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what languages do you speak?

sreservoir said:
mandarin ... japanese.

... I'm sure this ought to be reason enough for to disown, all considered, and what with the ... thing involving the japanese >|||, but, wait what, amusement.
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Japanese, is different to Chinese. Oh, I forgot. A little bit of Hawain as well. Please correct me if I got that wrong
 
English and Spanish natively.

French, Russian pretty well.

I've studied like every language ever only not really. I've dabbled in Zulu and Icelandic.
 
(American) English with a newscaster dialect, due to my father's army brat-ness and my mother's squashing of her Midwestern ascent. Have a bit of lisp sometimes and twouble with my "aw"s.

Been taking Latin for 5 years in a week and been learning Japanese on and off for 4. Not that the latter's getting anywhere.
 
English. General American accent, as I've spent extended time in (and around people from) the north and the south parts of the country. I also know the bare bones of Spanish from the two years I took of it in ninth and tenth grade. The vocabulary didn't stick, but I can say simple sentences like 'where is the food' and that sort of thing.

I am so linguistic you guys.
 
Being American, I speak English. Sometimes with a British accent, sometimes with an Appalachian one. (stereotypical country girl accent) I also tend to make an 'f' sound instead of a 'th' due to the trouble I had making the sound when I was little.

I also am kind of fluent in Mandarin Chinese and know tiny bits of German, Japanese, Arabic, and Korean. I want to continue learning German and Japanese, and also start Russian. I took Latin for three years at one point, but I don't remember most of it.

Multilingual indeed. :3
 
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Datura said:
Not to nitpick, but a lot of Americans don't speak English!
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I did phrase that wrong.
I should have said something more like: "Being born in America and a big anglophile, I speak English."

In my opinion, most Americans speak American, a strange version of English that includes words like 'eggplant' and 'learned'.
 
of course Americans speak English. we just speak a different dialect, and i kind of find it annoying when people say things like that. dialect shaming is harmful and silly. (also very nitpicky, but i'd be really surprised if English was your native language and you spoke Standard American English! you almost definitely speak a dialect without realising it. pronunciation differences between regions is evidence of differing dialects!)

as for 'learned', i have no idea? in Old English, weak verbs showed tense/aspect change through a -t or -d affix*, so it may be that in Middle English the paradigm was actually learn/learnt/learnt but then we Americans changed it to -ed by analogy, since most weak verbs in modern English use -ed and -t. this is all speculation, though.

in contrast, strong verbs used ablaut, or vowel gradation, which is where we get paradigms like sing/sang/sung.

*when i say this, i think that it was actually always a <t> in spelling, but variably a [t] or [d] in pronunciation. but again, i really am no expert on Old English.
 
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you don't even know dialect shaming until you've been stuck with a regional accent that makes people south of carlisle completely unable to understand a word you say
 
sovram said:
you almost definitely speak a dialect without realising it. pronunciation differences between regions is evidence of differing dialects!)
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I pronounce the word "won" as "wahn" (or juan like the name) and have my whole life. it wasn't until a few years ago, when my friend started making fun of me for it, that i realized that that pronunciation isn't something everyone around here uses and i must have picked it up from my pittsburgh mother. everyone around here pronounces it like "one".

on terms of language. i forgot that i also speak music theory
 
Twilight Sparkle said:
you don't even know dialect shaming until you've been stuck with a regional accent that makes people south of carlisle completely unable to understand a word you say
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obviously, i've never been at the receiving end of serious dialect shaming, but i know how destructive it is, and so i would like it to be avoided here. that's all i meant! for the record i think Scottish dialects (and Scots) are crazy interesting.

Augmented Second said:
I pronounce the word "won" as "wahn" (or juan like the name) and have my whole life. it wasn't until a few years ago, when my friend started making fun of me for it, that i realized that that pronunciation isn't something everyone around here uses and i must have picked it up from my pittsburgh mother. everyone around here pronounces it like "one".
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it took me a while -- but do you mean "won" like win/won/won? in which case, that's really interesting! i say it like "one" also, which, in my case, has IPA representation something like /wʌn/, but i am really bad at recognising vowels so :3
 
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Augmented Second said:
on terms of language. i forgot that i also speak music theory
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sovram said:
it took me a while -- but do you mean "won" like win/won/won? in which case, that's really interesting! i say it like "one" also, which, in my case, has IPA representation something like /wʌn/, but i am really bad at recognising vowels so :3
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Yeah that kind of won haha. I brought this up to my mom and she was like "Huh, I guess you're right that nobody says "wahn" around here. I guess you guys did pick it up from me." Pittsburghers also say "down" as "dahn" which I find hilarious

diminished third: that actually took me a minute because I'm used to recognizing chords as like V6 rather than the actual name of the chord itself haha

also i regret to say i don't recognize your sig :< (and the only reason my sig is what it is is cause there are so many augmented seconds, i DON'T SEE ANY DIMINISHED THIRDS IN YOURS x3)
 
American-English is my first language. And not that I can speak it all that well, I took four years of German in high school.

On accents, however, I have something close to the American "broadcaster" accent, except maybe a tad more southern sounding! It's Midwestern, anyways. Not enough that I say soda pop, though. It's just soda. Oh and I say syrup like 'sear-UP' not 'sir-UP.' And I pronouce creek like 'creak' not 'crik.' And...and...! I say crayon kind of weird, too. I just say 'cran' instead of 'cran-yawn,' but that's just me I think. Accents are most definitely cool beans! I think it's really amusing the Missouri has two pronunciations, too. 'miz-zer-re' and 'miz-zer-ah.'

Oh! Does anyone have words that only their family uses and aren't /real/ words? For example, my family calls dandelions when they're all fluffy with seeds 'blow flowers.'
 
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