How NOT to learn a dialect

Learning the "standard" and then replacing everything later is a waste of time.
70% off lifetime plan with Lingopie: learn.lingopie.com/Language_J...
Edited with Gling AI: bit.ly/46bGeYv
patreon: www.patreon.com/languagejones
#languagelearning #linguistics #dialects #argentina

[@columbus8myhw]

As demonstrated in Geoff Lindsey's recent video, yes Spain Spanish has both /s/ and /θ/, and they're distinct ("español" has /s/ not /θ/), _but,_ it is still the case that the /s/ phoneme is pronounced quite differently than the /s/ phoneme of English.

[@dollopsofspraycream]

An excellent companion/sequel to "they don't talk too fast". In a sense, most people who learn languages as literate adults see even the standard spoken variety as just a 'dialect' of the written form. I really wish I'd had these insights when I was younger.

[@stevenwilliamson6236]

Kevin Bridges says that the phrase is : cunts frae Embra.

[@kawumbakawumba2782]

just for algorithm

[@languagejones6784]

Much obliged

[@ryanzin6451]

Lets make this look like a huge argument in the chat for the algorithm! Rock on language jones

[@penguinlim]

​@@ryanzin6451I can't believe you would suggest such a thing. You can't even bother to capitalize his name!

[@patrickhodson8715]

me when the

[@ryanzin6451]

@@penguinlim how dare you!

[@kyleh4354]

I'll do it for you - and for the algorithm 🙂 Spanish spoken in Spain only "lisps" the letters "c" (before "e" and "i") and "z" but not "s" - so it's not "ethpañol" but rather "español". A lot of un(der)educated folks think that every "s" sound in Spain is pronounced with a lisp but that's not the case. The word "casa" is pronounced with an "s" whereas the word "caza" is pronounced "catha". I wish I knew how to type in IPA here but hopefully all y'all get the point!

[@riccardopucci3165]

There is a notable exception though, namely the southern part of Andalusia which has ceceo (that is, is also pronounced as th)

[@RaycoJ]

This is part of the idea behind that, for sure, but I think what he was pointing at is the fact that in some areas in Southern Spain people use an interdental ("th" sound in "think" for example) where most speakers would use an "s" sound, so for example they would say "cosa" (thing) as "coza". It's just another variant but it's really HEAVILY stigmatized

[@ahmedharajli189]

“A lot of uneducated folks” what’s that supposed to mean

[@dhank9860]

Omg, I’m so glad someone mentioned this. It was driving me crazy.

[@zahleer]

Allow me to disagree, wether you call that a lips or no: "The phoneme /s/ has three different pronunciations depending on the dialect area...An apical alveolar retracted fricative (or "apico-alveolar" fricative) [s̺], similar to English /ʃ/ and is characteristic of the northern and central parts of Spain. An apical dental grooved fricative [s̄] , which has a *lisping quality* and sounds something like a cross between English /s/ and /θ/ but is different from the /θ/ occurring in dialects that distinguish /s/ and /θ/. I don't consider "zeta" or "th" for that matter to be lispy but rather the normal /s/ because: A laminal alveolar grooved fricative [s], much like the most common pronunciation of English /s/ common in western Andalusia, the Canary Islands, and Latin America.

[@philipgwyn8091]

I live in Québec. I have a few friend who have lived in Lauzane or still live there. One friend came back to QC for a few weeks, with his wife, and we had a party to celebrate. At the party we were all fluent speakers of French. I noticed we all had to modify our French to be mutually intelligible. The Québcois were pulling out their international accents. The Swiss natives who'd live in Québec where speaking differently depending on who they were talking to. And the Swiss who'd never lived in Québec where struggling to keep up - in fact I saw at least two occasions where a "translation" was needed.

[@murphface]

I've studied an Indigenous Canadian language now for a number of of years, but I can certainly affirm I *do not* speak it - give me any word or phrase in isolation, however, and I can usually give you a detailed morph-by-morph breakdown of that word/phrase and probably even some historical notes on where it came from

[@KeolaDonaghy]

Taylor, this has helped me in so many wildly divergent ways for my current project I can't share them all. Mahalo nui.

[@MTimWeaver]

So, in my Spanish journey, I grew up in Southern California and was familiar with Mexican Spanish. When I formally studied it in grad school, my first semester instructor was from Bolivia, second was Mexican, third and fourth semesters was Peruvian. Fast forward a couple years, and I was working for a Mexican newspaper in their Tucson office. After that, had a job doing business development for a university in Latin America and Miami (Mexico, Venezuela, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, and Puerto Rico). Had this job for 4 years. One of the things that happened during my travels is that I'd pick up vocabulary I didn't know from wherever I happened to be. Which doesn't always sound right. Fast forward to an interview with a government department and I pass the written and reading comprehension. One day, I get a call from an employee and we have the oral interview for about 40 mins on the phone. When we were done, he asked, "Where did you learn your Spanish?" "Well,..." then explained everything above. Then he said, "Oh, that explains a lot. You speak like an American with a slight Mexican accent, but your vocabulary is all over the place. It was a little strange." So, yeah, just substitute words...it'll be fine. 🤣

