Standard Australian English is very easy to understand for me as a North American speaker of English, especially when written because that eliminates the potential problem of different accents. Standard Jamaican English is easy to understand, perhaps you are thinking of Jamaican Creole, which is often impossible or nearly impossible to understand for me personally and is usually considered an independent language by linguists and actually has a test WP: http://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wp/jam/Mien_Piej
-m.
On Sun, Sep 19, 2010 at 1:12 PM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
Hoi, The most common different orthographies are those for the American and British spelling.. When it comes to differences between British and American English, the standard version of either can be well understood in either country. Australian English or Jamaican English are less easily understood. I do not know to what extend Indian English is homogeneous..
As long as people write in either the UK or US orthography, the words are easily enough understood. The problems comes with implied expected knowledge. This is where things break down. Thanks, GerardM
On 19 September 2010 14:08, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 19 September 2010 12:42, Ilario Valdelli valdelli@gmail.com wrote:
It is normal because any standard language has different registers, the dialect has limited registers and in general only for daily and familiar use.
This, by the way, is why we don't have multiple English Wikipedias - in the higher registers, all the dialects (which are frequently all but mutually incomprehensible in the lower registers) converge and educational English is quite consistent. The only major dialectic variant is American versus British spelling, and anyone who reads one can read and often write in the other.
- d.
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