Err.. that would be the “Why can’t you damned furriners speak ’Merican like all the regular folk!” line. You may have been thinking of an “I would like to abjectly apologize for being a Canadian” line… X-D
To non-native speakers like myself Brits can be fore more difficult because their local accents / dialects can deviate far more from language schools standards than American ones. I was seriously dumbfounded the first time someone from Birmingham greeted me as “O’royt, moyt!”. One favorite: Stockport = shhtoffpfo, Stafford = shtaoffpfo so I had to be careful where to buy the train ticket to.
I used to think it must be a lower class thing, but I have seen engineers talk like this in e.g. Wolverhampton.
On top if it, there are ethnic versions. Chinese-Birminghamese is especially hard to understand, the above greeting sounds like “Ohoy, moyh!”
Scotland is very interesting, in one place people talk like the most difficult lines in Trainspotting (“Hazshu gozshda bish in shour shoightsh?”), and in other places in the usual Hollywood-American one from the movies (which probably originated from there).
Ireland… friend of mine interviewed an Irish DJ, it took a while to figure out “heiss music” means “house music”.
I have heard but did not verify that ’Straya down there is pretty much Birmingham, accent-wise, nice = noice etc.
Compared to this, Americans are easy, except those who speak like Jay Leno.
I would really like a comedy scene when two guys argue, one is talking in Brummie, Scullie or a similar thicker British dialect, and other in either AAVE or Jamaican like Little Jacob in GTA IV.
Note: there are similar things going on with e.g. the German language as well, Frankfurt meeting Vorarlberg is a similar comedy.
However in smaller Eastern European countries pretty much everybody speaks “TV language” (not the official but close, official + slang) and I still wonder how comes TV did not kill local accents and dialects yet in every country. I was really used to everybody talking like TV and this not being a problem at all.
Serbo-Croatian used to be one language with dialects. After the countries split it became two.
A lot of the Serbian languages have mutual intelligibility. Smaller Eastern European countries just named their most popular dialect it’s own language.
Communism is also likely to play a huge part. Part of the Marxist idea of accelerating progress is to get rid of dialects and make sure that everybody learns the local high language in kindergarden and school.
Diversity in the German language is also down. I had a university friend who came from a Bavarian town that had a dialect that wasn’t able to be understood in Munich. Maybe <10,000 people could understand it. It did weird things like doing new word construction by for new inventions like skateboards by adding syllables together in a way that Germanic languages or even Anglo languages usually don’t do. They had essentially their own grammar. But that dialect seemed to be dying and not used by the young anymore.
Do we even know that TV killed local accents and dialects in any country? Because I’m not sure that Slavic languages ever had such radical dialectal variety as English and German.
Anecdotal evidence—dated a woman in Birmingham who was a professional interpreter from English to Polish and she mentioned she sometimes often hired by visiting Slovak businesspeople who cannot find an English to Slovak interpreter and it works all right. Not without some confusion, but works. I was surprised, since that kind of politicial fragmentation began a good 1000 years ago.
Slavic languages resemble each other enough that people have tried to concoct pan-Slavic bridge languages for a long time. It has occurred to me that it might just be easier for someone to learn a relatively interoperable natural Slavic language (Serbo-Croat or Slovak, maybe, judging by this?) and try that as a bridge.
Slavic languages divide into three groups which are fairly different: Eastern (e.g. Russian, Ukrainian), Western (e.g. Polish, Czech), and Southern (e.g. Bulgarian, Serbian). I suspect that a natural “bridge” language might work within a group, but not between groups.
If you are a tourist in Ukraine, knowing basics of Russian is useful, the kind that the OP refers to. If you want some business done, just speak English; there would be enough translators. If you need to read something written in Ukrainian, and it is sufficiently complex and your Russian is not very good, have it translated; and even if your Russian is that good, but not your first language, it will cost you a lot of nerves.
(Also, if you know Ukrainian more or less well, it can help significantly to accept Russian, Byelorussian, Polish and Czech. I am not saying you will automatically understand those languages, just that adapting to them should be easier with Ukrainian as the base.)
I think the best return on investment in this regard is learning Russian. It is widely useful even in places like Kazakhstan or Bulgaria, due to it being taught at schools in the Soviet era. Of course that generation is aging, but not so much—I’d say over 45 people were still taught it and this is the age when they get into leadership positions and not retire for another 20-25. Besides, there are lots of scientific publications, SA of SSC mentioned medical research that never got translated and so on. Living in Central Europe, the most useful languages here look like English > German > Russian. This is of course widely location dependent.
