Spanish, Latin American Spanish, Portuguese Portuguese, and Brazilian Portuguese subtitles.

It seems to me that there are greater differences between written Spanish Spanish and LatAm Spanish than there are between written BE and AE.

[Torco]

we don't have any different orthographies than our spanish cousins that i can think of: it's mostly a matter of lexicon: they say judías where we say porotos or frijoles, they say guindillas for our ajies or our chiles, they say ordenador for our computadores/as, that kind of thing. oh, and of course, v o s o t r o s.

[Travis B.]

we don't have any different orthographies than our spanish cousins that i can think of: it's mostly a matter of lexicon: they say judías where we say porotos or frijoles, they say guindillas for our ajies or our chiles, they say ordenador for our computadores/as, that kind of thing. oh, and of course, v o s o t r o s.

These are exactly the kinds of things I was thinking of. In contrast, there appears to be fewer lexical differences between written BE and AE. Sure, what we call the "trunk" of a car is the "boot" of a car to them, and so on, but these differences seem relatively limited overall.

[Torco]

I'd say so, yeah: much of those difference I know through youtube videos that make it as a joke (haha americans say elevator or sth) as opposed to reading a british source and going "lolwut?", which is what happens if you're, say, a spanish and read some mexican guy.