This is true. My parents are both fluent in French and have taught it in college and stuff, as well as French Lit. They themselves have trouble understanding various non-Parisian versions (even a few miles outside of Paris, people can speak quite differently).
My mother used to help out the poor tourists in Paris when she was there on a fullbright. The tourist would be standing there trying to figure out what the hell the taxi driver had said to them, but for some reason my mother was able to understand the very quick speech of the taxi driver.
Her analogy for this is New York English versus the very slooow version of English spoken in the Midwest. A brand new immigrant on the docks in New York (this was in primarly boat-travel, not much plane travel times, early 1950's) asked my mother to 'what language is that man (the porter) speaking?" Because 'jwantmettakeyerbagsdownfrya' (Did you want me to take your bags down for you) didn't sound like English at all.
Whereas, when speaking to a typical Midwesterner, an New Englander may sometimes wonder whether the Midwesterner is stupid and thinks slowly, or just speaks slowly. Heh.
Another example is Chinese, of course. A Beijing resident will tend to add a ton of 'r' sounds to the end of a lot of words, and will ellide things that a non-Beijing person would never ellide (e.g. 'xiao har' instead of 'xiao hai zi' for 'small child'). Even in a village five miles outside of Beijing, people speak vastly differently. And the Shanghai folks often drop a lot of tone subtleties, and shout a lot in fourth tone.
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Date: 2004-09-05 03:59 pm (UTC)My mother used to help out the poor tourists in Paris when she was there on a fullbright. The tourist would be standing there trying to figure out what the hell the taxi driver had said to them, but for some reason my mother was able to understand the very quick speech of the taxi driver.
Her analogy for this is New York English versus the very slooow version of English spoken in the Midwest. A brand new immigrant on the docks in New York (this was in primarly boat-travel, not much plane travel times, early 1950's) asked my mother to 'what language is that man (the porter) speaking?" Because 'jwantmettakeyerbagsdownfrya' (Did you want me to take your bags down for you) didn't sound like English at all.
Whereas, when speaking to a typical Midwesterner, an New Englander may sometimes wonder whether the Midwesterner is stupid and thinks slowly, or just speaks slowly. Heh.
Another example is Chinese, of course. A Beijing resident will tend to add a ton of 'r' sounds to the end of a lot of words, and will ellide things that a non-Beijing person would never ellide (e.g. 'xiao har' instead of 'xiao hai zi' for 'small child'). Even in a village five miles outside of Beijing, people speak vastly differently. And the Shanghai folks often drop a lot of tone subtleties, and shout a lot in fourth tone.