Fun story: a friend of mine was invited to a project to the Silicon Valley and came back shaking his head saying “Next time I will learn some Spanish in advance so that I can have a chat with people like the newspaper guy.”
Less fun story: I really like the sound of the Italian language, but it does not feel like it worths investing into. I would not really want to live there, lovely culture but crazy politics and the “important” people speak English anyway. There is an enormous difference in ROI between say learning Spanish and learning Italian.
With 50+ people in Czech Republic, Slovenia, Croatia, even Hungary, so basically ex-Habsburg places, it tends to be useful. They picked up some amount of it from their grandparents who remember when it was the lingua franca of the monarchy and their English is not very good usually. The typical old Czech tourist in Budapest will try to communicate in more or less broken German.
Also for young people, in this region young people usually learn English but if they have capacity left, the second one is usually German. And for this reason, “eastern” subsidiaries of DE/AT/CH companies often keep the internal reporting language in it. Which reinforces people wanting to learn it.
The most creative usage I saw was some guys from South Tyrol who offered bilingual SAP consulting to DE/AT/CH firms having subsidiaries in Italy.
I also know a lady who went to East Belgium to work and it worked out well for her.
Note, though, that you basically need to achieve native-like levels of proficiency in order to use one Slavic language to understand another. So you may well never be able to collect this return on the investment at all. My Russian isn’t anywhere near this level and, living in Central Europe, the only use I ever make of it is talking to Russians. Signage in Slavic-speaking countries becomes somewhat comprehensible, but that’s about it otherwise. Russian does, of course, allow you to communicate in Central Asia, the Caucasus, and the Baltic countries, which is nice if you want that, but also likely to be irrelevant for most people.
True, but also: I smell some significant business opportunities in the general direction of Central Asia. It is a very virgin market for e.g. tech products and they have natural resources / fossil fuels to pay with.
Err.. that would be the “Why can’t you damned furriners speak ’Merican like all the regular folk!” line. You may have been thinking of an “I would like to abjectly apologize for being a Canadian” line… X-D
To non-native speakers like myself Brits can be fore more difficult because their local accents / dialects can deviate far more from language schools standards than American ones. I was seriously dumbfounded the first time someone from Birmingham greeted me as “O’royt, moyt!”. One favorite: Stockport = shhtoffpfo, Stafford = shtaoffpfo so I had to be careful where to buy the train ticket to.
I used to think it must be a lower class thing, but I have seen engineers talk like this in e.g. Wolverhampton.
On top if it, there are ethnic versions. Chinese-Birminghamese is especially hard to understand, the above greeting sounds like “Ohoy, moyh!”
Scotland is very interesting, in one place people talk like the most difficult lines in Trainspotting (“Hazshu gozshda bish in shour shoightsh?”), and in other places in the usual Hollywood-American one from the movies (which probably originated from there).
Ireland… friend of mine interviewed an Irish DJ, it took a while to figure out “heiss music” means “house music”.
I have heard but did not verify that ’Straya down there is pretty much Birmingham, accent-wise, nice = noice etc.
Compared to this, Americans are easy, except those who speak like Jay Leno.
I would really like a comedy scene when two guys argue, one is talking in Brummie, Scullie or a similar thicker British dialect, and other in either AAVE or Jamaican like Little Jacob in GTA IV.
Note: there are similar things going on with e.g. the German language as well, Frankfurt meeting Vorarlberg is a similar comedy.
However in smaller Eastern European countries pretty much everybody speaks “TV language” (not the official but close, official + slang) and I still wonder how comes TV did not kill local accents and dialects yet in every country. I was really used to everybody talking like TV and this not being a problem at all.
Warning: a time sink :-) Audio recordings of British dialects.
Serbo-Croatian used to be one language with dialects. After the countries split it became two. A lot of the Serbian languages have mutual intelligibility. Smaller Eastern European countries just named their most popular dialect it’s own language.
Communism is also likely to play a huge part. Part of the Marxist idea of accelerating progress is to get rid of dialects and make sure that everybody learns the local high language in kindergarden and school.