[@RICHUNCLEPENNYBAGS77]

I can appreciate. your point and it's especially true for "dialects" like Chinese "dialects" where they're totally mutually unintelligible anyway. But surely part of the issue here is that a Spanish learner doesn't necessarily want to limit themselves to just one place (half the appeal of Spanish is just how widely spoken it is, after all) and the difficulty of producing 60 different Spanish textbooks which are ultimately only going to offer fairly slight variation, at least until you start naming foods or tools or some other category where the standardization of words across regions is very poor. It's not as though a native speaker from Mexico would get off a plane in Buenos Aires and be unable to communicate with the locals.

[@CosmicDoom47]

IMO a good course would include samples from multiple dialects. Stuff like s-aspiration, distinción, or voseo can be tricky for learners without prior exposure.

[@EnkiduShamesh]

I'm sure they would be able to communicate, but it would probably be similar to myself, an American, ending up in Scotland and communicating with the locals. It would be possible, but as soon as they stop speaking slowly and altering their dialect to be understood by a yank, I'm going to get lost. I know Mexicans who can only partly understand other Mexicans because of the heavy influence of Nahuatl. As is pointed out in the video, there are influences from other languages, like Italian, in Argentinian Spanish.

[@EnkiduShamesh]

I used to work for an Irish guy that had left Ireland in his early twenties, decades before I worked for him. It was several years before I could consistently understand him, and all of that went out the window when he had a pint. He didn't speak Gaelic either, just an Irish dialect of English.

[@RICHUNCLEPENNYBAGS77]

@@EnkiduShamesh I just don't think this is really going to be your issue, as a second-language learner, for a long time, till you're at a very high level. For me I'm a bit more comfortable listening to Caribbean Spanish but, honestly, it does not make a very big difference what country's Spanish I am hearing; the extent to which I can understand or not understand is pretty similar. And whoever you talk to is likely to realize you don't speak Spanish as a native and communicate accordingly, anyway.

[@RICHUNCLEPENNYBAGS77]

@@CosmicDoom47 That's not a bad idea, but I guess their thought is you'll eventually get exposure through native materials, so they're sticking to people speaking in a very standard way, slowly, with careful enunciation.

[@koalaguy2153]

Watching this kinda makes sense why québécois was always easier for me to understand than Parisian French even when I was learning French and up to now where I am fluent but struggle with Parisian French. Growing up in a Quebecois speaking region really helps

[@Louisianish]

C'est moi avec le français louisianais, la langue maternelle de mes grands-parents. This is me with Louisiana French, my grandparents' native language.

[@CosmicDoom47]

I grew up speaking an Indian language at home, and I can understand my family's dialect very well, but not other dialects (including the standard dialect, used on TV). As a little kid I was always confused how my parents could watch TV shows in the language when it was literally gibberish for me. IME this is very common for heritage speakers, since their input is often entirely in one dialect.

[@Aryan-mh9vd]

@@CosmicDoom47 What is the language?

[@christianspanfellner3293]

British English was the first dialect of English we studied in school (or, more accurately, an already slightly old-fashioned version of Received Pronunciation -- in the 1990s, none of our teachers had probably even heard of Standard Southern British English yet). So a few months before leaving my native Germany to spend a year in the States, I started rewiring my brain to what I thought was a General American pronunciation, while my brother cautioned I might be better off waiting until I got there and picking it up from the locals. He was so right. I soon realized that substituting every British [ɒ] with an [ɑ] didn't work for most U.S. regions (most certainly not for northwest Ohio). And of top of that, I developed an ear for something no dictionary will tell you: the differences in the speech of teenagers, their parents and grandparents.

[@JemRochelle]

I'm new to your channel but I love your videos!

[@hya2in8]

9:18 a gusto> aúhto is how agustus became (a)oû(t) in french lol

[@Bibir3321]

Love you did this subject. It’s like you knew that whilst living in a French speaking country and learning the language, I enjoy way too much distracting myself with the side languages around me and that interest me, such as patois, jèrriais, romantsch, marseillais, ladino, cajun, kouri-vini, and québécois. But if i just stopped all that and focused on standard french i’d be much further along :-/

[@hazesystem2213]

you could but it would be so much less fun and life is too short to not have fun with it

[@Bibir3321]

@@hazesystem2213 Exactly! :)

[@fiddeou]

the chilango slang is also very interesting. You take a slang idiom like "Me cae", meaning smth like "I'm certain" then you do wordplay "me canso" and then rhyme "me canso ganso", and then some people do whole frases like "me canso ganso, dijo un sancudo cuando volar no pudo porque un ala se le rompió y la otra se le hizo nudo"

[@jeremiahreilly9739]

