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Comment by wink | Hacker News Reader

I'm a) not a linguist and b) ESL - but I notice a stark different between Irish/Scottish/Texan (as a standin for a thick southern example) on the one hand and most Indian/African (both native) and French (as ESL) dialects on the other end. The former are doing a lot of different words, contractions and mostly different pronunciations, but the latter are often using the same words, no contractions but just speaking with a different stress on syllables and melody of the sentence and that's what makes it harder for me. But I am in no way disputing your "getting used to it" argument.

Also, and again I might be wrong, but I cannot for the life of me understand people from Glasgow but the rest of Scotland was pretty much fine when I was there. I know it's kinda different but lumping "Scottish" together is already weird. I'm from Bavaria, I know how it is - people who understand German can't understand us :P

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A data point from me: people in Chicago had real trouble understanding my English accent. Then I realised that when they had trouble understanding I reflexively said it again closer to Received Pronunciation i.e. even more English. Then i started imitating the Chicago accent and people understood me. They still thought I had an English accent, just not so thick they couldn’t understand me. English people who knew me found the way i talked to Chicagoans absolutely hilarious.

The fact that you're willing to put in the effort for accents with different words, contractions and pronunciations but not willing to put in the effort for slightly different stress/melody is sadly quite common.

Someone saying "I'm going to pick up my ute in the arvo while I eat a jaffle" - sure, let me look up what that means. Whereas "Kindly do the needful" - no fuck this, you need to learn to fucking speak English.

I'd say the difference isn't what you've pointed out, it's the colour of the skin of the speaker. White people saying anything they feel like - the onus is on the listener to adapt. Brown/black people saying anything - they need to learn to speak English.

> lumping "Scottish" together is already weird

You lumping "Indian" together is equally weird. What's the matter? You can't tell the difference between a Tamil person and Malayali person speaking English? Spare me the condescension, please.

I grew up familiar with "do the needful", which I still use. I also grew up many thousands of miles from India. But my favorite Indian expression, which I learned later is to "prepone" something, as in the opposite of to "postpone" something. That one, I genuinely love. Neither of these are slang, like "ute" or "arvo", they're a thoughtful evolution of the language.

You are the only one that is acting racist here.

I put in the effort for every English accent I've encountered - French, Turkish, Greek, Scottish, Australian, Indian Canadian.

You put in the effort for white people's accents.

But sure, I'm the racist.

Typical isn't it? Indian person complains about racism and you immediately decide that complaining is racist. Says everything I need to know about you.

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