Diversity in the German language is also down. I had a university friend who came from a Bavarian town that had a dialect that wasn’t able to be understood in Munich. Maybe <10,000 people could understand it. It did weird things like doing new word construction by for new inventions like skateboards by adding syllables together in a way that Germanic languages or even Anglo languages usually don’t do. They had essentially their own grammar. But that dialect seemed to be dying and not used by the young anymore.
Do we even know that TV killed local accents and dialects in any country? Because I’m not sure that Slavic languages ever had such radical dialectal variety as English and German.
The Slavs just promoted their radical dialects to full-blown languages, mostly due to political fragmentation.
Anecdotal evidence—dated a woman in Birmingham who was a professional interpreter from English to Polish and she mentioned she sometimes often hired by visiting Slovak businesspeople who cannot find an English to Slovak interpreter and it works all right. Not without some confusion, but works. I was surprised, since that kind of politicial fragmentation began a good 1000 years ago.
Slavic languages resemble each other enough that people have tried to concoct pan-Slavic bridge languages for a long time. It has occurred to me that it might just be easier for someone to learn a relatively interoperable natural Slavic language (Serbo-Croat or Slovak, maybe, judging by this?) and try that as a bridge.
Slavic languages divide into three groups which are fairly different: Eastern (e.g. Russian, Ukrainian), Western (e.g. Polish, Czech), and Southern (e.g. Bulgarian, Serbian). I suspect that a natural “bridge” language might work within a group, but not between groups.
If you are a tourist in Ukraine, knowing basics of Russian is useful, the kind that the OP refers to. If you want some business done, just speak English; there would be enough translators. If you need to read something written in Ukrainian, and it is sufficiently complex and your Russian is not very good, have it translated; and even if your Russian is that good, but not your first language, it will cost you a lot of nerves.
(Also, if you know Ukrainian more or less well, it can help significantly to accept Russian, Byelorussian, Polish and Czech. I am not saying you will automatically understand those languages, just that adapting to them should be easier with Ukrainian as the base.)
I think the best return on investment in this regard is learning Russian. It is widely useful even in places like Kazakhstan or Bulgaria, due to it being taught at schools in the Soviet era. Of course that generation is aging, but not so much—I’d say over 45 people were still taught it and this is the age when they get into leadership positions and not retire for another 20-25. Besides, there are lots of scientific publications, SA of SSC mentioned medical research that never got translated and so on. Living in Central Europe, the most useful languages here look like English > German > Russian. This is of course widely location dependent.
Fun story: a friend of mine was invited to a project to the Silicon Valley and came back shaking his head saying “Next time I will learn some Spanish in advance so that I can have a chat with people like the newspaper guy.”
Less fun story: I really like the sound of the Italian language, but it does not feel like it worths investing into. I would not really want to live there, lovely culture but crazy politics and the “important” people speak English anyway. There is an enormous difference in ROI between say learning Spanish and learning Italian.
How useful to you see German outside of Germany, Austria and Switzerland?
With 50+ people in Czech Republic, Slovenia, Croatia, even Hungary, so basically ex-Habsburg places, it tends to be useful. They picked up some amount of it from their grandparents who remember when it was the lingua franca of the monarchy and their English is not very good usually. The typical old Czech tourist in Budapest will try to communicate in more or less broken German.
Also for young people, in this region young people usually learn English but if they have capacity left, the second one is usually German. And for this reason, “eastern” subsidiaries of DE/AT/CH companies often keep the internal reporting language in it. Which reinforces people wanting to learn it.
The most creative usage I saw was some guys from South Tyrol who offered bilingual SAP consulting to DE/AT/CH firms having subsidiaries in Italy.
I also know a lady who went to East Belgium to work and it worked out well for her.
Note, though, that you basically need to achieve native-like levels of proficiency in order to use one Slavic language to understand another. So you may well never be able to collect this return on the investment at all. My Russian isn’t anywhere near this level and, living in Central Europe, the only use I ever make of it is talking to Russians. Signage in Slavic-speaking countries becomes somewhat comprehensible, but that’s about it otherwise. Russian does, of course, allow you to communicate in Central Asia, the Caucasus, and the Baltic countries, which is nice if you want that, but also likely to be irrelevant for most people.
True, but also: I smell some significant business opportunities in the general direction of Central Asia. It is a very virgin market for e.g. tech products and they have natural resources / fossil fuels to pay with.
Ha ha, when I first read that, I thought “furriner” was another nickname for Furries and I was very, very confused.