The video I've been waiting for! I am a native English speaker living in German speaking Switzerland. I know "standard German" (aka Hochdeutsch) well. German has spoken in Germany and Austria has many dialects. The six major dialects of Swiss German is a whole other kettle of fish: Low, High, and Highest Alemannic German. Swiss German speakers learn a form of "Swiss standard German" (aka schriftliches Deutsch) which is similar to, but not identical with, Hochdeutsch. I've studied Baseldiitsch for 18 months with limited success. The teaching method used is the rule-based how-to-convert-Hochdeutsch-to-Swiss-German. Different pronouns. Different grammar. Phonemic changes. Different vocabulary. Learning Swiss German is made more difficult because there is absolutely no standardized orthography and many Swiss believe that Swiss German is not a real language. Au contraire. Bravo for tackling this topic.

[@hopegate9620]

I guess it's just a matter of exposure. For Spanish, all of my teachers were from Spain, but I was watching many many episodes of an Argentinian and Mexican show, reading books and speaking to people from a lot of different countries. So now, while there are a lot of regional expressions that I don't know, I can understand most accents well.

[@Bittzen]

I just found you and love your videos. I've been recently trying to go back and learn the Fujianese or Taiwanese accent in Mandarin instead of the really standard (though not Beijing) accent I've learned. I mostly know Southern Chinese dialectal words and understand their accent and dialect perfectly, since I live in Chinatown with all the Fujianese immigrants and do business with Taiwanese. I wanted to wait until I got more fluent in Mandarin before I started pronouncing 是 as "si" for example. I already speak their dialect besides the pronunciation. I have trouble with understanding Northern Chinese speakers, and your videos have been a bit helpful in giving me advice on getting exposure to their speech to get used to the way they speak.

[@travisjacobson2334]

Every time I see a Dr. Jones video, my brain always starts to chant “Jones! Jones! Jones!” But in the Bill Nye theme song. 😂😂😂

[@jbejaran]

If Google is to be believed: "People from the capital of Scotland have a few names that they are known by, including Edinburgers and Edinbourgeois, but the most common is Edinburghians, pronounced Edd-inn-burr-eee-anns. The basic origins appear to derive from the place name Eidyn, mentioned in the Old Welsh epic poem Y Gododdin."

[@helenjohnston3178]

Aye. But don't suggest a Leither is from Edinburgh. For real accent/dialect fun go to Glasgow or Aberdeen! After marrying into a family with Aberdeenshire links, I can understand everything in Brave!

[@vladimir520]

Great video, thank you so much! Now that how not to learn a dialect was addressed, do you have any advice for learning rarer dialects, or just rare languages in general? I'd be interested to look into stuff like different dialects of Romanian (my native language), different dialects of Greek (regional southern varieties, or maybe just Cypriot Greek - although admittedly that one is not rare), and languages such as Aromanian, Pontic Greek, Tsakonian or Romani. These aren't the easiest things to find / interact with / engage, so I'd be interested to know how people take on studying a rare language with limited resources at their disposal.

[@thenoblegnuwildebeest3625]

This is a really interesting topic. I spent some time working on a master's thesis having to do with inference of historical sound change laws through finite state transducer inference, though I ultimately abandoned it due to lack of linguistic knowledge. But it seems like it could be a fruitful area of work for someone more knowledgeable than I.

[@languagejones6784]

There was a paper a while back that created a measure for AAE dialect density and it basically reduced AAE to a series of transformations of “standard” English. It was NOT well received. But yes, there’s a lot FSTs can do!

[@justin.booth.]

It would have been really interesting to see some of those examples of socioæinguists incorrectly transcibing AAE, it would help a lot with the context. For example, what kinds of things do they get wrong? Is it specific constructions that deviate from the rules they are taught? Or something else?

[@fernandoteitelbaum]

As a Brazilian Southerner I'm at ease with Rioplatense Spanish. Not far away, if I hear an excited Chilean I might as well be hearing someone speaking Greek. I know Chilean Spanish is famously incomprehensible, even for natives... I think it's the best analogy with the Scottish for native English Speakers. Glad that you talked about Quilombo, too! I'd love to see a video about the WILD differences (crazy differences phonological, lexical and grammatical) between Brazilian and European Portuguese. Amazing vid, as always. Abraços!

[@GSully32]

Love your videos

[@languagejones6784]

Thank you!

[@martinhartecfc]

Just a slightly off-topic comment on something near the start of the video here (hope that's OK), but I'm surprised more people don't talk about the whole mixing Spanish-Italian thing. I seem to have the opposite problem to you (I lived in Spain for a few years about a decade ago and recently, I've been trying to learn a little Italian and I'm pretty shocked at how difficult it is to keep Spanish out). People do talk about mixing Spanish and Portuguese; but I honestly think Spanish and Italian are even harder to keep separate.

[@hopegate9620]

I also have this problem. Since my Spanish level is already advanced, now that I'm learning Italian it's quite easy to understand (with also French and some Latin as a bonus) however when I try speaking the Spanish just takes over.

