Scots – Beyond Highbrow

Repost: Englishes, Portugueses, and Chineses

In the comments to a previous post, Goyta made several comments. First of all he noted that the differences between Brazilian and European Portuguese are considerable, especially when a Brazilian hears a less educated, working class or rural Portuguese.

He also said that when European Portuguese are interviewed on Brazilian TV, Brazilians wish they had subtitles. Wanting to have subtitles when you see a video of someone speaking is actually a symptom that you are dealing with another language. He said the differences are particularly severe when it comes to IT. He said he cannot understand 99% of what is written in a European Portuguese IT magazine, whereas with a regular publication, he can get 99% of it.

It does appear that the differences between European Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese are pretty significant, more significant than the differences between US and British English.

On other hand, I find Hibernian English spoken in Ireland to be nearly incomprehensible, though it is said to be just a dialect of English. It’s clearly been influenced extensively by the Irish language. Scots, the regional English spoken in Scotland and exemplified by the movie Trainspotting , is actually a completely separate language from English. That movie actually needed subtitles. On the other hand, there is a Scottish English dialect that is not Scots that is pretty intelligible.

We can always understand British English no matter who is writing it. Same with understanding spoken Australian and New Zealand (Kiwi) English. British English is often written a bit differently in slang expressions, but we pick them up. The formal writing is totally understandable.

There have been huge fights on Wikipedia between British English and US English speakers with complaints from the Brits of bullying by the Americans. There was an attempt to fork the English Wiki into Br and US versions but it failed. Wikipedia demands that you have an ISO code in order to get a Wikipedia and ISO codes only come from SIL, who publishes Ethnologue. I petitioned for a few new languages a couple of years ago and they all got shot down.

There is an ongoing war between European Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese on the Portuguese Wikipedia with complaints from the European Portuguese of bullying on the part of the Brazilians. Gotya noted that he, a Brazilian, could not read Portuguese IT materials. This is unfortunate. All written British is intelligible to us. We can read anything written in the UK, though most of our reading material here is from the US. I can read The Economist and The New Standard and The Spectator with no problems at all.

As a Californian, I speak completely normally, of course, and have no accent whatsoever! Haha. We can understand the Midwest accent perfectly, though it can be different. It sounds “flat”. They also insert rhotic consonants before some consonants at the end of a word and the raising of the preceding vowel – “wash” becomes “worsh”.

The Oklahoma accent is different and sometimes it can be hard to understand. I heard some people speaking Oklahoman in the doctor’s office the other day for a minute or so I thought they were speaking a foreign language! Of course they were mumbling too. Then I asked them where they were from and they said Oklahoma. At that point, I had caught onto their accent and could understand them perfectly.

I do not know why the Texan accent is said to be hard to understand. We understand it perfectly, but it sounds funny. We make a lot of jokes about it. George Bush has a strong Texan accent. There is also an Arkansas accent (Arkies) that is different but understandable. This is also the source of jokes. In this part of California there are many Whites who still speak Arkie and Okie. They are the descendants of those who came out here from the Dust Bowl in the 1930’s. Steinbeck wrote a book about this called The Grapes of Wrath.

Other than that, there are no accents in the West.

There is some sort of a Kentucky-Tennessee accent, but I am not sure if they differ. This is also a source of jokes. It’s sort of a general Appalachian accent, and it’s the source of jokes about inbred hillbillies and whatnot.

The Southern accent is well-known but usually understandable. My brother went to live in Alabama though and he said that the workers in the factory he worked at were often completely unintelligible. The Blacks were worse than the Whites, and they had separate accents. He has imitated their incomprehensible accent to me and it’s pretty hilarious.

I have heard poor Blacks from Memphis on the Cops show who were completely unintelligible to me. People with more money and status tended to be more comprehensible. I sometimes have a hard time understanding a Mississippi or Alabama accent, but it’s no problem. Our Southern politicians all have thick Southern accents.

Cajun English from Louisiana is often unintelligible to us, but the people with more money and status are quite intelligible.

There is also a Black accent from the coast of South Carolina called Gullah that is hard to understand. The Blacks from around there speak something like it and you can pick it out if you are sharp. It has a pretty, lilting sound to it. It’s different from the standard Southern accent and is sort of charming.
Moving up the coast, there is a Virginia accent that is softer, pleasant and charming.

