Ironically, US English is in many ways more traditional than UK English. The US uses many words and phrases that used to be common to both continents but later changed in the UK.
US did try to de-French most spellings with mixed success.
Yeah, but there’s still the tendency to simplify things (e.g. “color” vs “colour”) and the ever shortening of phrases as if it’s difficult to say the whole thing (“macaroni and cheese”).
Changing spellings to match pronunciation should happen more often, to ne honest. And I don’t think UK or Australian English get to throw any stones about shortening words and phrases, the US isn’t calling anything “spag bol”.
British should be eevee if anything. There are double the British accents compared to American ones. Cockney, London, Welsh, Scottish, Northern Ireland are extremely distinct let alone the hundreds of other distinct regional accents.
Same for the us, though. NY, Boston, Midwestern, New England, Minnesota, Atlantic, Southern, Texan, Pacific Nw, Californian. And various specific regional like queens, Brooklyn, Philly. It goes on and on. The US is not the monolith it’s often described as.
Tbf they only sound “extremely distinct” to British people. A lot of those accents are hard to distinguish for non-native speakers or people outside the UK.
Tell that to someone from Bawston lol, the US has way more than 2 accents for sure. UK does have a lot though, not sure who actually has more. Let’s find a linguist!
A Boston accent is different from a New York accent, is different from a Missouri accent, is different from a Mississippi accent, is different from a Florida accent, is different from a Texas accent, is different from an Oklahoma accent, etc. Even within states, it fully depends on how rural you live, whether you went to college… hell, even your tax bracket in some cases.
I say this as an Australian that grew up in America: the sheer size of the place is enough to have something like fifty regional accents per state. Like everything with the US: it’s fucking insane.
Lmao to me Britain has two accents, Scottish and English. The rest sound the same. Y’all think your accents are so special to the point where it gets cringe sometimes.
Now comes the hard part of defining all the Eeveelutions.
I feel like there are a few very distinct regional accents, but I’m having trouble coming up with the right distinction from the top of my head.
There’s New England, the south in general, New York, Chicago which immediately trigger my brain to think of a very specific accent. Surely there is more to it though?
Maybe for the regions that only speak one language. East Texas alone mixes English, Spanish, French and German dialects. It’s like a sitcom of bad accents down there.
I have read British and American books galore (i.e. thousands), and I’ve listened to English (BBC, BFBS) and American (AFN, Movies) audio sources. My vocabulary and accent is a wild mix of both, so the British consider me American, and the American think I’m British.
They’re talking about native English speakers. Did you really not get that? There are also a lot of Chinese people, try yelling that out of context, also.
English is one of the official languages in India.
Even if only 1/10 of Indians grew up speaking it alongside Hindi or one of the other official languages (it’s a pretty big and varied country), it still adds up to 140 million people, so the previous poster has a valid point.
No no, I speak a combination of the three. Although American English dominates my accent. That’s what you get when you grow up watching English-speaking media. You pick up their accents and you make one of your own.
I have a buddy who learned English as a second language early in life and he has a fluent Irish accent. I’ve never been able to wrap my head around that one.
I once took a short trip through the south of Germany near Nuremberg … we were just on a random trip not knowing what we were doing in a rental car. We stopped at a gas station to get gas and got some help from an attendant, a young German teenager who spoke some English.
He talked to us in the weirdest accent I ever heard … a combination of English with a German accent and a touch of southern Texan or southern American. He had grown up learning English from army personnel from the American US base nearby.
I’m Canadian in Ontario and the first five years of my life, all I spoke or heard was my cultural language Ojibway-Cree. I went to school where I learned English but continued to only mostly speak my language.
Then I spent an awkward period as a teenager speaking English with a Native accent … a classic TV stereotypical Native accent and it was horrible. It took me about a decade to get over that phase, now I speak English as boringly as any Canadian. Not bad eh?
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