[@languagejones6784]

I’m going to address this in a video pretty soon. The title will be something around “learning two languages at the same time”

[@lardgedarkrooster6371]

I've been learning French and anytime I speak it, I end up speaking more of a Frenchified version of Spanish that just happens to be correct most of the time. It's really difficult to keep the Spanish out, but sometimes it makes for good entertainment

[@Cerg1998]

It's not necessarily because the languages are related, but it can make it worse. I can't say that I've gone too deep into figuring out the reasons, but subjectively I would describe it as "language is language, the brain doesn't distinguish between them all that much, at least at first, when you only begin studying a new one, so it kinda shoves it all in the same category". Hence code switching and such. So when you start learning a 3rd+ language (I'm speaking purely from personal experience and anecdotal evidence in that part) your brain kinda puts your L3 into the same "pile" as L2. I guess, the more similar they are, the more you experience it, as I barely ever conflated English with Latin or my native language, but I sure did struggle to separate between German and English grammar, when I started learning the former. I've also observed L3-L4 mixing and code-switching between German and Portuguese, which are barely related. Mixing the languages can also increase and reduce as your fluency in either of the languages changes. I've seen some studies that claimed that L2 has a way more significant effect on L3 than L1 does on L3 and possibly even L2? So it might be that. I'm way out of my depth here and haven't done anything academically linguistic in years though, so I might be partially (or completely) wrong.

[@ProactiveYellow]

I made the interesting decision to make my second language the delightful little conlang of toki pona, and i can read and speak it quite fluidly, but it has been very interesting to me to see how it has grown and changed so much even in the time i've learned it, such that some of these newer speakers are speaking with patterns that i can recognize as meaningful, but are entirely alien to how i learned to speak. A similar phenomenon happens when speaking to people in my new target language of Norwegian, and the regional dialects and mixtures with the other nordic languages really trip me up, even though i have a decent grasp on the structure and sound of the language.

[@JohnnyLynnLee]

As someone who have being learning Vietnamese for 5 yeas now and just started Mandarin my advice is: start with a dialect/accent right from the get go and understanding all others will be way easier, specially for languages with a somewhat "artificial" standard version like Mandarin, that no one speaks outside the TV. I know 'cause I didn't do that with Japanese and understanding Kansai dialect was a lot harder. If you are learning Arabic start with Lebanese/ Egyptian (any of your liking) Arabic as you start with Fusha. Day one! If you are learning Spanish pick at least an specific group of countries to d most of your leading, like Central America, or Colombia and Venezuela besides Mexico. And if you are going for Latin American Spanish don't bother at ALL with European as much as possible when you are starting. Pick one and say to you, that will be "my" X language. The rest my brain needs to understand as VARIATIONS of "my" X language. To this day I can say the double R in Italian because I listened a lot to a Sardinian on youtube. And Italians will understand a Sardinian not pronouncing it but NEVER a foreigner (including a Sardinian himself).

[@thomaspscheidt3876]

thank you!!!!

[@eternal_learner9943]

It would be cool if you could make a video about Tolkien, his love and knowledge of language and how it relates to LOTR. Maybe even something on the languages he invented.

[@trademark0013]

It’s similar to gaming or sports actually. You can KNOW what to do or look out for but in real time, it’s a lot to remember at once. You have to practice and become familiar so it’s second nature

[@wonderbugone]

On the topic of dialect, I was interested in learning Gyeongsangdo dialect of Korean because my partner's is a mixture from the Busan area, but decided that beyond certain key phrases for giggles, it doesn't really make sense for me to learn it because learning materials are basically all Seoul dialect, most media and other listening opportunities are Seoul dialect, and I've never lived in Gyeongsangdo (currently live in Seoul), only visited, so I don't have any connection or identity tied to it other than my partner. I feel now that even beyond it being logistically almost impossible for me, it would just be weird if I suddenly started talking like a southerner, just like it'd be weird if my partner started talking to me in British English despite having lived in Canada, but never the UK. That's just how I've come to see it in my case, but more power to people trying to switch their dialect or learn a minority one. It definitely does bug me that Seoul dialect is considered "standard", whatever that means

[@Rilows]

Argentinian here. Regarding the prononciation of the letter S in “desde”, the /s/ sound becomes “aspirated" before another consonant or a pause. So we say it like “dehde” instead of “desde”. Other examples: mosquito, casco, España, rosca

[@vampyricon7026]

New comment, since I remember the example I actually wanted to give. I've just started learning Latin, and I'm using reconstructed Classical Latin as the phonology. Surprisingly, I was able to pick out a few words from an Ecclesiastical Latin video, though my understanding of Latin is minimal in either case, so I'm not sure this proves anything. Another example is that I have trouble with Mainland Chinese Mandarin when I have much less of an issue with Taiwanese Mandarin. I needed subtitles while watching Mainland shows.

