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]

They are terrible mumblers on that show! It's a really wide variety of Australian accents, too, so that's probably not helping.

[ratcreature]

Yeah, the accents don't help. Not that it isn't nice to have local flavor, but tv actors should speak clearly. It's not as if fictional dialog was like natural dialog in other ways, it is made to be less aggravating to watch. Fewer pauses, fewer aborted half-sentences, and so on, so there is no reason diction should be like the reality of dialog either. Though for all I know this already could be toned down Australian dialects, but then I don't think the original would have real mutual intelligibility with Standard English.

On German tv regional dialects are often replaced by Standard pronounced with a regional accent or subtitled, because German dialects are not mutually intelligible if they are too far apart regionally. Much like dialect speakers switch to standard if they hear that you aren't a local, tv does the same. Of course due to these media and the modern mobility true dialects are getting rarer and rarer as more and more people just speak standard, because mutual intelligibility is really useful. (Hence the local one where I live mostly died out outside of preservation societies because it is so far from standard that depending on politics it's counted as separate language, and it came with economic downsides to use it. It used to be the regional written language some centuries ago, but powers shifted, and by the time of my grandparents it was mostly spoken only and its use punished in school as "wrong" etc. so most switched to standard with their children, and a generation later the dialect was more or less dead. Which maybe is bad for language diversity, but quite useful for communication.)

[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.

[enname]

I didn't have too much trouble with it, and I am generally quite bad with shows that mumble. I can aver that most Australians are great mumblers in general (me for example), when they aren't ripping out your ear drums with the nasal tones. They talk very quickly in natural speech (more so than most English speaking people, I come back from Britain and sound like a snail) and mumble. So you could say it is fairly true to how people speak on the street.

lilacisgill is correct about the accents though, and in particular I find that a lot of the ethnic accents keep their own patterns of speech which roll over all the hard consonants as well, the ones that mark out things like stops and commas. Not to mention a great deal of slang terms that is EW 101. A lot of my friends are from the same background as one of the main characters, and half the time I struggle to work out when they are even speaking English or have changed back to their native tongue.

[ratcreature]

I think part is just that because I've watched more US shows I'm quite used to that by now. I remember that at first when I was mostly used to fairly clear British English from the samples we had in school, I found Americans rather hard to follow too.

But I noticed that the word boundaries sometimes aren't the clearest. And sometimes when I listened again, I recognize how to break it up, and then can make out the parts more easily. That's a difficulty with German as well, when different regions use very different contractions, like "haben wir" if you'd write what is said down (with German spelling rules) can sound like hamwer (which would be what I'd say informally) but other accents might pronounce the same hammor, hemmer, or hamma. Obviously someone expecting to hear a sound like the written standard language said out loud would be totally out of luck.

[enname]

I am in France at the moment having a lovely time trying to follow anything, so yes I understand. Some diffferent pronounciations and contractions make more sense than others. The Norman accent is really quite interesting - hard in spots and then easier than standard in others.

Australian English, when spoken straight comes in three varieties - RP, middle and broad. RP is most like 'Queen's English.' What EW has is mostly middle/broad, although quite strong middle and then those that are ethnic. It is very front of the mouth and most of the ends of words are elided off, or given the annoying rising inflection if you are below 25. Think of the word 'Australian' itself. Most Australians would say 'Ostrayan' which automatically removes most of the consonants and heads into mumble land if you dip your head at all. Thus the old complaint that we are all from Austria. No final consonant. Then say, add my friend whose name is 'Fatima', she would say 'Fa-ma.' Add a fast flowing pattern of Arabic, Lebanese, Thai whatever patter, plus inner Australian 'laziness' produces a lot of vowels.

Hell, in most tv shows and news things they still subtitle indigenous speakers or those with heavy accents. *rolls eyes* Yet not Americans speaking dialect.

[iamza.livejournal.com]

I'm hoping Germany wins, just so that my BIL stays happy. Of course, now that I'm really rooting for Germany (as opposed to kind of fake rooting for them weeks ago), they'll probably lose...

[ratcreature]

Heh. So you had a Mick Jagger like effect so far?

I mostly just want the football obsession tone down to its normal level again.