I was talking earlier to one of the British guys. He's one of three British people, and they all come from three different parts of England. But, as I told him, I cant hear any difference between them. I imagine that if I listened carefully to them speaking I could hear some kind of difference, but to my American ears, they just sound British. But as my friend explained to me, although they spoke close to Received Pronunciation English (basically Standard British English), the other two sometimes slip into their own accents. One guy is from the northern part of England, and speaks as they do. The other, a girl, is from the London area, and sometimes uses a slightly different vocabulary. Luckily for my friend, he's from the middle part of the country, apparently where the two accents overlap.
Among us Americans, we all feel that we speak "American English", and I dont think anyone one of us has a particular regional accent. That is, we dont have a Bostonian, New Yorker, or Texan. In fact, if no one told me where they were from, I probably would never have been able to guess. It is accepted by all of us Americans that we speak the same language, with the same accent: Standard American English. But according to my British friend (and really everyone else), one of us Americans has a particularly strong accent. They cant fully articulate what it is, but the accent is so strong that it sometimes overruns the pronunciation of certain words. It has been described as a long stream of "grrgrgghrhrgghrhrrg" or something. To be quite honest, the Americans do not understand the problem.
It was at this point that my friend asked me to speak in my accent. Unfortunately, I couldnt perform for him. I was raised to speak "proper English", so using Hawaiian Creole English, aka HCE aka pidgin, has always been a bit difficult for me. However, I've noticed that when I become agitated, eg upset, sad, extremely happy, it starts to come out more. Also, since entering college, I've started using it a lot more. I think it's because I made a few new friends after high school, friends who had no problem speaking HCE. Since I couldnt show my friend, I turned to the great resource that is Youtube, and found this video. It's a pretty accurate and educational video on how a lot of people in Hawaii speak. It's also pretty legit, because I think I've seen the "Pidgin Advocate" before. I linked it on my facebook, but on the off chance you missed it, I'll repost it here:
To be quite honest, I love talking and learning about dialects. Perhaps not enough to push me into linguistics, but I do enjoy looking at the "cracks" in the monolithic thing that is a language. I feel that language education is a bit of a lie. It presents the target language as a single way of speaking, one that all natives of a country or ethnic group speak. However, this is not true. What we call a language is really just a heading, a way of seperating large distinctions in the world. Within a "language", we have different dialects and accents, and even within those subdivisions, there are even tinier divisions. My native language, English is a perfect example: There's British English and American English. Within American English, the English that's used in New York City is different from the English used in California, which is different from the English that's used in Hawaii. And in Hawaii, the English I use is sometimes different from people from another island. I'm slowly learning that the same is true about Japanese. The Japanese that I watch in dramas, that I hear in music, that I'm learning in class, is the dry, dusty, boring Standard Japanese (標準語). But that's different from the Japanese I'm trying to learn, which is the Hiroshima Dialect (広島弁). And 広島弁 is different from what my friend is learning in Kyoto, 関西弁. It is simply fascinating that there is so much diversity! Doesnt it make you want to learn another language?
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