Danes world's best non-native English speakers

[trogs]

Both of my English teachers were Brits. I think a huge part of the accent of the younger Dane is "who was your teacher".

But really, Hollywood eventually drowns out any influence from school. When my class started learning English, several of the kids in class mere already more-or-less fluent, just from watching TV. And after school, everybody sees American movies for the rest of their life.

Same elsewhere. Here in China, the TV is unifying the once-scattered accents and dialects of this humungous, rural country.

TV/video is today what the church was 200 years ago.

[trogs]

Also:

DEEEEENMAAAAAARK, FUCK YEEEEAAHHH

[laklak]

When I worked in Denmark I was amazed at how well almost everyone spoke English, and usually a couple of other languages to boot. In fact, the Danes spoke far better English than anyone I met in Yorkshire.

[Jerome Da Gnome]

Hollywood teaches the world English.

[Griz_]

This matches my experience and Norwegians and the Dutch are pretty darn proficient as well.

[Griz_]

[quote="Jerome Da Gnome";p="2116788"]Hollywood teaches the world English.[/quote]

And schools.

[I'm With Stupid]

[quote="Jerome Da Gnome";p="2116788"]Hollywood teaches the world English.[/quote]
And that's why they all speak like this?

[trogs]

[quote="I'm With Stupid";p="2116805"][quote="Jerome Da Gnome";p="2116788"]Hollywood teaches the world English.[/quote]
And that's why they all speak like this?

[/quote]
So goddamn RACIST.
But itøs ok, they are only Norwegians.

[Xaihe]

Dutchyland proud is too be two-nd place.

[trogs]

[quote="Xaihe";p="2121210"]Dutchyland proud is too be two-nd place.[/quote]
You guys beat us in stature, so it evens out

[jamest]

Does Hollywood have that much influence? I mean, the UK produces many good films, has (and had) countless literary geniuses, and has been prominent on the popular musical scene for at least 50 years. Are mainland Europeans ignoring all of this?

[Scot Dutchy]

[quote="jamest";p="2172235"]Does Hollywood have that much influence? I mean, the UK produces many good films, has (and had) countless literary geniuses, and has been prominent on the popular musical scene for at least 50 years. Are mainland Europeans ignoring all of this?[/quote]

Dialogue in American films is much more simpler. Vocabulary being reduced to minimum including grunts makes it far easier to pick up unfortunately.

Plenty of Dutch used to be proud to speak with a English accent. Afraid students today are happy sounding like some second rate actor in the general crapiness that is the American cinema.

[Blackadder]

[quote="jamest";p="2172235"]Does Hollywood have that much influence? I mean, the UK produces many good films, has (and had) countless literary geniuses, and has been prominent on the popular musical scene for at least 50 years. Are mainland Europeans ignoring all of this?[/quote]

Never mind mainland Europeans, the Hollywood disease infects British kids too. I don't know if you have children but my teenagers and their friends (mostly the girls for some reason) all adopt a faux Californian raised inflection at the end of every sentence and the word "like" is inserted between every three other words. And that is despite being pulled up on this crap constantly by my partner, who is an English teacher and by me (I write legal documents so the English language is my principal work tool).

It's not that I object to Americanisms per se. It's the lazy attitude to vocabulary. "I was like...and she was like...and then I was like" - as I patiently explained to my 12 year old, the English language has the most wonderful variety of verbs. It seems a pity to jettison them all in order to sound like a Disney Channel retard.

[don't get me started]

Blackadder, you would not be alone in decrying the use of 'like' in conversational language.
However, don't be too hard on your kids.Although usage of the word like is often dismissed as an empty filler, a kind of irritating verbal tic, research has revealed some very interesting things concerning this polysemous word.

Michael McCarthy (one of the top corpus linguists in the world), has identified the following data: (citation available on request)

'Like is one of the TOP 15 words in English usage.' That's right. It is up there with 'I', 'You', 'the', and' and the like.
It is used 6 times more frequently in conversation than in writing.'

(It is important to remember here that the written form of the language has been privileged over the spoken form of the language, even to the extent that Chomsky, with typical dismissive elan, labeled the spoken form of the language as 'corrupt' and 'degenerate' (1965) and unworthy of serious study. In this he was completely wrong. Spoken language is deeply orderly, just not in the ways that traditional grammars would recognize.)

As I mentioned, the word like is used for a lot of different purposes, and here is the breakdown from corpus analysis.

34% to say that something is similar. " He acted like we were in his way"
18% to highlight something. "They were like totally blocking the doors."
17% miscellaneous meanings, including the verb 'like'
16% to give examples. " Like, I get upset
10% to report speech. "They were like "What's the problem?"
5% to say 'approximately' "Isn't he like 80 years old?"

I have done some research on 'like' in its quotitive function. Her is a passage from a paper that I have in press at the moment.

"In addition to this, a further semantic aspect of ‘like’ as a qoutative is connected to one of the other senses of the word, namely ‘similar to’. If we accept that any given utterance realizes aspects of its meaning in ways beyond lexical-grammatical structure, (by pitch, speed, accent, paused onset, gaze, gesture and so on) then we tacitly accept that the report of that utterance will probably not capture all of these dimensions. Every report must make some compromises once the original utterance is decontextualized and ‘de-authored’. In a sense, a report can only make the claim to be similar to the original utterance, and by using the verb ‘like’ to report an utterance the reporter is actually being more accurate in his/her report, claiming similitude rather than faithfulness in all points of the original utterance."

Young adults often have a fully developed grammar and vocabulary competence, but still lack certain discourse and socio-cultural skills in language use, which emerge later (and sometimes only partially, depending on environment.)
Many of my students return from study abroad experiences with very finely developed abilities in the use of 'like' in conversational exchanges.

When you hear someone speak grammatically correct English without discourse markers, smallwords, change of state tokens, closed class repair initiators, vague category markers and all the rest of it, it starts to become clear how valuable these words are in making speech live.

Apologies for a verge off topic....

[Varangian]

Danes being most fluent in English? Small wonder, as they have big trouble making themselves understood in their own language...

[trogs]

[Scarlett]

[quote="Evolving";p="2116153"]Not the Scots then?

[/quote]

Oi!

[Varangian]

[quote="trogs";p="2180153"][/quote]
That was just kamelåså!

For all Game of Thrones fans, here's a greeting from Denmark's greatest export in recent years, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau:

[Thomas Eshuis]

[quote="Xaihe";p="2121210"]Dutchyland proud is too be two-nd place.[/quote]
Yep, cheers to those bloody Vikings for beating us!

[Thomas Eshuis]

[quote="Griz_";p="2116794"][quote="Jerome Da Gnome";p="2116788"]Hollywood teaches the world English.[/quote]

And schools.[/quote]
And video games.
And TV series.