Well British English doesn't really exist. English English is one variant, Scottish English is another and from what I've heard Northern Ireland has its own unique variant.
Amazon Lex can now speak British English... or simply 'English' if you're British
It's only taken three years, but the conversational interface tech underlying Amazon's Alexa assistant is now capable of the world's lingua franca in its purest form – "British English". If "color" sets your teeth on edge and "organization" makes your eye twitch, you're in for a wild ride with our San Francisco office's work …
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Thursday 17th September 2020 12:03 GMT Hubert Cumberdale
Well, it does exist as a standard formal written form, but the spoken and informal forms do of course vary widely from town to town, let alone from sub-nation* to sub-nation.
*(I use this term at the risk of invoking the ire of residents of Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. However, be assured that I also include England as one of the sub-nations, so please don't freak out. We're a nation of sub-nations.)
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Thursday 17th September 2020 14:46 GMT James 139
My grandmother used to really hate his accent, saying that it wasnt very realistic, she was from NI.
All the more amusing given that the chap in question, Charles Lawson, is from Northern Ireland, and I can only assume they asked him to do some other accent that sounded like a non-native trying to put on an inaccurate impersonation of an accent.
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Friday 18th September 2020 09:44 GMT Ken 16
Re: Born on the Isle of Eire...
Eire isn't an isle, it's the Irish word for sorrows, you might be thinking of Éire, the name in Irish for the country Ireland or Éireann, the Irish for Ireland but since you're writing in English you might be better sticking to 'Ireland'.
What are they teaching in citizenship classes these days?
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Friday 18th September 2020 22:40 GMT Ken Hagan
Re: Born on the Isle of Eire...
I don't think we have citizenship classes here. We didn't when I was at school and my kids didn't more recently.
Given how our politicians can stick an oar in some so apolitical as English and Maths, it is probably for the best that we don't have Citizenship.
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Thursday 17th September 2020 16:43 GMT jake
And now a word from my Great Grandfather:
Ah’m fair stalled, stop faffin' about and frame thissen!
(A Finn, he came across the country to California by covered wagon during the gold rush ... he started learning English during that trip from his first wife, a Plains Indian, who had learned English from her first husband, a Yorkshireman. How a Finn and a Plains Indian hooked up in New York City in the first place has been lost to history, alas.)
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Thursday 17th September 2020 12:20 GMT Danny 2
Dragon Dictator
My dad was never good with a keyboard so I bought him Dragon Dictate, like half a lifetime ago. He got on fine with it, but it couldn't understand a word I said. Everyone says we speak identically, but Dragon Dictate disagreed.
More recently I bought him a Google Home for him to chat to. He wasn't impressed. He asked it, "Okay Google, who were the Famous Five?", and it correctly listed the five Hibs players from the 1950s (Smith, Johnstone, Reilly, Turnbull and Ormond). I asked it, "Okay Google, who were the Famous Five?", and it repeated the Enid Blyton stories.
I concluded it had picked up on his Leith accent, and thought mine a wee bit English.
[Or it just knew I was a bigger fan of Blyton than Hibs]
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Thursday 17th September 2020 16:51 GMT jake
Re: It's not so much spellings...
Has it occurred to you that YOU are the foreigner, and are speaking a foreign language? Do you think a Frenchman thinks he has a distinct advantage when he swears at you in French deep in the wilds of Liverpool? Or do you find him to be a rude person, more intent on being abusive than in communicating?
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Thursday 17th September 2020 23:24 GMT jake
Re: It's not so much spellings...
Read what the OP posted. For some reason, he thought that being able to insult someone who didn't actually understand the insult was an "advantage".
Advantage for what, exactly? Shirley the point of an insult is to be understood, otherwise why bother? Unless you are trying to be a prat, of course.
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Friday 18th September 2020 12:16 GMT Cederic
Re: It's not so much spellings...
Shirley the point of an insult is to be understood
Oh hell no. The best insults are the ones that leave the target bewildered, unsure if you've just complimented them or not, while everybody else listening knows exactly what was just said.
It's a skill that I use regularly on Americans.
