English

[serge gurkski]

I agree with Ava, as Aish likes to call him....it was fascinating! The Belgian snippet was very similar to 'Allo, 'allo (TV series) and the late Peter Sellars .

I think Americans can be self-centred, but linguistically, I fancy every native English-speaker is. Off-topic, the mind does boggle in a cliche kind of way, at the parochial world-view which sometimes emanates from the US, which I put down to not travelling outside the country. It is hard, when abroad, not to get into the stuff that concerns the natives: when I had a flat in France, I turned to the French press, and the things which were of importance to my neighbours, (or layabouts at the Cafe du Quartier) and made up my French political mind with just a hint from the values of home.

The idea of tracking people by accent was of course at the heart of Prof Higgins in Shaw's 'Pygmalion' /'My Fair Lady', an excellent production of which I saw at the Old Vic a couple of years back, done by Peter Hall. I can detect a certain type of East Ender, of the old sort, as they find difficulty with 'l' 'r' and 'w'.(eg, 'Alright Terry?' has to be 'A wite Te-w?' My grand-daughter, on the other hand, had tears streaming down her face have been 'South of the Wa'er' (where I live) and heard some old girls extolling their meal 'wiv red sauce 'n awl'. I privately thought she was bang out of order.....

That's an interesting opinion. I'm American. I've traveled far and wide, I speak Portuguese (with a Brazilian accent), Spanish (with a Mexican accent), French (with a Nova Scotian accent), Latin (with a Harvard accent), Patwa (with a Jamaican accent), and several American slang dialects in Spanish and English including ebonics, Southern, New England, Midwest and Puerto Rican slang, and I can get by conversationally with these just about anywhere in the world; but I cannot, for my life, order food at a restaurant in the UK.

and what about ordering just a simple fucking cup of coffee in the States?