ROBUST discussion
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Dialects of English
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I've often encountered people from non-Anglophone countries who very smugly declare how Americans are stupid or whatever because they have trouble understanding a particular accent or dialect, yet I can easily find many dialects and accents in the US that it'd be hard for people from say, New Zealand, to understand.Interestingly though, the UK still has dozens of active dialects. I haven't checked into it, but I'm curious if there's been any consolidation with the rise of the mass media there. There certainly has been some smoothing out/consolidation in the US throughout the decades but we still have plenty of interesting regional variation.
One fun thing I've always like to think about is to compare and contrast older movies vs. newer movies. In newer movies, most actors have extensively trained by acting coaching to "neutralize" their native accents. The result is unless they were actually a foreigner who just can't shake it for whatever reason(though some actors have actively kept their accept for the 'exoticism' in the past), most major Hollywood productions for the last several decades have leads that all are speaking the same sort of quasi-upper-middle class vaguely Californian sounding accent, whereas back in the day, nobody bothered, and so some of the largest names in films had really obvious regional accents.
Newscasters are also taught to neutralize their accents, et cetera.
Of course, the US isn't unique in that regard. The BBC presenters are taught to neutralize their regional dialects to speak RP, and in Japan, the media dialect is basically the Tokyo dialect.
In Korea, the media dialect is the Seoul dialect. When I was learning Korea, one of my instructors was from the Daegu in the south. He always got irritated because he felt that the "Seoul" dialect was too "feminine" (he was older, though I'll note that as much as I liked many aspects of Korean culture, they definitely are rather sexist...the current President benefited greatly from her particular family connections, though maybe it'll change some perspectives in general) and "tough soldiers" (even though half my training group were women, ha) shouldn't be speaking such a "weak" dialect.
A really interesting example is the so-called Chinese "dialects." The average Chinese dialect pair (e.g., Mandarin vs. Cantonese) is almost as functionally different in terms of a spoken language as say your typical Romance language pair (e.g., French vs. Spanish). If a Cantonese speaker once to learn Mandarin, they have to study it as a foreign language (indeed, in my Mandarin classes back in the day, MOST of the students were actually native Cantonese speakers).
However because of the nature of the Chinese writing system and the fact it is more meaning-based than sound-based, you can generally still use writing to get your point across cross-dialect.
This is why if you watch Chinese television, they have subtitles in Chinese. Large chunks of the country still don't have a good grasp on spoken Mandarin. Well, technically their prestige/media dialect is a slight Mandarin variant that could be properly considered in a dialect int he sense we think of. Most of my instructors spoke Mandarin, just not native Beijingers, but our materials were all Beijinger stuff, and so the Beijing dialect still sounds "weird" to me.
Several of the big party leaders of the post-Civil War old guard couldn't speak Mandarin.
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In Boston in parts they still speak a better-rooted English, more in tune with Plymouth in the seventeenth century, than almost anywhere else.
But the Queen's English ain't what it used to be. The BBC pronunciation unit has long believed that the purest English is now spoken in -- Dublin! More particularly in St Colombine's, a private school in Dublin.
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This is why I love ROBUST. Where else can you an instant, expert, mini-introduction to accents in an important part of the world.
I must tell you though, Jeremy, that while I speak with an accent locally typed as "Sandhurst" though I prefer to think of it as "mid-Atlantic", and have worked and lived all over the world, I can't understand a word of what some of the British regional politicians say, and even the BBC's regional announcers are sometimes beyond me. For political correctness, in the last generation the BBC has encouraged presenters with regional accents to keep them. The reason RP is still spoken on the main news and other important programmes is accidental: it happens because people from RP backgrounds naturally rise to the top jobs.
I originally studied linguistics. I loved it. I just couldn't think of how I was going to make a decent living at it. So I went into the military because they needed people who were good at languages and by the time I came out I was more interested in science. Now I've forgotten most of my languages. In my initial sentence I meant to say, "non-American anglophone countries" but it seems like you got what I was saying anyway.
It's interesting to me that despite all the heavy emphasis on multi-culturalism and PCness in the US culture they still heavily push people toward a certain accent.
The fun thing is to watch American politicians on the campaign trail and their accents and diction suddenly shifting. Look I get code switching and all that, but when Johnny the New England Yankee is suddenly is in Alabama trying to sound all Sweet Home Alabama, it is PAINFULLY obvious.
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I hear that here often, or at least when I lived in Pretoria I did. We have 11 official languages, English being one. It is sometimes highly amusing and also very sad to hear people talk to each other in a language clearly not one that they grew up speaking in their homes. How they often change their accents to fit the urban setting.
From a Hollywood perspective, I've heard interviews with American stars complaining about how difficult it is to ape the South African accent. Matt Damon almost got it in Invictus, Leo Di Caprio failed miserably in Blood Diamond. Yet I listen to Charlize Theron, a home girl. Her acquired American accent seems extremely neutral.
The "mysteriousness" of the South African accent was a minor plot point in a book I wrote. An American girl runs into a teacher at her new school, and she has an accent she can't quite place. She guesses central European, but the woman is actually South African. :)
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Dutch YouTube?
Perhaps you should make your own audio representation for the net. Probably get the Nobel Peace Prize for it. They've given for it less recently.
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One of my favourite lines from the movies, where in Miss Congeniality, Sandra Bullock, playing an FBI agent of the utmost butchness, has to compete in the Miss World contest, and for her speech wants rapists castrated, jaywalkers shot, and so on, a fascist/NRA wet dream. The audience is shocked into gaping silence. Bullock steps back to the mike and adds, "...and world peace," and at the code words huge applause breaks out.
Wandering around the UK and Ireland many years ago everyone thought my girlfriend and I were American. Except in one pub in the middle of nowhere. Stokesay. No one was in the pub but us and the owner. It was mid-afternoon. He sat down with a couple of free pints for us. "Nobody comes in here except the farmers to get pissed after work," he said. We nodded in sympathy. "So you two are Canadian," he said. Is this guy psychic or what? He took a swig. "My wife is Canadian." There are only two distinct accents in Canada: Quebec which is French and Newfoundland which is still quite Irish.
Unless you're Leo Q Rosten, for God's sake don't take this as a hint to start writing dialect. Nothing is more irritating to read.