Gibraltar has a lovely mix of people from all over Europe and all of them speak English. But as Facty has pointed out in her experiences in Ireland things are not always as they seem.
Chips are fries, fries are fries, crisps are chips, biscuits are cookies, and cookies are cookies.
It’s a little deeper than that though.
The British speak English as do the Gibraltarians (Gibbies as I call them). But so do the Scots, the Irish, the Welsh, the Aussies, and the South Africans. Those are the core native language speakers that you’re likely to run into on a day to day basis. Then you have Eastern and Western Europeans who have learned English as a second, third, or fourth language. Last, but certainly not least, you have the Indians who also have learned English as a secondary language.
Now this might seem like a dream, all these people speaking your native tongue, but it’s not that simple. The Brits have a different accent than do the Irish. And the Welsh sound different from the Scots. So even when speaking with someone who’s mother tongue is English, training your ear to follow one particular dialect/accent doesn’t necessarily make it easier to decipher the another. People have different accents, like duh, Bill. No, seriously, it’s not that easy. Even within England, someone from Manchester sounds very different from someone who comes from London. And even within London, you have different accents based on where you grew up.
The folks who do voice over work on television [more on that later] have a very clean accent. It’s very neutral and I was able to understand it right off the bat. But as the accents begin to diverge from that nice clean, very even patterned speech, you find yourself needing to pay more and more attention just to make out what is being said. Some accents are just impossible to understand until you’ve grown accustomed to them. I’ve found myself on more than a few occasions wondering if they were even speaking English.
There’s one person in particular who has a heavy, heavy accent which I’ve termed mush-mouth British. I know I’m not alone on this one because even some of his fellow countrymen have commented on how difficult he is to understand. Basically it sounds as if he’s got a mouth full of food whenever he speaks. Way too many letters in his speech are replaced with the letter F. Mowf = Mouth. Chrismaf = Christmas. Here was a recent conversation we had:
[He finishes saying about a paragraph worth of dialogue]
Me: Dude, I only understood two words out of what you just said; pool and frog.
Him: I didunt say nufing about no frog!
Me: Okay, make that one word then.
Typically, until your ear gets trained to a certain accent, there’s about a 1 – 2 second delay between when someone says something and when your brain grasps the meaning. First you hear the words, you pick out the ones you understand clearly, and then you try to piece together a meaningful statement or question based on the context of the conversation. So if you pop into McDonald’s and someone asks you “Eat here or take away?” not only do you have to rely on deciphering the words but this is very different from the question “For here or to go?” that you would hear in the US.
I’m slowly getting used to training my ear to new accents but it’s a slow and sometimes bewildering experience. 🙂
Earlier I mentioned voice overs. At home I have Sky TV which is pumped out of the UK via satellite. All the channels are from the UK but they contain a mix of US and UK shows (there are some Indian, Spanish, German and French channels but I’m not sure if those are part of the Sky TV lineup or something pumped into the system locally). So, you might have a channel like Paramount Comedy 1 which pretty much just shows back to back to back US sitcoms. The Hallmark Channel shows Law and Order (SVU and CI) on a loop. National Geographic and Discovery are pretty much what you see back in the US. The strange thing though is that many of the shows and commercials get voiced over in British English. Obviously they don’t voice over Everybody Loves Raymond but when you watch something on the Discovery Channel that you’ve seen before in the US you notice that the voice over now has a British accent where when you watched it in the US it had no accent. Same thing goes for commercials. Many commercials are the same ones you see in the US but unless the actors have dialogue, the voice over is done with a British accent.
American football and basketball do something similar as well. If you watch a football game, British announcers will pipe in frequently but when they cut to the action the normal US announcers do the play by play.
Not that any of that means anything but willythewise did ask about the differences so there you go.