Linguistic Miscellany Thread

[Creyeditor]

As a native speaker of German, I only use my 'real' idiolect with family and close friends from my home region in day-to-day life. (I also use it when I visit my home region.) Otherwise, I use a contact variety that is nowhere close to what people speak where I live now and I sometimes hypercorrect (e.g. Köni[k], which is neither a thing in my idiolect, nor in the place I stay, nor in Standard German). I still have problems with non-native speakers of German sometimes. I guess it's also about some kind of universal non-verbal communication (which I am bad at) and guessing what words and constructions are most basic in language courses.

[Travis B.]

I have alluded to this before here, but does anyone else here find that they have to deliberately not speak like they do at home to be consistently understood by non-native speakers of one's native language?

Note that a key factor seems to be how natural their informal English is ─ if they speak informal English naturally like a native English-speaker, even if they have an accent, they generally do not have a problem. On the other hand, if they do not speak naturally informal English, even if they have very little accent, if I make the mistake of speaking to them like I would to someone at home I am liable to not be clearly understood.

Why does this surprise you? Understanding other dialects has to be learned by exposure. My wife is Peruvian, and when she came here (many years ago) she had trouble understanding any dialects but General American. And why wouldn't she? She would not have encountered them as a foreign learner. Similarly I can understand her Spanish very well, but other dialects with more difficulty.

Partly it is that I never grew up thinking of there as being a firm demarcation between "dialect" and "Standard English", and while I had always heard of "non-standard English", that was something other people elsewhere spoke (e.g. the South, the Northeast, the Inner City) and was looked down on, whereas the English I grew up with was not looked down on at all here. The closest to this I grew up with was a distinction between "speaking informally" and "speaking carefully", but the latter is to only be used in certain circumstances like phone calls and formal meetings and like, and the former is expected in normal speech (when I told my parents about having to carefully pronounce "Arnold Palmer" to reliably get an Arnold Palmer at a coffee shop here, they said I was risking mocking their ability to speak English). While there was a vague idea of "Milwaukee dialect", this idea is more centered around lexicon, e.g. words like "bubbler" and "soda" (the standard Midwestern term, as you must know, is "pop") and "yah" (cf. StG ja), with only the more linguistically-inclined being really aware of things like the NCVS. As a result I have had to learn that I need to speak carefully to be reliably understood by my non-natively English-speaking coworkers, but I do not naturally do so outside meetings and calls, having lived my whole life "speaking informally".

[Ares Land]

I have alluded to this before here, but does anyone else here find that they have to deliberately not speak like they do at home to be consistently understood by non-native speakers of one's native language?

I can confirm some NAE dialects are difficult. I haven't had any experience with yours, but I know I can have trouble with a NY accent, for instance. I haven't noticed that New Yorkers make a special effort with the tourists, but maybe they do.
What they teach you is relatively formal; they'll teach you about BrE/AmE but not much beyond that. (Not that teachers are hiding anything from us; there's just a lot to learn about the English language) For really informal English, we have to rely on TV

I didn't know about these contractions until today, though I think I'd be able to figure them out after a while.

e.g. [d̥jɛː(v̥)] for do you have or [ˈaːõ̞ʔ]~[ãːːʔ] for I don't),

[jal]

I have alluded to this before here, but does anyone else here find that they have to deliberately not speak like they do at home to be consistently understood by non-native speakers of one's native language?

Note that a key factor seems to be how natural their informal English is ─ if they speak informal English naturally like a native English-speaker, even if they have an accent, they generally do not have a problem. On the other hand, if they do not speak naturally informal English, even if they have very little accent, if I make the mistake of speaking to them like I would to someone at home I am liable to not be clearly understood.

Why does this surprise you? Understanding other dialects has to be learned by exposure. My wife is Peruvian, and when she came here (many years ago) she had trouble understanding any dialects but General American. And why wouldn't she? She would not have encountered them as a foreign learner. Similarly I can understand her Spanish very well, but other dialects with more difficulty.

Indeed, I'm too at loss how anyone could be surprised by the fact that non-native speakers of a language do not understand every accent/dialect of said language. The worse one speaks a language, the worse one's comprehension of the language and all its variations will be, and the closer to the standard one must speak in order to be understood. The mere fact that you didn't already tone down your regionalisms (and possibly pronunciation, which as we all know here is quite marked) and then are surprised baffles me, to be honest. When I'm talking to a non-native speaker of Dutch, I talk more slowly, try to articulate better, don't use any expressions and non-literal language, and so on. (Though I admit I have colleagues that don't understand that and are constantly misunderstoord by the non-native-speaking colleagues).


JAL

[Travis B.]

Indeed, I'm too at loss how anyone could be surprised by the fact that non-native speakers of a language do not understand every accent/dialect of said language. The worse one speaks a language, the worse one's comprehension of the language and all its variations will be, and the closer to the standard one must speak in order to be understood. The mere fact that you didn't already tone down your regionalisms (and possibly pronunciation, which as we all know here is quite marked) and then are surprised baffles me, to be honest. When I'm talking to a non-native speaker of Dutch, I talk more slowly, try to articulate better, don't use any expressions and non-literal language, and so on. (Though I admit I have colleagues that don't understand that and are constantly misunderstoord by the non-native-speaking colleagues).

The big thing is that here we don't have clear ideas like that of, say, Alemannic versus StG. While on here I do speak of "my dialect" and whatnot, in everyday life the real distinction that people make here, myself included, is of register, of speaking "normally" or "informally" versus "carefully", and register is predicated on social context and not whom one is speaking with. You are right that I should put more effort into speaking carefully with non-native English-speakers, but it is not natural since everyday conversation is not typically in careful speech here.

[Travis B.]

Even in meetings, though, people often use informal pronunciations. For instance, in a Zoom call that was recorded, which I watched the recording of later, I caught myself using [ˈʁˤʷɛːːʁˤ] rather than the formal* [ˈʁˤʷɛːðʁ̩ˤ(ː)] a number of times for rather, and in a meeting I was in this morning, I noticed that one of my coworkers, for example, pronounced wanted to as [ˈwɒ̃ɘ̯̃ɾə(ː)] rather than the formal* [ˈwɒ̃ɾ̃ɘːt̚ʲʷˌtʲʰʷy(ː)] or [ˈwɒ̃ɾ̃ɘːt̚tʰə(ː)].

* This illustrates that the difference between "informal" and "formal" is distinct from "regional" versus "national standard", because these pronunciations are formal, yet are local. Contrast with formal General American [ˈɹʷæːðɹ̩(ː)] and [ˈwɒ̃ɾ̃ɨːt̚ˌtʰʉ(ː)] or [ˈwɒ̃ɾ̃ɨːt̚tʰə(ː)].

(I find that non-native speakers with an okay understanding of English generally do not have a problem with formal regional pronunciations, even when the values of the individual phonemes are distinct from those of General American, e.g. [ɛ] rather than [æ] for /æ/ generally does not prove a problem.)