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Thursday 17th September 2020 12:44 GMT Chris G
No hope
I have not lived in the UK for a good twenty years, when I hear a lot of British tourists here I have no idea what they are saying.
Particularly Londoners and I'm South London born and bred, language and speech are living things that change constantly along with the evolving culture.
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Thursday 17th September 2020 17:01 GMT jake
Re: No hope
Several years ago, as the Wife & I were wandering around the Plaza here in Sonoma with a couple of our Whippets, we ran across a family visiting from Yorkshire. Their kids actually went to the same highschool I got me Os and As from ... Small world. I had lived there some 40 years earlier, and yet I had no problems understanding them (and vice-versa). T'dawgs were right chuffed. The Wife, on the other hand ...
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Thursday 17th September 2020 18:39 GMT sofaspud
Re: No hope
A couple years ago my wife and I went on vacation to Disneyworld in Florida, and ran into a family from "just outside London" (I remember that part, but can't remember the actual name of the place). Later we ran into another couple from Yorkshire, and chatted with them for a while, too.
As an American... I'm pretty sure they were speaking different languages. I'm just sayin'.
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Thursday 17th September 2020 12:46 GMT lybad
Article quoted as "Amazon said: "With British English, you can deliver a robust and localized ['scuse me?] conversational experience that accurately understands the British accent. Amazon Lex also provides pre-defined slots that are localized [ahem] to capture information such as common names and cities found in England.""
So British English - but common names and cities found in England. So that rules out Scottish, Welsh and Northern Ireland's cities and names then?
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Friday 18th September 2020 13:54 GMT Spanners
Re: Correct
I will answer to many names, including
Orcadian
Scottish
British
European and
Human
What I describe myself as depends on who I am talking to. If I am talking to someone from London or the rest of the remote South East, I use the first. Someone from the USA hears British because I like pointing out that we're not all SNP enthusiasts.
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Thursday 17th September 2020 13:21 GMT Social Ambulator
Organize!
Except that -ize is the standard English spelling, and the myth that it’s American is a conspiracy fuelled by Microsoft Word’s spelling dictionary. Check the OED if you don’t believe me. The pocket Oxford dictionary I had at school in the 1950s (sic) doesn’t even have “organise”. And at least some technical book publishers in Britain still explicitly specify “-ize”, just as they did thirty years ago.
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Thursday 17th September 2020 13:31 GMT Danny 2
Don't moan, organ eyes
Why does the OED spell verbs such as organize and recognize in this way?
The suffix -ize comes ultimately from the Greek verb stem -izein. In both English and French, many words with this ending have been adopted (usually via Latin), and many more have been invented by adding the suffix to existing words. In modern French the verb stem has become -iser, and this may have encouraged the use of -ise in English, especially in verbs that have reached English via French. The -ise spelling of verbs is now very common in British use, and Oxford dictionaries published in the UK generally show both forms where they are in use, but give -ize first as it reflects both the origin and the pronunciation more closely, while indicating that -ise is an allowable variant. Usage varies across the English-speaking world, so it is important to record both spellings where they exist. There are a number of verbs with only one accepted spelling – advise and capsize, for example. This is not just perverse: they have different etymologies. The important thing is that people should be consistent in the form they use in a given document.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0bezsMVU7c
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Thursday 17th September 2020 14:34 GMT Waspy
American English is English
Sure I read somewhere that, in a similar vein, Brits changed their accents after USA independence (mainly in the south), so the USA still broadly sounds more like 18th century Brits than modern Brits do. Northerners have deviated a little less, having decided not to insert a 'r' into 'bath', 'grass', 'lass' etc
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Thursday 17th September 2020 14:53 GMT RM Myers
Re: American English is English
What is this American English of which we speak? Have you every been in south Louisiana, or spoken to a real Cajun? Or how about someone from Minnesota? Or someone from New York City? Or as far as that goes, almost any large inner city neighborhood. Within 2 blocks of my house, you can hear English with a Japanese, Chinese, Indian, Mexican, or Russian accent, and all from US citizens as well as non-citizens. As a written language, yes there is a reasonably consistent "American English". As a spoken language, not even close.