[@romnempire]

I was listening to CORAAL based on some of your previous videos, and could clearly identify several transcription errors. Is there a good way to submit revisons?

[@Eruntano42]

Argentinian Castellano, the most underrated of the Latin American dialects.

[@mew11two]

Is it though? It's usually like the third option offered after Spanish and Mexican varieties.

[@aiocafea]

yeah trying to learn darija really opened my eyes to how we do this all over in language learning i couldn't have put it better that you are taught a way to speak and then 'the difference', you're supposed to subtract language on the fly if that's just 'broken french' why do you need to break it in such specific ways? why does it take so long? how do so many start with 'broken french' and learn it properly but it's so difficult to learn standard french and *then* informal varieties? we're supposed to evolve a language in our heads, or even trace back to a common speech pattern and then re-evolve it edit: i don't mean darija is broken french, i've had similar experiences with french

[@malenalucero6473]

I'm from Buenos Aires and it's /bolónqui/ not /bolonquí/ (the accent was wrong). I loved this video ❤

[@user-bk2wj4ng8z]

hay, I'm a speech therapy and i thought on using the 'Prat' software to analyse dialect for better understanding and better learning of this dialect. do you kbnow this software? can you do a video about this idea if it something that you think can work?

[@channamasala1]

Honestly speaking if I wanted to learn a dialect of Spanish and already knew some Spanish, I'd figure out some way to go live where it's spoken for awhile and muddle through till I picked it up. Unfortunately I can't do that with Armenian -- learning Eastern because I have to, there are no good learning materials available for Western, though I'd like to learn Western -- unless I can find a way to live in Glendale CA for awhile. Which I can't. It would be very hard to learn Western first, so I have to learn Eastern, and I hope someday I'll have the opportunity to immerse in Western long enough to pick it up.

[@jjero1]

What's the best phonetics resource for European Spanish?

[@loadingwave]

The video topic diverged slightly from what I expected, and that so immediately ties into my example of knowing how things work but not quite being able to put them together: I'm from an area in the netherlands with a local dialect that is still spoken quite a lot. My parents always spoke it with eachother but to me they have always spoken ABN (Algemeen Beschaafd Nederlands/General Civilised Dutch 🙄) so I never learned how to speak it. I know a lot of the rules and how to put them together but when I actually try to speak dialect it just sounds awkward :( (and I think its a shame bc i would like to be able to speak the way my parents speak with eachother)

[@JoffesThoughts]

Nice to hear a random Edinburgh mention. We don't have a commonly used word for people from Edinburgh, but some people do indeed say Edinburgher. If you're ever interested in testing your Edinburgh dialect comprehension skills I'd be happy to help.

[@cavaskonen1449]

As an Argentine American who has had to teach myself Argentine Spanish in order to communicate with my family, I have far too much experience with the differences between written description of the dialect and the actual spoken language. It's really nice to see someone have the exact same problems as me.

[@M4TCH3SM4L0N3]

Basically any language I have ever learned is as you described: I have never had the time and access to properly dedicate to speaking with others (who are fluent) in another language. I very much want to do so, but it just isn't so easy as a near 40-year-old with a wife and kids.

[@RogerRamos1993]

I, Brazilian, learned Spanish only through input. The first variant I was able to understand was the Mexican one. I had to consume dozens of hours Spain's content to be able to understand spoken Spanish from Spain. The third variant I became able to understand was the Argentinian one. And the last variant I became able to understand was the Cuban one, almost only through videos of Cuban youtubers. Now, I think I can understand any variant, except Chilean.

[@joshuasims5421]

Hey, I like graph theory!

[@kyleh4354]

Oh yeah, then there's s-dropping in Andalusian Spanish. I was talking (in Spanish) with a friend's dad who's from Andalusia and it took me a good 5 minutes to figure out that "etadítica" is how he pronounces "estadísticas" - confusing!

[@vampyricon7026]

Conscious knowledge to implicit knowledge is definitely a difficult thing to do in real time. I know a bunch of rules to transform a correspondence set between Beijing Mandarin and Hong Kong Cantonese to something for Sicuanese (stop-coda'd syllables > tone 2, /ŋ/ initial everywhere Beijingese has a null, et c.) and I still haven't started wrapping my head around understanding the language.

