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Comment by axaxs | Hacker News Reader

I know this comment is tongue in cheek, but honestly, it's something I've come to really enjoy about English. It's so pervasive that it changes constantly, and often times you can guess where someone is from by how they construct it. As an American, I only speak English fluently but have a passing knowledge of other languages. I wonder if any other language has similar phenomena, in a single country(excluding regional dialects, which also exist here of course).

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I'm sorry to disappoint you, but this happens in every language :)

A cultured speaker (he doesn't even have to be native) will recognize where other speakers are from based on either their accent or their phrasing, in most languages.

My come from a small country (Portugal), yet there are multiple recognizable differences between not only the pronunciation but also the vocabulary used for the common words (like a cup of coffee) in different regions of the country.

The fact that we were quite poor until not that long ago might have helped to maintain those differences, since most people didn't have TVs nor could afford to move to a city to attend college. Then again, the poverty also led to major emigration from rural areas, which killed a lot of smaller communities.

Russian demonstrates this to some extent, and German, prominently.

I am currently in Moscow and I can tell anybody from Moscow just by their first sentence based on pronounciation - but almost only that. That is because Russian has a governing body that dictates what "real" russian is. English has no such body.

In English, words mean what people understand by them, not what they are suppose to mean.

French has a governing body (l'Académie française) but, at least in some parts of the world, spoken french is very different from what is prescribed by the Académie. Plus the accents are so diverse, here in Québec we are 7 million people (and not all of them french speakers) and we have as much difference in the way we speak depending on the region as you have in the U.S. for example. Funny thing, when we visit France, the french sometimes answer us in english, because our accent is so thick that they think french is not our native language.

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