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It's quite impressive that most English speakers across the world understand each other, despite variations in accents/dialects (lemmy.world)
submitted 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) by to c/showerthoughts@lemmy.world
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Additional context:

Native speakers of my mother tongue do not all understand each other due to some pretty extreme dialects. Now that I'm in Europe, I've noticed multiple instances of people sometimes not understand the dialect of someone from a village 10-20 km away...

In contrast, for example most American, British, and Australian people can just... understand each other like that?? I never thought much about it before but it's pretty incredible

Edit: thanks everyone, and clearly I didn't think of certain parts of the UK when I was in the shower and thought of this...

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[–] 8 points 8 months ago (2 children)

As an American, Scots are the most difficult to understand. Most Brits, Welsh and Irish are fine. Australians and New Zealanders, too. Canadians can be almost indistinguishable to me with the exception of a couple of words here and there.

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  • [–] 4 points 8 months ago

    southern Ontario Canadians don't sound much different. the more east you go, the more Letterkenny you get. and then you get the Quebecois, which are unique in oh so many ways. and then you start getting to the true east coast stuff as you go farther and farther, and that's not going to be confused for american

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