{"id":1518,"date":"2005-04-28T09:51:25","date_gmt":"2005-04-28T13:51:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=1518"},"modified":"2005-04-28T09:51:25","modified_gmt":"2005-04-28T13:51:25","slug":"foreign-accents-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=1518","title":{"rendered":"Foreign accents"},"content":{"rendered":"

My son Felix, who is half Swedish, speaks three regional dialects of English fluently — RP, <\/span>or BBC<\/span> English, which is what we speak at home; Essex\/Estuary, which is what the aboriginals of Saffron Walden spoke when he worked in the Hamleys warehouse here; Belfast, where he was at university. All these had to be learnt separately, and there are some dialects he never mastered at all. Once, in Belfast, he was introduced to a Glaswegian freind of a friend who launched into a story and spoke, Felix swears, for eight minutes without more than one word being comprehensible. That word, emerging into sudden audibility from the middle of the talk, was “titwank”.<\/p>\n\n

His friend Oskar<\/a> stayed in Sweden but nurtured a passion for Jamaican music. He’s now studying journalism, and came over to London to do a project on cup clashes, which culminated in a trip to Straford to hear eight different sound systems<\/a> competing. The bass was so loud it pushed the air from their lungs. He and Felix were the only whites in the room; and whenever a DJ said anything, Oskar was the only one who could understand a word of it.<\/p>\n\n

To add a final note of international surreality, the winning outfit<\/a> was Japanese.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My son Felix, who is half Swedish, speaks three regional dialects of English fluently — RP, <\/span>or BBC<\/span> English, which is what we speak at home; Essex\/Estuary, which is what the aboriginals of Saffron Walden spoke when he worked in … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1518"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1518"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1518\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1518"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1518"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1518"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}