I need subtitles :/

[ratcreature]

I've watched the first three episodes of the Australian series East West 101, after I've seen it recced a couple of times. And so far I quite like the premise and setup, but I find it really hard to understand the dialog. With most US or British tv I miss maybe a word or half sentence every now and then, sometimes because of dialects, but more often because actors mumble, but in this series I frequently have no idea what they are saying at all for a whole exchange, not even when I replay and replay again. :(

(Totally unrelated, today's obligatory World Cup-related whining: I sincerely hope that once this is over I won't ever have to hear the stupid 54, 74, 90, 2010 song again.)

Comments

[lilacsigil]

I knew that German (among other languages) had a lot of regional dialects that aren't mutually intelligible, but it's really sad to hear how they were driven out, despite the usefulness in communication.

The accents on East West 101 are a bit toned down when one ethnic group is speaking to another (when the Pacific Islanders are talking amongst themselves their accents are much stronger, for example) and that's fairly true-to-life. Those are all real accents that appear in great numbers in urban Australia. Out where I live, there's far less variety, sadly.

[ratcreature]

Yeah, it is a bit sad. The local dialect is now "protected" under some EU minority language law (currently counted as its own "language"), but of course that's about a century too late, coming as it's dead as every day communication tool, and just "preserved" with the occasional radio program and such, ad maybe some pockets of use in rural areas.

My maternal grandparents made the choice to raise their kids with standard exclusively rather than going for bilingual, and according to my mother that meant that her grandmother couldn't really talk to her and her sisters, because my great-grandmother's knowledge of standard was apparently limited (I never knew her as she died before I was born), and my grandparents disliked that she was speaking it incorrectly. My grandparents themselves still had more pronounced accents because for them Standard was the second language, and to avoid that disadvantage with the stigma that comes with not speaking "pure" German they didn't allow their children any dialect, so as a trade-off they didn't have a shared language anymore with the generation before. Both my parents still understood the dialect though they didn't speak it, but I can't understand it at all.

The local dialect here was more on the middle of the continuum between Dutch and German, and in some respects closer to dialects that are now counted as Dutch than to Standard German, and it has a good number of grammatical differences in syntax, tenses, cases, gender etc. to either. Which means that if you know the dialect and try to speak Standard just by pronouncing the word in a standard way, you sound stupid and ungrammatical.

[ratcreature]

Also wrt the individual accents I find Crowley hardest to understand of the regular characters so far. Sometimes whole sentences are entirely incomprehensible with him.