Three versions of English

[pieter]

[pieter]

[pieter]

[pieter]

In general I know the British English, British Scottish, the Irish, the Australian, New Zealandic, the South African, American and Canadian English accents. Canadians speak slightly different than the Americans. Probably because the British influence and presence lasted longer there?

[pieter]

[pieter]

[karl]

Pieter

It is strange of differences in the spoken word of English, but then, why not, for it is spoken by so many different countries. In my own personal experience in early school under British Occupation we as children were required to learn English in as well as British spelling as your self, perhaps under a different situation but non the less, British English as my self..

Most Brits I do understand very well, it is though of some with such a heavy dialect I do have difficulty in understanding them. Many of British slang words are well understood. With this of South African English and some of their slang which seemed to make sense, whilst though, some other of their slang was not, until explained. But this was many years past and as most languages grow with time so my experience is very much out dated.

Australian?? Yes, they speak a very strange manner of spoken English and at most, is beyond my understanding with exception of those that speak slowly and clearly.

American is easily understood and is so different as to be easily identified as American. With this though, is the various immigrant folks that have their own dialect in speaking. The exception is of those Americans of the Southern States, a person some times must listen very very carefully to fully understand them..

Canadian English is readily understood with a few different slang words but not so much. The French Canadians do have their own brand of spoken English for the most part are easily well understood. My self at least, found the French Canadians better in forming friendships with but for the most part, most Canadians are friendly.

Karl

[pieter]

Karl,

Maybe American English is easy for you because there are German, Scandinavian and Dutch influences in American English.

The dialect regions of the United States are most clearly marked along the Atlantic littoral, where the earlier settlements were made. Three dialects can be defined: Northern, Midland, and Southern. Each has its subdialects.


American English dialects
Map showing the dialect regions of the United States.
Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

The Northern dialect is spoken in New England. Its six chief subdialects comprise northeastern New England (Maine, New Hampshire, and eastern Vermont), southeastern New England (eastern Massachusetts, eastern Connecticut, and Rhode Island), southwestern New England (western Massachusetts and western Connecticut), the inland north (western Vermont and upstate New York), the Hudson Valley, and metropolitan New York.

The Midland dialect is spoken in the coastal region from Point Pleasant, in New Jersey, to Dover, in Delaware. Its seven major subdialects comprise the Delaware Valley, the Susquehanna Valley, the Upper Ohio Valley, northern West Virginia, the Upper Potomac and Shenandoah, southern West Virginia and eastern Kentucky, western North Carolina and South Carolina, and eastern Tennessee.

The Southern dialect area covers the coastal region from Delaware to South Carolina. Its five chief subdialects comprise the Delmarva Peninsula, the Virginia Piedmont, northeastern North Carolina (Albemarle Sound and Neuse Valley), Cape Fear and Pee Dee valleys, and the South Carolina Low Country, around Charleston.

These boundaries, based on those of the Linguistic Atlas of the United States and Canada, are highly tentative. To some extent these regions preserve the traditional speech of southeastern and southern England, where most of the early colonists were born. The first settlers to arrive in Virginia (1607) and Massachusetts (1620) soon learned to adapt old words to new uses, but they were content to borrow names from the local Indian languages for unknown trees, such as hickory and persimmon and for unfamiliar animals, such as raccoon and woodchuck. Later they took words from foreign settlers: chowder and prairie from the French, scow and sleigh from the Dutch. They made new compounds, such as backwoods and bullfrog, and gave new meanings to such words as lumber (which in British English denotes disused furniture, or junk) and corn (which in British English signifies any grain, especially wheat) to mean “maize.”

Before the Declaration of Independence (1776), two-thirds of the immigrants had come from England, but after that date they arrived in large numbers from Ireland. The Great Famine of 1845–49 drove 1.5 million Irish to seek homes in the New World, and the European revolutions of 1848 drove as many Germans to settle in Pennsylvania and the Midwest. After the close of the American Civil War, millions of Scandinavians, Slavs, and Italians crossed the ocean and eventually settled mostly in the North Central and Upper Midwest states. In some areas of South Carolina and Georgia, enslaved Africans working on rice and cotton plantations developed a contact language called Gullah, or Geechee, that made use of many structural and lexical features of their native languages. This variety of English is comparable to such contact languages as Sranan (Taki-taki) of Suriname and Melanesian Pidgins. The speech of the Atlantic Seaboard shows far greater differences in pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary than that of any area in the North Central states, the Upper Midwest, the Rocky Mountains, or the Pacific Coast. Today, urbanization, quick transport, and television have tended to level out some dialectal differences in the United States. On the other hand, immigrant groups have introduced new varieties in which the influence of ethnic origins is evident, and some immigrant languages are widely spoken (notably Spanish, in the southeastern and southwestern states).

The boundary with Canada nowhere corresponds to any boundary between dialects, and the influence of United States English is strong, being felt least in the Maritime Provinces and Newfoundland and Labrador. Nevertheless, in spite of the effect of this proximity to the United States, British influences are still potent in some of the larger cities; Scottish influences are well sustained in Ontario. Canada remains bilingual. Less than one-fourth of its people, living mostly in the province of Quebec, have French as their mother tongue.


distribution of majority Anglophone and Francophone populations in Canada
Distribution of majority Anglophone and Francophone populations in Canada. The 1996 census of Canada, from which this map is derived, defined a person's mother tongue as that language learned at home during childhood and still understood at the time of the census. Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

[karl]

Pieter

It is interesting of your well research of The USA. As of this, you are much better travelled then my self in the USA. For my travels were/are in the Washington State and Oregon. The USA is such a vast area for travel it is no wonder of the American Autos of the past being so large and roomy.

Karl

[pieter]

Dear Karl,

I do have to disagree. I can't compare my 8 days Kras travel company bustour in the West coast through the states California, Arizona, Nevada and Utah in februari 1999 and my 12 days visit to Manhattan New York in 2008 with your life and work experience in the Washington State and Oregon. You're experiences in Washington State and Oregon will overpower my limited holiday experiences at the West coast and East coast. You lived there, worked there, had/have a family there and knew and know more Americans than I do. Maybe I visited more states (California, Arizona, Nevada, Utah and New York State), but you spend more time in the USA than I did and met more Americans and build more relations there than I did.

Cheers,
Pieter