When identifying where someone is from simply by listening to them should focus be on words and phrases as well as the obvious that includes dialects and accents?
Yes. This make social interactions more fun and one may incorporate new phrases in to one's own use. I live in the US but use "take away" rather than "take out" for restaurant foods I get to take home. A rainy day is "really tipping down". I also like to toss in archaic phrases like, "Zounds!" (God's wounds) "Slidikins!" (God's eyelashes) "God's blood!" and "forsooth."
This post was edited by Benedict Arnold at March 22, 2017 9:40 PM MDT
Both of the aspects of communication that you've clarified here are extremely useful in determining or narrowing down either a person's origins or environs (the former may differ from the latter). However, the two are neither mutually inclusive nor mutually exclusive of each other. As an example, the same words may be spoken by various people from various places while the accent or accents that they use differ, or conversely, various people with the same regional accent might use vastly different words from each other in their everyday speech. A Cockney nuclear engineer (ok, work with me) might say different words than a Cockney high school dropout. ~
This post was edited by Randy D at March 16, 2017 6:34 AM MDT
Help me out here, Randy, because I don't understand what you're getting at. The premise is that when listening to someone, you should listen to what they say (words and phrases) as opposed to just listening to how they say it? You seem to be saying that people with the same regional accent might have differing vocabularies. Why wouldn't they? Granted, the probability of two Cockneys understanding localised slang is significantly higher than a non-British person but that's sort of obvious. At the risk of making myself look foolish, what am I missing?
Thank you, Lu. I'll use one of Didge's examples to illustrate the point:
If a native English-speaker says, "I'm warning you, we have ways to make people talk," and a native German-speaker says it in English with a heavy German accent, it may sound like, "I am varnink you, ve haf vays to make people talk."
The actual words are the same, but they sound different based on accent. It's also possible for one non-native English-speaking person who is more fluent than another to say it with less of an accent being perceived, so I'm not intimating that all Germans sound the same when speaking English.
On on the other hand, if someone says, "Ah'mo run it down to ya li' dis, homey, we git mad skills in gettin' a mo-fo ta talkin', ya feel me?" The same message is being conveyed, but the words themselves are different. Slang is one example of verbage that may differ from region to region, but slang is not accent.
Oh hell, yes! I'm originally from Cumbria, in the North of England, and there are many words and phrases which are only used by us marras. The fact that we are called marras is one of them. I will give you a few random examples. "Yam" for "home," our tendency to greet each other by just saying "do." Not "how do you do?" Or "how do?" We have it down to just "do." "La" for "little." "Grotch" for "spit." They call it "gob" down south. It comes out of your gob, but we don't call it gob. You can't hear me say it, but if I was using these phrases on here, anyone in the know would identify me as a marra. They wouldn't think I was from some other part of the North, either. They would know it was Cumbria. Also, very few users of this site would understand me, which is why I don't post a lot of Cumbrian dialect.
Benedict Arnold 