Brokers: Do you get drivers that are hard to understand because of there accents?

My son-in-law is, Derek, is from Charlotte, NC...he talks just like 'Merlinders' "bawled peenuts" for Peanuts boiled in water. (i.e. Goobers) Southern Caviar, Southern Pearls ?? I dun no but they #### good...even more gooder with with a belly washer

 

What gets me going is Virginia.

I can almost hear it anywhere sometimes because part of my family ancestry has been burned out twice by war and other problems in our and before we were a Nation there.

Buy some oil.. at the truckstop there?

Oh you mean OLL..

? Oil.

no no OLL right?

fine OLL let's get some of that.

Have me a little fun with that sometimes.

Louisiana gets me a fit to be tied sometimes, but I make do. Breaking out a touch of like elementary school french when needed. Not more than a few badly mangled words that makes em laugh all around. But we get by. I just soon stick closer to Cromwell which is not far from the Lancaster area.

 

I am pretty sure OP's question was about fresh immigrants and nobody talks about that lol

 

Perhaps we Southerners are more intelligent than most give us credit for.
I generally understand all accents fairly well.
I can follow along with Spanish, Spanglish, CoonA$$, wigout, Jersey JackJaw... just about all of it.

 

My
E
X

Girlfriend was born and raised in Milan Italy. She started studying English in California at the age of 5. It was stil
Pretty broken up at 21 until I kept correcting her which she did not mind.

Now her girlfriend from Italy who learned English at a much Oder age and learned it in Texas was a whole Nuther Story.

You ever hear broken English come out of a pretty Italian girl who learned it in rural Texas.

Friking Hilarious

 

Different dialects and accents are the most challenging aspects to learning another language. I feel your pain. Immersion helps tremendously and of course much practice. Only those who try to learn a second language can relate.

 

Accent is something you'll never get rid of. You can try as hard as you can...now way, no technique. Perhaps one sentence or two you can hide it...but it is just a matter of a few more spoken lines that will give you away. It is body parts...tongue, nose, the vocal cords in larynx...whatever mechanism there is responsible for phonetic sounds, that would need to reprogrammed. It may be possible only with a very young age. But still, I never met a person who would be perfectly bilingual...there are always some deficiencies, imperfections, some subtleties that would make one learned language always inferior to the other - the Mother language. There is an FX series "The Americans" where there is a couple of married Russian spies who speak perfect American English (it is perfect because it is played by American actors) , trained in Russia by KGB...I don't believe there is a training that would give such results. An adult person can only achieve a certain level of proficiency of studied language...there is always a threshold.

 

Agreed. I just know what challenges I've been facing learning German and Spanish. Accents and dialects make it very challenging. Most Americans don't bother to learn anything other than their mother tongue.

 

Do you ever watch The Walking Dead? Seems like most of the main characters are actors and actresses from Britain and Austrailia. They all sound perfectly American with their english but some of them are characters "from Georgia" and they really don't sound like any native Georgians I ever heard. But their American English is passable as red blooded American English in my opinion. To hear it spoken you wouldn't think they were not American. I can overlook that they don't sound like real people from Georgia but I have to disagree with you that people can't hide their accent. I didn't know one of them was from Australia until I heard an off the show interview. Some actors and actresses can do an excellent job losing their normal accent but where they can't ever seem to get it right is in trying to mimmic a local accent.

 

I certainly have to leave to you to be an expert on assessing American English Dialects. LOL .I meant more or less people like me, whose Mother language has nothing to do with Germanic languages, where the phonetics and grammar are completely different. I perhaps could pass as a Russian in some short sentence exchanges in Russian, that I know a little, at a Chicago Flea Market or somewhere, but never as an American.
Actors have more skills. I was surprised to find out a while back that Nicole Kidman was Australian, or Russel Crowe for that matter too. .In a movie script they will sound perfect, especially if their natural, first language is English.Still, I'm sure in a real life situation, if you took her on a trip together, after a day or two,you'd figure her out....even with precision that she's Aussie.