Quote:
Originally Posted by masraum
Most folks try to fit in to their environment. Changing the way you speak is not that much different than changing what you wear if you're at the beach or in the office or at a ball game.
If I speak to folks for which English is not their primary language, I'll try to tailor my speech to use less slang, be a little slower and more clear with better enunciation and pronunciation. I've had folks speak to me with thick accents and using slang from their group that I did not understand. That goes for rednecks, country folks, black folks, folks from New Jersey, etc.... If we all (all of those folks listed) want to interact, then we all have to step away a bit from our group/local speech patterns and try to speak a more neutral American English. It's not just Asians or black folks or hispanics that change how they speak when they speak to other people. There are white folks that do the same because they have local/regional/cultural variations in how they speak vs a more neutral American English.
I suspect folks in the UK/England, Scotland, etc... run into the same thing. Cockney, Geordie, Scouse, etc... probably have to try to speak closer to RP (received pronunciation) or BBC English when they communicate with folks from other areas. And that's without even getting outside of England, I'm sure that there are variations around Scotland and Ireland that are hard for other folks to understand, and that's before folks from Scotland, Ireland, England and Wales try talking to each other.
Trying to minimize your accent and speech patterns isn't a sign of trying to be someone that you aren't. It's not really much different than picking a language to speak when dealing with people from another country. It seems like it because the base language is the same, but for some folks, multiple folks speaking English with thick accents may be as unintelligible as if they were speaking another language. Some folks have a good ear for picking that sort of thing and others just don't.
I suspect it's the same reason why some folks never lose an accent while others can lose an accent. I also knew a girl from Texas that went and lived in the UK and when she came back several years later, both her and her daughter had picked up a British accent. I used to work with a young guy that was from Vietnam, IIRC, who's English was as good or better than average with practically no accent and he'd been in the country <10 years. I've also interviewed a guy that was from another country, but had been in the US for >40 years, and his accent was so thick that I sometimes had to ask him to repeat himself. And I usually find it very easy to understand people even if they have strong accents.
My wife, if she's speaking to someone with a strong accent (regardless of the accent) has a hard time understanding because of the accent.
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This is true and valid when we are talking about clarity of communication.
I speak Swabisch, I also speak proper German.
Since I present in all ways as an American it's advantageous for me to communicate in Swabisch when I'm in Germanic countries because it immediately lets my audience know I'm a hommie from Stuttgart because you don't learn Swabisch any other way than having grown up with it.
My counterparts in Munich used to laugh at me not because I spoke it but because it was just strange to them to hear it coming from me.
But no one ever judges my quality or perceives me in a different light over it.