zompist bboard

i am from merlin, in murrca, and yes we really do talk like that

My native tongue is Indonesian. I know a bit of English and a smattering of Mandarin.

34, male. I was born in the west of Germany and I'm a native speaker of German (fairly close to the standard language, but with some regional peculiarities). I speak English more or less fluently, and I also learned Latin and French at school. I can still read both languages fairly well, but I'm not conversational in French anymore. (I was able to follow a recent French/German bilingual conversation without problems though, where my mother and a French guest were speaking French, while a second French guest, my father, and me were speaking German.) Apart from that, I have a basic knowledge of Spanish (probably about the same level as French now due to interpolation from Latin, although I never formally studied the language), Dutch, Portuguese, and Swedish (in decreasing order of competence).

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You speak Croatian and you can't deal with consonant clusters?

I speak English. I'm American, born in Washington state. I lived there most of my life, but for 2 years in Utah, a short year in Southern France, and most of my adult life in Western Pennsylvania. I spend time in Texas, but I travel a lot elsewhere too. My "second" language is very rusty American Sign Language, so that has no bearing on my English. It's possible that living with deaf relatives such as my mom, step-dad and many family friends affected my pronunciation of English somewhat, but I don't think it's to a heavy degree.

I do not speak French fluently now, but I was proficient for a while as a child. I'm not exactly sure, but my French might have been tainted by the local speech of Nice and Provençal possibly.

I am of course twenty-one, thank you very much, and I come from Rockall in the UK, and have an accent which is typical of the area.

Astraios wrote:You speak Croatian and you can't deal with consonant clusters?

True.

Croatian is actually easier on clusters than English. Coda clusters, even those of only two consonants, are actually quite rare and occur only in a small number of non-borrowings, except for /st/, which is easy and is common only because of the derivational suffix -ost). There are syllabic consonants every here and there, but everyone pronounces them as [ə(r)].

Astraios wrote:You speak Croatian and you can't deal with consonant clusters?

Hell, I would not be surprised if even people who speak Georgian have trouble with English's conso clusters. strange they are inded

Hmm, judging what languages you can confidently say so know is tricky. It's a bit like answering the question how hot a spicy dish is. Everyone has a bit different criteria. Let's try anyway.

I come from the south of Finland and speak Finnish as my first language. I abuse English on daily basis at work, could probably survive quite well in Swedish with a little brushing up and in German with a bit more work. Apart from that I've done things like checked into hotels and hired cars in French and Spanish but I'm a lot less competent with them. Unfortunately working on the Canaries for one year in a very international setting teaches you more British English than Spanish.

I've lived most of my life in Helsinki (didn't even have to move away for the university, how boring is that) and would describe my speech fairly typical for the city. That would include such common features as widespread loss of /d/ as the weak grade of /t/, loss of the /i/ off-glide in unstressed diphthongs, strongly speech register dependent alternation of the reflex of the old dental affricate between the literary /ts/ and western dialectal /tt/ ~ /t/ exhibiting gradation, common dropping of word final vowels and an alternation of the word final /n/ between a weak nasal off-glide, a weak glottal stop and complete loss. I can't say that I use all of the local vocabulary as much as other people around me and some other colloquial forms I find using more often myself than what other people might do, but that pretty much describes the linguistic situation in any urban setting. My mum has tended to make a point of coming from the east of the country which might have somewhat affected my preference towards using certain vocabulary. My dad comes from just inland from Helsinki and I tend to notice mainly features typical for that area which I don't have such as the common use of the -ti variant of abessive. One grammatical feature that's noteworthy for my own speech is the widespread use of the -Vn variant of the 3rd infinitive illative (-mAAn in the standard language).

My accent in other languages is a bit of a mystery to me. My version of Swedish, when I get to speaking it, should mostly be an approximation of the local Finnish Swedish variety, though I might also be bringing over some features from my Finnish. I don't know if my English can be put onto the map nearly as easily. When I've dared to listen to recordings of myself speaking it, I've been left with the feeling that it's not exactly native sounding. An elderly Scottish gentleman once asked me if I was from London. Then again my first guess for his nationality was Swedish so I don't think either of us has very distinct accents that would grant for easy pinpointing. Lately I've noticed that I've started to gravitate towards glottalic English varieties. This might be partly because reducing many consonants to glottal stops feels very natural to me.

