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Comment by physicsguy | Hacker News Reader

I'm a native (British) English speaker, and I actually can find it quite hard to communicate with non-native speakers, because they don't understand my accent. It's not particularly strong as British accents go (nothing like Glaswegian or Geordie for example), but it really caused problems when I moved to a research group which was made up of primarily English-as-a-second-language speakers. The other thing I found was that while their speaking ability was good, their written grammar was generally poor; I'm the resident proof reader in each of the places I've worked.

Many of the people spoke what is apparently described as 'Euro-English' which has many borrowed phrases from other languages, or what native English speakers would see as mistakes but which are relatively easy to understand between non-native speakers.

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I’m a British native that works almost entirely with people with English as their second language, mostly remotely. To be effective you need to adapt your language and accent to fit the global English style, and adapt to individual dialects on a country by country basis. It seems a little counter intuitive, but English is genuinely a global language and not owned by the English anymore, so it’s important to adapt to fit that if you want to be understood.

> global English style

I am afraid there's no such thing.

Hollywood, baby.

There is such a thing called transatlantic pronunciation.

It is a good thing, then, that there is only one ocean, the Atlantic, across which English is spoken.

> the global English style

What distinguishes the global English style?

US native here, so perhaps I'm just failing to see past the absence of leftovers from Noah Webster's efforts to violently excise any evidence of French influence from the language, but, to me, Southern English English seems about right for that description.

> What distinguishes the global English style?

I'd say that it's basically just the lowest common denominator of English. Imagine an English where any accent is acceptable as long as you're consistent and any regional vocabulary is okay so long as it's well known (e.g. either "torch" or "flashlight" is okay, "soda" is okay but "pop" is not). You then have "global" English.

I’m American and I certainly don’t think “torch” to mean flashlight is well-known. The overwhelming majority of people in the US would not understand it.

Tolerance towards misuse of tense/plural, would be my guess. For example, oral Chinese doesn't distinguish between He/She/It, so we often mis{gender} people during conversation, though under the right context, it is clear what actual meaning is thus isn't really blocking effective conversation, but is not correct either.

In my mind, global English style = how they speak English on the nightly news.

I guess that does say something about English being a "good" international language. Native speakers, too, often have extremely hard time understanding foreign accents and even some "almost-native" accents; mutual understanding is an even more difficult problem for non-native speakers. This has to do with the unusual character of English vowels compared to the "continental" languages. For example, if you hear an English speaker read Latin, you would never guess it is Latin: the "say it right" guides tell one to pronounce 'e' as 'ay' etc.

I wonder if "Singlish" is the future. It's a dialect of English spoken in Singapore, but due to the Chinese influence, it is sometimes stripped of all tenses, for example.

tbh there are a lot of british accents that are hard to understand even for native english speakers.

The opposite extreme happens too, many English/Australians have trouble distinguishing Canadian and American accents (especially North-eastern US). Conversely Americans may have trouble distinguishing New Zealand and Australian accents.

You might find it hard, but I'm sure it's not harder than to learn another language, as those people did.

I don't think there is such thing as Euro-English, but a French-English, Spanish-English, Dutch-English, because every non-native speaker will make grammar/vocab/pronunciation mistakes depending on his/her primary language.

But the brilliant thing of the English is she has excellent at withstand error. Close enough is often good enough.

What makes you think this property is specific to English?

You can speak broken French too and a person from France will still understand you.

I didn’t say it was specific to English.

How true. I have many calls from head hunters based in London and their accent is hard to understand, especially via phone line.

as Americans, my wife and I laugh when we watch British TV shows because we can't understand half of what they are saying. Fortunately we have a DVR so we can repeat things 4 or 5 times to figure it out.

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