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Comment by cardanome | Hacker News Reader

The categorization of dialects is a bit disappointing.

What the hell is an "Uk" accent? So a posh southern English accent would be the same category as a northern one? I get that considering nearly every city has its own dialect of English it would hard to offer some sensible mapping but it still feels kind of wrong.

If I search for the word "climate" in "Uk", "Irish" or "New Zealand" I get the same British English video, otherwise a Scottish English video for US. Don't offer me that many choices if you are going to lump them all together anyway.

Honestly they should have just offered a switch between American English and "British English" (the Received Pronunciation that many learn at school).

Other than that, seems like a great idea and already working reasonably well.

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There's obviously some limit to how finely you could expect them to separate accents, but putting rhotic Scottish and Ulster accents in the same category with mostly-non-rhotic English accents is just crassly wrong. It's about as bad as putting Australia and the USA in the same category.

Heh.... UK = England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland.

None of these accents sound remotely alike. Back to the drawing board with this methinks.

> So a posh southern English accent would be the same category as a northern one?

I'm more amused that you think southern England is the posh part :-) Though on a more serious note, we use shorter vowel sounds in the north (in the north we say 'bath', southerners say 'baarth') which can make us harder to understand to those whom English isn't a first language.

I understood that to mean there were two dimensions: location and class.

More often than I am comfortable with, I am told I'm very easy to understand. I recommend using a middle class Midlands / South Midlands accent when abroad.

Yeah, you just described the kind of "roping in" of multiple dialects that make me worry that trying to define pronunciation in English is impossible.

I have friends who are Welsh, I have friends who are Australian, my background is Scottish, Irish, and Estuary English.

You learn very quickly that everyone has completely different ways of saying things and that you have to accept it. I can't imagine trying to define all of them, it's utter chaos.

Outside of mass media there isn't very strong standardization of pronunciation. Linguistics is a spectrum, and occasionally society decides to totally upturn how they want to pronounce things, like in the Great Vowel Shift: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift

> I'm more amused that you think southern England is the posh part :-)

Isn't that the stereotype? I thought London area is considered pretty posh. At least that is what I am getting from most popular culture. Of course both dimensions, class and location are partly independent but there is some overlap.

For example, this classic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-BVgPeZR-Y (Posh family reacts to northern nanny | The Catherine Tate Show)

> Though on a more serious note, we use shorter vowel sounds in the north (in the north we say 'bath', southerners say 'baarth') which can make us harder to understand to those whom English isn't a first language.

Yeah, as a non native speaker I need to concentrate way more because it feels faster. I love the accents though, really fun to listen to.

> Isn't that the stereotype? I thought London area is considered pretty posh.

I think what you're getting at is Estuary English, which is spoken around the estuary of the river Thames. It's pretty close to Received Pronunciation which is sort of the 'standard' English as it used to be spoken on the BBC. And probably what most Americans would classify as a posh English accent or even as just 'British English'. London also has Cockney though, which I don't think anyone would say is posh.

> London also has Cockney though, which I don't think anyone would say is posh.

Oi, guv, you sayin' East Enders geezers don't speak nice, ye? You havin' a laff, mate?

... Cockney would make me laugh so much, if it weren't for the fact that "certain people" tend to make it thicker when they want to glass you.

Cockney and MLE (a modern multicultural London accent/dialect/whatever it's officially called) are non-posh southern England accents. See the "in popular culture" for examples of MLE (Eggsy from Kingsman for example). Working-class London accents, not posh.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicultural_London_English

The West Country accent is something special!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahznvtDunEw

From a humorous perspective, how should US pronounce "wash" from a Wisconsin accent (sounds like "warsh"). Or how to pronounce "car" or "bar" from a Boston accent. (sounds like "cah" and "bah") Southern's in the US say "ant/aint" instead of "aunt". And what about "y'all"? etc, etc...

Maybe there is similarities with the varied UK accents?

In fact, English dialects in the British isles have huge variety compared to those in North America, by at least an order of magnitude. It sounds counterintuitive at first because the differences in land mass and population size are the other way around, but the actual biggest factor here is the amount of time that these regions have had English-speaking communities. Give it a few more centuries and the rate of local dialect differentiation will start to catch up.

American English dialects trace back to the various British groups that settled the different colonies. Tangier Island[1] for example has an ancient Cornish dialect. Ocracoke Island[2] has what is probably the closest thing to a living Elizabethan English speech community. Those are extreme examples, but the stereotypical New England and Southeastern dialects have similar origins, they're just considerably watered down due to the lack of isolation.

Meanwhile, the standard "BBC English" Received Pronunciation is actually quite the novelty, comparatively speaking.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20180206-the-tiny-us-isla...

[2] https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20190623-the-us-island-th...

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