[@kalleoberg2538]

For the the sake of algorithm-boosting, I can tell you that I experienced this first hand coming as an exchange student to Taiwan, after having studied mandarin back in my home country… despite having watched uncountable KZbin videos about differences between Taiwanese Chinese (國語) and the Chinese standard mandarin (普通话）, it took me quite a few times before I realised that “sui” was 水 (meaning water, and pronounced with an sh initial in the version I had learned). And it wasn’t until the waiter found a menu to point at the character that I realised that “lou”in the phrase 你吃什麼”lou” was 肉（meaning meat and with an “r” initial in standard Chinese mandarin… ) When I left after one semester however, I too was saying sui (and sometimes even Lou) without thinking about it, to the point where it would annoy my Chinese teachers from china… Goes to show that theory is def not enough in and of itself, but with real life input, learning a new dialect is very doable! Now I unconsciously switch between them, depending on what I heard most recently and who I’m talking to…

[@patrickhodson8715]

You know it's serious when Dr. J didn't even make a "and this is [wrong channel name] I mean this is languagejones" joke

[@JakubSkowron]

ɛdɪnbuːɐ̯jɐ - rhymes with Luxembourger (Lëtzebuerger)

[@RyAnneFultz]

I have family in the Kentucky Appalachians. I have no issues understanding most people there, but I cannot make out what small children are saying. The dialect is understandable to me, but not familiar enough for me to understand it when it's spoken imperfectly. I can understand most small children and people with speech issues in my own two dialects, though. This is true of a lot of dialects of English. I can often understand even excited adult speakers in dialects I don't use, but once phoneme pronunciation changes. For example, I know skirl is a typical way small children where I live say squirrel. I know boomer is squirrel to my Appalachian relatives. I don't know goomer is a child's way of saying boomer at conversational speed. I also watch people who are not native English speakers struggle with my father because his idiolect is just odd. He has a tendency to make leading b soften into v before some a and e sounds, like "varely" for barely and "verry" for berry. He pronounces those vowels the same, while I do not. Native English speakers almost never seem to notice he's not using b. I think you have to be really intimate with a dialect to understand it when it's spoken "wrong."

[@KSLAMB-uz4it]

The Dreaming Spanish teachers include Augustina, who speaks Argentinian Spanish, and I can't get used to hearing her pronunciation of the double LL and the Y, both with a sh sound.

[@christopherellis2663]

Castilian has at least three modes of speech. The Madrilen version is the least of them. Edinburgh Ednbra

[@derpauleglot9772]

I guess the key take-away is that we should approach dialects in the same way we approach other languages? PS. For the algo^^

[@matt92hun]

Good points if you want to get nerdy, but if you just want to be understood and understand others, the same content they watch on TV, or on the internet is a good enough starting point that will let you pick up the differences on the way. As a native English speaker you won't even know all the Spanish sounds at first.

[@aimeelinekar3902]

Scottish person here: I taught my lycée classes to chant “Edin-bra! Bra! Edinburgh-bra!” (It’s closer to a “bruh”, honestly).

[@marioandtyler]

subscribbbed

[@mickgorro]

"pibe" is not an Italian word. I looked it up, it comes from Portuguese pivete, akin to Genoese pivetto, which I believe would be "pivello" in Italian. UPDATE Apparently not. "pivete" is from Catalan "pevet", meaning "little foot", which could be calqued as "piedetto" in Italian (we actually say "piedino", like the dinosaur in the Land before time: Littlefoot, aka Piedino).

[@neilwhitton6416]

So you "can tell (people) all about ... English spoken in Edinburgh" ? I'd like to hear you do this (remember it varies considerably according to class/educational background). People from Edinburgh don't need a word describing where they're from (unlike Glaswegians).

[@Hawaiian_Shirt_guy]

5:25 it only occurs with C and Z, because the original pronunciation was a /ts/, which diverged into a /th/ in northern spain and a /s/ in Southern Spain and Latin America. It certainly has nothing to do with a king who had a lisp, and Espanol with a /s/ or /h/, but never with a /th/. It should be noted that that transition from /s/ to /h/ occurs on a gradient, with the /s/ very forward in Mexico and "highland" latin america in general, middle to back of the mouth in Northern Spain, and all the way back to an /h/ in Southern Spain and "lowland" latin america. I could probably explain it better were it not for the Jamaican herbs lol. the lowland and highland distinction is primarily because settlers from northern spain settled on the mexican and andean altiplanos (with landscapes similar to castile in spain) and settlers from southern spain in the tropical lowlands and Caribbean. I am quite fluent in Spanish and can speak with mexicans with ease. I can barely understand spoken puerto rican spanish.

[@tylersmith3139]

It was only a /ts/ in Old Spanish. It became a retroflex 's' in middle Spanish, before splitting into a non-retroflex/ English-like 's' sound in Latin American Spanish and dialects of Andalusian Spanish(seseo) and becoming a /th/ in other dialects of Andalusian and Peninsular Spanish(ceceo and distincion).

[@zacharytipton1801]

More 中文 content please! ❤

[@NemoRamalho]

Edinbourgeois, obvish

[@wurstkocher842]

Here a comment in (my region's) austrian german: I bi gonz klor da Onsicht, dass es se quasi nia auszoit, an deitschen Dialekt stott hochdeitsch zum learna

[@channamasala1]

I just went to go look at Lingopie and I'm disappointed that they don't have the languages I'm trying to learn (not even complaining -- they are not popular languages and Duolingo doesn't carry them either. They're Armenian and Taiwanese if anyone cares). But I noticed on the list of languages Lingopie DOES offer, that they have "Chinese". Which Chinese? I assume Mandarin, but there are lots of Chinese languages -- not dialects, they are not close to mutually intelligible -- and arguably it could be Cantonese just as easily as Mandarin as it's the other big one with lots of diaspora who speak it. Because it's a Sinitic language which is a dialect of a language from China (Minnanyu or Southern Fujianese -- it's mutually intelligible with this but not Mandarin), technically you could call Taiwanese "Chinese", but they probably don't mean that. It's weirdly non-specific and you'd think a company whose entire business is language learning would know that. If you mean Mandarin, say Mandarin.

