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Comment by Fuzzwah | Hacker News Reader

As an Aussie who is living in Phoenix and has lived in Kentucky I've really enjoyed the variety of dialects I've run into so far.

I'm not sure if it is due to coming from a culture which pulls in media from all over the english speaking world or just a personal "gift" but I really don't find any accent difficult to understand.

Where as I've found that occassionally people I've met in the US have a hard time understanding me (and more so my Aussie wife, who speaks faster and quieter than me), and also mention that they have trouble understanding other dialects from around America.

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Where as I've found that occassionally people I've met in the US have a hard time understanding me

My spouse is from England and we live in Ireland. Here, Irish people will have a lot of exposure to English accents (though TV & film), however English people will not have had as much exposure to Irish accents. (There is much more English TV than irish TV, and much more English TV is shown in Ireland than Irish TV showsn in England).

As a result, there is an asymmetry. Irish people will understand the accent of an English person, but not vice versa. But the Irish person may presume that the English person can understand them as well as they can understand the English person, so they probably talk fast and use idioms, etc.

So you might have the same situation. Remember just because you can understand their accent fine, doesn't mean they can understand yours!

Also you find the TV effect on many of the actual accents. Cockney (E London dialect) glottal stops have turned up in Glasgow (Scotland) children because of the very popular BBC Cockney TV soap Eastenders. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/3531075.stm

> coming from a culture which pulls in media from all over the english speaking world

I really enjoyed this about Australia. When I was there we liked to turn on the TV each morning to watch the cartoons, because they had stuff from England and India and all over the place.

Growing up in England, we had British, Australian and American TV shows.

The only accent I've really had trouble with is the deep southern accent in and around New Orleans. The heavy Cajun accent from the rural areas is nearly indecipherable to me but even in the city some things are just weird. Most of what gets me in the city is that there is strong French influence but nothing seems to be pronounced the way it would be in French. e.g. Milan is pronounced 'm eye - l i n'.

There was a discussion on Shibboleths on HN a few days ago.

The wikipedia reading on the subject is fascinating.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_shibboleths#In_the_Unit...

That's true, I've lived in Texas and now California. The accents vary a lot, even within Texas, DFW, South Texas, Austin have slightly varied accents; the only thing in common is when Texans say "ya'll"

As someone born and raised in Michigan, I've adopted y'all in my own speech. I think its a fun and useful phrase if for no other reason than to confuse others around here, lol.

I'm also glad to see Michigan properly represented. Us trolls that live under the bridge are quite different from the Yoopers who have more in common with Canada and cheese-heads. All in good fun though :)

This is interesting. I'm from Michigan and it took me a couple re-reads to understand you were talking about Upper vs Lower peninsula. I'm from near Detroit, curious if you're more north of that? We generally compare more to Ohioans than "Yoopers" as you say.

I've been living in NYC for a couple years and I've adopted some words and also had "pop" beaten out of me for soda.

I'm in Seattle, and plenty of people around here use y'all. Well, or we're just being ironic. Or we find a second person (explicitly) plural pronoun useful on occasion.

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