[Ailist] FW: Dialiect Coaching (no quoted material)

[Roger Davies]

Just to make the point that there is a big difference between dialect and
accent. As an Englishman in America I had terrible trouble getting people in
NC to understand my name. Of course it's hard to write in an accent but when
I said may name in an English accent it drew blank looks. When I eventually
got through and heard the local pronunciation it still sounded perfectly
understandable to me but obviously very different to them. Maybe I was used
to hearing many different accents as the UK has the same breadth at least as
the US and separated by much smaller distances. I suspect people brought up
in cities or who are widely traveled will have less of a problem
understanding different accents.

Dialect however is a different use of words and colloquialisms. Here in
Minnesota the accent issue is almost non existent. However my 'six of one
and half a dozen of the other' translates into the Minnesotan phrase of 'A
horse a piece'. My experience is that when you registers a blank look all
you have to do is explain or reframe what you mean in different terms.
Eventually you get to understand and it becomes quite fun. 

I was brought up in Yorkshire in steel mill and coal mining country and my
Grandfather had a very strong accent and dialect. I spent my college years
on the east coast of England which has a strong Viking influence. I remember
hearing a radio broadcast about language with an extract of a guy speaking a
very strong dialect from a village on the west coast of the UK where I'd
never been. It was a mixture of Yorkshire and Viking and I understood it
perfectly. Apparently people from that region have made themselves
understood in Iceland without knowing a word of Icelandic.

My advice would therefore be to find people who had roots in very
multicultural societies or were very well traveled. I think it's more of a
desire to understand and communicate thing than it is a linguistic issue.
There are many more ways of communicating that language. 

Roger ( or Rarrrgerrr as they'd say in NC!!)