Comments by "SmallSpoonBrigade" (@SmallSpoonBrigade) on "American English is Changing Fast" video.

  1. It's because it's a relatively young country and people have had far more opportunities to move around than they did in the UK and most of the rest of the world. They also existed for centuries prior to the invention of TV, radio or even records, which means that the only spoken language they would hear would be from others speaking a similar dialect or from people who were clearly not speaking it correctly. Here in WA there isn't a particular dialect you've got people born here that speak like Canadians or Californians or various groups of East Coasters and they're not quite the same, but they aren't consistent enough between the dialects spoken to really point at one or another as the local dialect. Before I spent time learning foreign languages and traveling overseas, my accent was place-able to about 400 miles of where my parents were from by people knowledgeable enough about language.
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  2. The TH sound is just a hard sound to make. English is one of the relatively few languages out there that use it. It's not necessarily because of where you're living, I was born and raised in America and I was about that age when I was finally sat down with a speech therapist and worked it out. Completely ruined my accent stability from then on as I got used to listening to works as sounds as much as as words. The Dutch presumably split their words between the T and the H when they appear next to each other the way the Germans do. The other problem is that it requires you to stick your tongue out while doing it. Just stick the tongue a bit through the teeth and touching the upper teeth and blow with a wide mouth gets you words like theory or thing. Voice it and you get the and this. Since you speak English, you should be able to coach her through it fairly quickly. I find that even non-native speakers usually get it fairly quickly when they've got somebody to mirror.
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  3. Pronouncing that list of words as unique words is non-standard English and if we're going to be laughing at people, it would probably be at the people who pronounce them as different words. That's a British English thing that's been retained by people in New England and to my knowledge nowhere else in the US is that the standard pronunciation. Arguably Southerners pronounce them differently, but they'll typically take the diphthongs apart and pronounce them as separate vowels, so I'm not really sure that should count. If you're wanting to know where people come from on the basis of their accent, there's no way of doing it that is quick and easy. It requires a fairly significant amount of time studying the various dialects and an excellent ear. A huge stumbling block is just hearing the sounds. There are a total of about 400 phonemes that are found in various languages and English only has about 45 of them total that are mixed to make about 12,000 unique syllables. If you haven't learned to hear the words as sounds rather than words it can be quite difficult to identify them. I pronounce rut, root and route as three different words, but my friend can only tell the difference between rut and route, but not rut which falls in between the two in terms of pronunciation. It's kind of an uh sounds with a sharp exhalation.
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  4. raleighman3000 At some point I'll probably learn Dutch, but it's not a priority. I'm a native English speaker and I'm pretty good with German so I can open up a Dutch book and generally know what's being said without ever having studied. It would be kind of an interesting experience to learn a language without any instruction of any sort. That's more or less what happened with me. I was taught to make the sound and then I had people on me about it even though it wasn't causing problems with comprehension. But, the process did mess up the stability of my accent.
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