[@natlewvt]

I’m curious if you have read Percival Everett’s “James” yet. In the novel, the slaves speak mostly standard English to one another when white people are not around, and then a deliberately and abjectly exaggerated AAE to white people and one another in front of whites. Actual AAR, as far as I could tell, is erased. This was an interesting artistic choice, because language and its use is a core theme of the novel, but I felt the loss. I wonder what you and your fellow AAE scholars think of the use of language in the book.

[@five-toedslothbear4051]

Processing in real time? That would describe the level of Japanese that I’m at, I know a couple thousand words and all the pieces and if you ask me to generate some speech I have to think. Kind of familiar with the Spanish dialect, considering that I was the only person in my graduating class in high school to take four years of Spanish. I don’t think it helped my comprehension and speaking to sit in the library to read books and write term papers because that’s how they handled me being in Spanish seven and eight by myself. Anyway, here is a comment for the algorithm, and I will have to go look at Lingopie because they say Japanese is now available and it’s new.

[@moonverine]

Question I'm tossing out for the algorithm: What do you make of "nativizing" pronunciation? For example, British English speakers pronouncing jalapeño with a hard j. Dr. Lindsey has a couple videos about it, and how it's a linguistic feature, and not a sign of ignorance or indifference, much like the American tendency to aspire to "authentic" pronunciation is a linguistic feature of their English dialect. While I get all that, I have to admit that nativized pronunciations still sound off to my ear, laughable at best and deliberately obtuse at worst. I feel like attempting to get a loanword's pronunciation "right", even if you miss the mark, is far better than just contorting the word to the rules of your native tongue. Is this just a prejudice I need to get over?

[@bobblebee49]

Imo it is usually an arbitrary bias. I think of the meme about British v American English pronunciation of “croissant.” Interestingly, both sides make an argument that the other is being unintelligent/ignorant: US claims it’s silly to speak in a french accent when no one in the cafe probably even speaks french. A British person might argue something similar to what you said about trying to get loan word pronunciation “correct.” To me all this just underscores both the arbitrary aspect of this issue (if we all know what is signified by “croissant” then the pronunciation isnt really vital to communication and more of an aesthetic preference), and the fact that language is really synonymous with culture in a lot of ways. Because imo I would say these attitudes about pronunciation and our reactions to accents and languages are going to be molded by the langua-culture we are raised in (kiki and bouba notwithstanding ;)). Like the thing about pronouncing croissant in a french accent is more a reflection of British identity with Europe (and france in particular), and on the flip side, the US desire to differentiate themselves from Europe to build an identity. Though I wont stake much on the claim it goes that deep; at the end of the day say “ one cwah-sohn please” in the US is cringey, equally as cringey as saying “one cross-ant please” would be in the UK, simply due to how people are expecting the word to be pronounced.

[@RyAnneFultz]

I have no real answer, but I have a few leading questions. How do you pronounce sake, tsunami, and kamikaze? Do you pronounce those Japanese or nativized? I know if I say kamikaze "properly", Americans sometimes don't even know what I'm saying. Many of them aren't even consciously aware it's a Japanese word. I admit jalapeño with an English j or a flat n rather than ñ do catch my attention in a bad way, though, as does salsa the way many Midwesterners pronounce it.

[@georgebecker5409]

do you wear kippah when you go on in the streets?

[@languagejones6784]

I generally wear a head covering of some kind, often a kippah. The only time I don’t is when I’m going to be giving a lecture or presentation where I think it will distract or detract from the audience’s willingness to take my point (for instance, advocating for inclusive leadership - but I’m moving more toward just taking that risk). I get about as much honest inquiry and compliments as I do harassment when wearing one so it all balances out.

[@languagejones6784]

…one more thought: it’s basically only when wearing a kippah and Star of David that I get harassed on the street or mistreated in retail situations and so on. But that’s because I don’t “look” Jewish without those things since most of my genetic ancestry isn’t, and what is is not the kind of Jewish most people I interact with would recognize on sight

[@georgebecker5409]

@@languagejones6784 7azak u'baru5!

[@kgpierce]

Edinbourgeois? 😅

[@ericab3919]

Okay wait but where do you see the "rules"? Trying to learn Taiwanese Mandarin through sheer exposure without knowing the "rules" has me constantly translating from Mandarin to Mandarin in real time conversations. This makes me stuttery and slow, often asking clarification. At least they stopped switching to English to clarify now.

