Re: Norwegian languages

Emaelivpahr Thomas R. Wier:
>You have obviously not listened to any of these "accents". :)
I've listened to people with accents from Georgia, Wisconsin, Texas, and
New York. (Also people from Nevada, Colorado, and southern California, but
I didn't hear any noticeable accent as compared to northern California.)
I've never heard anyone in the States speaking English that I couldn't
understand. (However, when I was in Spain I overheard a couple speaking and
I didn't realize until halfway through the conversation that it was English
because they had such a strong accent -- Scottish, perhaps. I'm not sure.)

>or China.  I live in an area in which many African-Americans
>live, and a large number of them speak the so-called African-
>American Vernacular English.
(Is "ebonics" no longer PC? I don't pay much attention to PCness, so I may
have easily missed the memo. :P ) I've listened to them too, but I always
felt that it was more a subset of slang that I didn't know, similar to a
non-geek listening to a bunch of computer users talking about techincal
stuff. I've seen people's eyes glaze over at some heavy duty techno-mumbo
jumbo. :)

>Your opinion of America "having no dialects" is true only for the
>Western half or so
Perhaps that is the trouble, then, since I'm from California and most of my
traveling has been in the western US.

>travel along the East Coast, there are *lots* of regionalisms
>present.  One vivid one that comes to mind, present in parts of
>the Carolinas, is the idiom "it come up a cloud", meaning "there's
>going to be a thunderstorm".
I didn't realize the east coast spoke significantly differently than the
west. I retract my generalizations and confine them to the west coast. :)


--
Arthaey

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