What sort of <r> do you use, gach? (In English, I mean.)

Another American here, born just outside of New York City (the town that inspired where Jay Gatsby lived, actually), lived in NYC for the first 4 years of my life and then grew up in SW Connecticut until college, which I attended in Rochester, NY. I've lived in Beijing for the past year, and also spent a semester in Cape Town but I don't think that's relevant here.

English is my first language. I speak a dialect that's basically GenAm except with more New York-ish vowels and some lexicon. I have conversational abilities in Standard German (though it's actually been getting worse, especially speaking, as I am fairly out of practice), and Standard Mandarin (with a Beijing flavor, oh yeah erhua). I wouldn't go so far as to say I'm fluent in either, but I can have relatively fluent conversations in both, depending on what the topic of conversation is. And my reading/writing ability in both is far superior to my speaking/listening ability.

Anguipes wrote:I'm Ang and I'm sure we've had this thread before.

It's been three years... would you prefer that he raise the thread? Especially considering that he's a new user, wouldn't he get flamed?

Anguipes wrote:I'm Ang and I'm sure we've had this thread before.

But people would complain if, as a new user, they engaged in such thread necromancy...

ObsequiousNewt wrote:What sort of <r> do you use, gach? (In English, I mean.)

/r/ you mean? (Just nitpicking about notation, don't worry about it.)

It's mostly an alveolar approximant. Sometimes an alveolar trill sneaks in, but that tends to be only for some isolated non English words or if I want to make a point about accent. I'm not a huge fan of the rhotic approximants so I've adopted a non rhotic accent and ditched the syllable final /r/s in English.

Travis B. wrote:

Anguipes wrote:I'm Ang and I'm sure we've had this thread before.

But people would complain if, as a new user, they engaged in such thread necromancy...

And we complained when a noob didn't necro the old thread.
TL;DR: the ZBB likes to complain.

Why do you assume I'm complaining? I just pointed to a resource for the desired information.

Facetiously.

These do indeed come up every few years, but that is good because people often join or leave in the meantime. I'd quite like to do another census thread, because i think the last one is now two or three years ago.

Do one then.

I'm from France, French is my first language. I used to speak with a Northern accent, but I've picked up a fairly unremarkable Parisian accent over the years.
I've learnt a fair bit of Picard from elderly relatives. I'm not sure that it counts. (Picard is a dialect/language that used to be spoken from Calais to about 100 km north of Paris. It's not really that different from standard French.)

I speak English fluently enough; I try to approximate RP but I still have a French accent. (I think the language centres in my brain aren't really convinced by that word stress thing I'm trying to make them learn.)
To be honest, I still have a lot of trouble with a few things. Bits of slang, and more importantly strong accents I'm not familiar with. (Though I had a fairly long drunken conversation with a guy from Argyll the other day, and that went fine. So maybe I'm getting better at it after all.)

I've learnt I don't speak German very well. That's a pity, because it happens I go there fairly often. I'd like to thank the countless Germans that have put up patiently with the equivalent of 'I can haz cheezburger' over the years.

I also have some knowledge of Italian, Old French and Latin.

I'm from the south of Sweden. My native language is Swedish, with a strange hybrid dialect, presumably because my mother speaks central Swedish.

I lived two years in the vicinity of London, hoping to learn good posh RP, but with no luck. Now I live in the north of Sweden.

I speak English fairly fluently; my vocabulary is probably at least as big as in Swedish. You would probably notice an unusually active prosody, and some minor trouble with certain consonant clusters and the /s/ vs. /z/ distinction.

I can more or less make myself understood in German, but I can't remember all those genders and stuff, and my vocabulary is quite limited.

I tried learning Esperanto, but didn't get terribly far.

I can say "the cat is under the table" in Spanish.

Chuma wrote:I can say "the cat is under the table" in Spanish.

fuck I can't get the last 3 words

FUCK YOU INABILITY TO LEARN LEXICA EASILY

Hm, I don't know Spanish, but … El gato es ??? la mesa? Or am I mixing Italian (which I also don't know) and Spanish there?