[@patrickhodson8715]

I'm certain it's not Edinburglar but at the same time I really want it to be Edinburglar

[@ahmedharajli189]

I think you’re sort of exaggerating how difficult it is with Spanish

[@VienerVater]

Yeah i wish i could more eloquently explain how i see what he is saying but he is like sensationalizing the issue especially with lunfardo and such

[@wardm4]

Nope. In fact, by using very specific examples, I was thinking he's actually downplaying how widespread this is when learning Spanish. Take something as simple as "Qué es esto?" If you've learned this in a class or from a textbook, then you will think it's 3 separate words. But almost all native dialects will contract a word that ends in e and a word that starts with e, so the first two words sound like "Kes." But then a word that ends in es and another that starts with es also gets contracted. So that whole question sounds roughly like one word "Kesto?" Even someone who has been studying for 2 years but not regularly engaging in native content could listen to that on repeat a dozen times without comprehending what the phrase is. And that just a simple 3 word question. When you have to listen to a full complex sentence with these types of different dialectical contractions all over the place, it becomes impossible to sort out in real time.

[@ahmedharajli189]

@@wardm4 I think this sort of undermines how quick it is for speakers to adapt. Like we all know that people tend to contract their language when speaking. And it’s usually quite quick for people to catch up on. What formal text books usually do is prepare us with extra information and what we find in the real world actually simplifies it for us. I’m not saying you’re dumb if you’re so flabbergasted by contractions that you just thing the language is unbearable, but if you’re not thinking logically and adapting to it (btw this isn’t really much of an adaption it’s actually a very simple example you gave) then you gotta use your mind more 😂

[@nagontingingenhar]

B

[@jack2453]

If I take nothing else from this video it is that henceforth residents of the capital of Scotland are Edinburglars.

[@chin_chillin_villian]

Rithmalgo

[@lennih]

Native porteño here. /d/ becoming an approximant in "nada" is universal Spanish. There's nothing dialectal or regional about it, since *there's no single variety of Spanish where this allophony doesn't happen in the exact same way and under the exact same conditions.* Variation across different dialects may only occur when /d/ is at the end of a word ("ciudad, universidad..."). A similar point could be made about [b ~ β ~ v] -- I don't want to ramble on with the details. And what's your problem with sociolinguists? Why would you attack part of your (already rather niche) audience? I was one of the people who left a negative comment on the latinxs video, because I thought it was very poorly researched. LGBTQ+ activists and political activists have worked to create a standard on inclusive language, working with communities all around Latin America, giving courses on both how to speak it and why to speak it (a classical Labovian 'change from above' that has all linguists fascinated, as they see something so big happening in their lifespan). 'Chicos' becomes 'chiques', 'nosotros' becomes 'nosotres', 'pibes' becomes 'pibis'..., and there are a lot of people I know who speak like that, with varying degrees of consistency. And they may be spelled with an x, @ or an actual vowel, but there's a (newly created) standard on how to pronounce it. The entire video about "latinéks" (which you keep mispronouncing, in lieu of the standard 'latínes', even after people from all of Latin America told you in the comments of that video that the x is pronounced as the vowel /e/) was very cringeworthy, although the morphological conclusion you arrived at is spot-on. I mainly took issue with that video because instead of thinking that "spelling is subsidiary to speech", your entire video implies that "speech is subsidiary to spelling" and you draw morphological conclusions (accidentally correct) on poorly-researched spelling-only evidence. Linguists don't do that. I don't rule out the possibility of US Spanish speakers maybe pronouncing "latinéks", I've no idea, since "eks" only exists in English. But that's not how it's pronounced in the majority of the Spanish speaking world, and definitely not how the communities who created this new standard pronounce it. And on the previous video you attacked linguists who "misunderstood a quote by Chomsky" or something like that, and I felt like I could have written 5000 words on how you misunderstand people you incorrectly believe misunderstand Chomsky. Socio-linguists can acknowledge many of Chomsky's ideas and respect and even admire Chomsky (I'm definitely an admirer), but each expert brings a different aspect of language into focus and may feel that their area is the most relevant, and that's fine. You don't need to look down on entire groups of linguists as if you were speaking to us from a pedestal. Lots of love. xxx

[@EinNameDenKeinerHat]

Definitely Edinburglers

[@liquensrollant]

When's the video trashing sociolinguistics coming out?

[@LIYANMUSIC]

I think i've learned a whole bunch of nothing

[@SimonRGates]

Edinburgh? That's almost English, drunk Glaswegian is where all the cool kids are at: kzbin.info/www/bejne/iofOZaGeYs11gbs

[@leonlindner6929]

Algorithm fodder

[@DostoenVnimaniay]

Первый!

[@Refael8219]

שבת שלום.

[@MelissaCarole13]

Ugh! Boring!

[@languagejones6784]

I appreciate your comment!

[@cyganskadywizjapiechoty]

Formidable!