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4 HN mentions · mentioned in 4 months, 2024–2026
3:26 · 3.2M views · Jan 6, 2020
A Hot Fuzz clip in which Nicholas Angel struggles to understand the West Country accent of locals.
Dropped into threads about dialects and mutual intelligibility as a comedic illustration.
4 comments from Hacker News
Right the fact you may not be able to understand some Scottish people because of their accent doesn't mean they're not competent English speakers, it just means the accent is difficult for you to understand, which isn't relevant when writing. There are a few famous movie scenes where somebody deliberately uses perfectly reasonable English sentences but with such a thick accent that most English users cannot understand it, but once you know what they said you can play that sound back and yeah, that's what they said, you just couldn't understand the accent e.g.. this video Indeed the joke is that people keep repeating what the hard-to-understand bloke said even when it's perfectly obvious what he said, because if you can understand it then you can't tell whether it was hard to understand. That's not even Scottish, the bloke in that scene is from Somerset, which is the far side of the country but exactly like Scotland most people in Somerset don't talk like that most of the time, but some of them do, some of the time and to them it's normal, that's just how you say words.
You don't even have to go all the way to China. The English countryside has multiple so called "accents" that are basically unintelligible to a speaker of London English, with plenty of famous examples in popular media (e.g. [1][2]). Similarly, Germany has plenty of mutually unintelligible dialects. They are all related to each other and any two geographically adjacent dialects are mutually intelligible, but as distance grows it becomes harder to bridge the gap (which is why everyone learns Standard German nowadays). Luxembourgish meanwhile is in every sense a dialect of German with French influences, but due to having an army is considered its own language. 1: this video 2: [LINK]
You say that, but what comes to mind is the scene from Hot Fuzz where Simon Pegg's character needs a translator to understand a thick West Country accent. this video
> older man approached me and spoke to me in English and I couldn’t understand a word he said like this this video ?