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Thursday 17th September 2020 15:19 GMT First Light
Re: American English is English
I partially agree with you. "It don't pay me no never mind" is one of my favorite quotes from the South. "God willing and the creek don't rise," from the West.
However, idiomatic American has alot of sports references, eg coming out of left field (out of the blue), touching base, etc. The kind of things they teach in those hideous IELTS courses.
Also television tends to enforce a certain standardisation of accent and language.
If you grow up outside the US as a native English speaker, you will definitely find your vocabulary shifting and your vowels broadening as you attempt to be understood by Americans, especially NYers who are not shy of "correcting" your pronunciation.
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Thursday 17th September 2020 17:20 GMT jake
Re: American English is English
""God willing and the creek don't rise," from the West."
For values of "West" that includes Texas. Which ain't "the west", no matter how hard you squint at it. Shit, it's even on the wrong side of The Rockies!
"especially NYers who are not shy of "correcting" your pronunciation."
Which sets my teeth on edge, and makes me want to go all Joisey on their ass ... For you Brits, that's kind of like a Glaswegian trying to tell someone from Basingstoke how to speak.
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Friday 18th September 2020 11:46 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: American English is English
You say that... My Malaysian Chinese wife's accent goes from West Coast American to West Yorkshire accept via an South East Scottish twang before firmly arriving at Manglish (Malaysian English)
It's comical to behold how it changes depending on who she's speaking to (and if she's imbibing at the time or not)
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Saturday 19th September 2020 22:08 GMT Danny 2
Re: American English is English
@lybad
I worked for Hamilton District Council and played works football. The highlight was I once played against a Lisbon Lion - we lost, but still. The lowlight was a stranger came up and punched me because I was wearing a French strip in Blantyre. Apparently too close to a Rangers strip.
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Friday 18th September 2020 07:37 GMT werdsmith
Re: American English is English
One person in England can sound very different from another, so they don’t broadly sound like much.
If you read written text from pre-empire days, it seems that people understood the phonetic sound represented by the combinations of letters and put together a word however they wanted. There was no consistency or standards for spelling until the world trading with so many different tongues started to require an interface.
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Thursday 17th September 2020 15:37 GMT Arachnoid
British English
WTF exactly is that as there are so many dialect and variations within the language , is it Brummy, Mancunian, Liverpudlian ,Cockney or some other variant involving plums in ya gob?
On the other hand American English is in a world of its own and should be corrected on sight, especially the spelling.
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Thursday 17th September 2020 15:48 GMT Mike 137
"Oxford University Press, favours -ize over -ise"
For its house style maybe. However (at least until recently" the Oxford dictionary was specifically "descriptive, not prescriptive" of the language.
The niggle -ise v. -ize based on ancient Greek is somewhat reminiscent of the "sin of the split infinitive". This is based on argument from Latin, in which you can't split an infinitive because there's no particle (the equivalent of the "to" in English). So in reality it's not "mustn't" at all, but "can't" if you force English to follow rules derived from Latin. But of course you don't have to if you're speaking or writing English.
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Thursday 17th September 2020 21:24 GMT Lorribot
Bet it won't understand Geordie.
Still, it is an ideal opportunity for Nicola to blame Boris for not taxing Amazon enough to do things properly or better still nationalise them and base them in Edinburgh *sigh, followed by bemused chuckle* and another reason why the Scots should be allowed to vote to leave the United Kingdon of England so she can do things properly.
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Thursday 24th September 2020 03:07 GMT Steve E
Not just the original
Whilst the residents of this green and pleasant land undoubtedly have a legitimate claim of prior art where the English language is concerned, we do find it a little galling that another nation has taken an antiquated version of it, tagged on a “US” prefix, and claimed as their own. Seriously the word ‘faucet’ fell out of favour in the civilised world shortly after Queen Elizabeth (the first that is) lost the colour in her cheeks. I guess we should be grateful you lot didn’t call it World-English, you know, in the same way you have your World Series with no international interest whatsoever. Oh crap, but you did, didn’t you... International-English Oh bugger!