Even here in Ireland we have some many regional accents and even different accents in different parts of the cities. I come from Dublin and I am very good at spotting a North Dubiln or South Dublin accent as well as even smaller regional variations. I think that through the medium of television, radio and the internet we are bearing witness to something which is happening very rapidly around us - language changes and because of media it is changing more rapidly. It's a great time to be alive!

I'm with Lynn, there are places all over the USA that it is hard for me to understand what is being said. I was talking to my brother, who has lived in the south for years, just recently moved to CA. He was trying to tell me his address and I kept questioning what he was saying. He really was angry with me because I was asking him to spell the name of the street and this is what I thought he was saying "Wkee" I just couldn't figure it out. Anyway, to make a long story short he was saying "Waikiki". He still loves me.

I moved 450 miles south from Scotland to a very quiet corner of Kent 23 yrs ago and still have problems with both MY accent, the local one. I use a few Scots words amongst my "Queen's English" and can find it very difficult to provide a translation as I've used the best word for the job! My children have grown-up bilingual, with one accent at home and another at school - although I did once tell my daughter that she could "speak Sheppey" only on her birthday and that was only because she was born at home. (That's a variant of Estuary English, with a very flat accent!) When I first came here, I had to rely on the till display at the corner shop for translating what the assistant had said...

Hey Lyn, you actually got it spot on with spelling for Eliza Dolittle's London cockney dialect, so your not so ignorant as you thought you were. And yes we have lots of different dialects, but we don't go around saying they are not English.

Heck, here in USA, the "English" can vary quite extraordinarily from Region to Region, i.e. Boston, Jersey, Louisiana, Georgia, Alabama, Wisconsin, Texas. Now, nobody is to take offense here, but I have actually been unable to understand some of my own fellow citizens.........speaking my own language.....just shows what a melting pot it is, I guess. With immigrants from all over the world, how could it be anything else?

Course in England, you have the "Queen's English" and then other dialects like Eliza in My Fair Lady - was that Cockney? Did I even spell it right? Now I really show my ignorance. Lynn, SHUT UP! ha

American english sure can be a different language at times.

Ah well, a Science teacher in my school didn't know how to explain to a low ability group of Year 10 students what 'connectives' are when the instructions for a piece of work asked the students to write a couple of paragraphs about the importance of plant cells, using connectives to make the piece of work more interesting. He turned to the students and said: "Ask Mrs. Nunn. She is German. She'll know what it meant!"

LOL

I was watching 'Ramsey's Kitchen Nightmare's' last night, when he was trying to sort out a couple of brothers in New Orleans, earlier in the programme they go on to Ramsey about the 'proper' way to pronounce 'New Orleans', but then a bit later after Ramsey calls the elder brother a 'busy idiot', which made him blow up, the younger brother tried calming him down by saying
'He's British, he doesn't speak English'

WHAT! If nothing else, we most certainly do speak English over here, that is why it is called the 'Queen's English'