richardhall:I don't think the cashier had ever heard a yorkshire accent before...

Woo hoo for Yorkshire!

After 50-some years in North America, my grandfather still retains traces of his Yorkshire accent.

T0dd:The likelihood of misunderstanding is increased. As a general thing, when people call Customer Service, they're already in a bad mood. Many people are upset about the outsourcing of those jobs to other countries. So when you add together the difficulties of accent, telephone transmission, political issues, and a bad mood to start with...some drama is likely.

Yeah. I personally don't have a problem - in theory - with outsourcing call centers abroad. But I have had more than one tech support phone call with people in India, and that was frustrating, to say the least. The sound quality alone (due to the international phone call halfway across the world), even assuming a perfect native English accent, made it harder to understand than someone in the States.

Mythos:This is not about Esperanto, but about people that I have met in life.

I work at a hotel, and there we have a few people at the front desk who are not native English speakers, one speaks Bosnian (though he has been in the US for the last six years and and speaks great English with a bit of an accent), and another is from Kazakhstan, he has only been in the US for a little less then a year (he also speaks great English with an accent). None of the staff have any troubles understanding these two people, and a majority of guests do not have a problem as well.
What gets me is the people who will be perfectly nice to these two, till they hear them talk then they will say that they can't understand a word my two desk clerks are saying are saying.
I want everyones opinion on this. Are the people who say that can't understand them, really not able to understand them - or are they just saying that because they hear an accent? If they can't really understand them, is it truly because they have trouble hearing the words, or is it because their minds just shut down without the listener consciously doing it?

I personally see it more as a prejudiced behavior (intentional or not).

I think its ignorance. I am Puerto Rican by Family, but i was born and raised here in the good old U.S. of A. English is my first language (though i speak both English and Spanish fluently), but what bothers me is how people assume i cant speak english just because of my race. As soon as they hear that my name is Carlos, or that i am Puerto Rican, they assume that i cant speak english. they talk to me like im foreign or stupid (you know, really slowly with their heads nodding back and forth like morons), and are completely taken aback when they find out im in Advanced Placement English at my High School. I correct the grammar of most of my white or black friends!

It isnt fair, and it is pretty stereotypical, but that's why we have to keep moving towards one universal, international, neutral, AUXILARY language. My English and your Spanish wont matter, we'll both be in the same game with the same rules and equipment, E-o!

Librum: As soon as they hear that my name is Carlos, or that i am Puerto Rican, they assume that i cant speak english. they talk to me like im foreign or stupid (you know, really slowly with their heads nodding back and forth like morons), and are completely taken aback when they find out im in Advanced Placement English at my High School.

Would it be excessively snotty to talk back to them in the same way? I would be sorely tempted to do so! "Oh, is English not your first language? Let me help you out." Or else purposely reply to them using the most complicated words you can think up at the moment.

waxle:She doesn't even speak Korean, but whenever she and her English/German husband (my mother's brother), they always end up with people asking her "HOW LONG YOU IN AMERICA? YOU MISS CHINA?"

Hopefully this will decrease as the current generation grows up, since there have been so many international adoptions of Korean and Chinese children. And in any case, I know plenty of children of Asian immigrants who don't speak their parents' language of origin at all, or speak it very badly.

My cousin was born in Korea and was adopted; I don't know if she has ever encountered something like this, but I should ask her. She has experienced confusion that her name doesn't sound remotely Asian. She is a minor so I won't use her name online, but suffice it to say, her name sounds as American as "Jane Smith". I know that at least once - recently - a kid at her school asked her if she knew the latest information about [her name]. She said "Of course, because I am [name]." I guess the kid figured that an Asian-looking person wouldn't have a name like that!

I guess people might be predudiced, but I think mostly not. I am not a native english-speaker, but know the language quite well, and thus speak quite fast, and quite often people find it difficult to understand me. I think it is often more easy for nonnative speakers to understand each other actually, I have quite little difficulty in understanding people speaking english with an accent, but people speaking swedish with even a very light accent can be very difficult to understand, perhaps because I do not hear it often, but I think also because you have a more precise picture of what your own language is "supposed to" sound like, and if hearing it pronounced differently the brain do not recognise the words. English words I have heard with many pronounciations since I began to learn it.

I have also noticed that it is much more difficult to understand short sentences, before your brain have had time to "readjust" to the language/accent, like when in a shop or similar, than if listening to a lecture e.g. I always have to ask the cashier to repeat what I should pay, but can understand a lecture even if the lecturer have a difficult dialect.

I also agree with that it has to do with if you have heard the accent before, when I first came to england to study at univeristy I was used to the US accent form TV, and suddenly I had to be able to understand all the english accents at the universtity, and some of them I could not understand at all. Angolan english, nigerian, london, midlands, irish, wales, scotish, east anglia, liverpool, yorkshire... it does take some time to learn.

Great thread.

As an English-language teacher, I hear from students all the time about how they are able to understand the English of other non-native speakers but not native speakers. Native English speakers are often not aware of the unclarity of their pronunciation or of their word choice (relying on slang/colloquialisms rather than universal terms).

I do NOT mean oversimplifying or 'dumbing-down' your language (as the people in your stories were doing) but simply communicating consciously.

The problem is that many native English speakers have not experienced learning another language, so they don't understand how difficult it can be to decipher colloquial speech.

This is my final year in the English-language industry. Enough is enough.

By the way, when I was living in Russia I heard about many Western ex-pats who had lived there for years--decades, even--without speaking Russian! Here in Latvia it's the same story.

Long live Esperanto!

Tilino:Great thread.

As an English-language teacher, I hear from students all the time about how they are able to understand the English of other non-native speakers but not native speakers. Native English speakers are often not aware of the unclarity of their pronunciation or of their word choice (relying on slang/colloquialisms rather than universal terms).

This is definitely true with all languages. One time I met a French guy in Italy. He was an artist, and as he explained his work to me in Italian, it was great because I could understand perfectly. He used all of the easy words that I knew, grammar that wasn't complicated, and no idioms or colloquialisms. And didn't talk too fast!