There is the famous New York accent, which to us laid back Californians sounds horribly rude, obnoxious, loud and belligerent. Some forms of it also sound ignorant – these tend to be associated with working class Whites in Brooklyn and the Bronx.

One thing they do is to glide and lengthen rhotic consonants – “New York” becomes New Yawwk” “Brooklyn” becomes “Bwwoklyn”.

A similar accent seems to be spoken in New Jersey, but it may be different. One again, it involves lenition of rhotic consonants, in this case turning them into dipthongs with long vowels. “New Jersey” becomes “New Joiisey”. This is also a source of jokes.
There is a Boston accent which is completely understandable. Ted Kennedy speaks that. It involves the lenition of hard consonants into glides and the end of a word – “car” becomes “caw”.

I believe there is a sort of a slow drawl from Vermont and New Hampshire too. Those people, especially the older men, are known for not talking much. Men of few words.

Some Blacks around here still talk with thick Black accents that sound Southern even though they were born in the Central Valley.
There is also an “Ebonics” English (for lack of a better word) that is spoken here by sort of ghettoish or semi-ghettoish Blacks. It is frankly, almost completely unintelligible. They seem like they are talking with their mouths full, mumbling and speaking extremely fast, running all of the sounds together.

Everyone who talks like this can also speak Standard English thank God, and they can quickly move in and out of that Ebonics talk when you talk to them. It’s sort of a language for them to talk so that we can’t understand them, I think. To us, it sounds sloppy, low class and ghetto, but it reportedly a full-fledged language.
The Blacks in the Caribbean do not speak English! That makes me feel good because I can hardly understand a word they say. Each island has its own form of Creole English which is a completely separate language.

I think that Indian English (Chichi derogatorily) and West African English need to be split into separate languages because they are often incomprehensible to us. This is a case of regional Englishes evolving on their own. Further, West African English often differs a lot in its written form.

Indian English is often so mangled in its written form that it is incomprehensible, but more educated writers are comprehensible. The tendency to drop articles is very annoying and makes written Indian English sound ignorant to us. Don’t mess with our damned useless articles!

Reading about the Chinese languages, there are efforts underway to get speakers to speak proper Putonghua, whatever that means. Speakers from different parts of China still speak Putonghua with an accent that can be heavy at times.

Here in the US, we do not have this problem. Even our politicians still speak in heavy regional accents, and no one cares. We can always understand them. There is no national effort to get everyone to speak proper English that involves wiping out regional accents, though I understand that in the corporate world, they are offering classes to help people get rid of Southern accents, which are stereotyped as sounding backwards, ignorant and racist. I think this is sad. Our regional accents are what makes this country great.

Goyta also notes that Brazilians are starting to speak Spanish and the neighboring Spanish speaking countries are starting to speak Portuguese. When I was dealing with them 5-10 years ago, most Brazilians did not speak much Spanish (They acted like it was extremely low on their list of priorities) and Spanish speakers had zero interest in learning Portuguese (In fact, they regarded the suggestion as offensive and preposterous!)

Goyta notes that with regional integration, more Portuguese are speaking Spanish and more Spanish speakers from nearby countries are learning Portuguese. Spanish is becoming a prerequisite to getting a good job in Brazil. This is good as it’s good to see Latin Americans getting together.

It is also true that in China there has been a big fight over Chinese language classification. The unificationist – fascist types, associated with the Communist government (and actually with the Nationalist government before also – this is really a Chinese elite project) insist that there is only one Chinese language.
This goes along with racism of Northern Chinese against Southern Chinese and to some extent vice versa. This racism is most evident in the Cantonese vs Mandarin war in China.

Cantonese speakers say that they speak the real Chinese and that Northern Chinese speak a bastardized tongue derived from the old Manchu language. Cantonese speakers also resent that a Northern Chinese was turned into the national tongue and imposed on them against their will. They also say that Northern Chinese are really from the South and that the real NE Asians are the Mongolians, Koreans, Manchu, Japanese, etc. Genetic studies show that this is not the case.

Northern Chinese say that Southern Chinese are not real Chinese and their blood is “contaminated” with Tai types like the Tai, Zhuang, Vietnamese, etc. There is probably something to this.
Although Putonghua is the only official language in China and there is a war going on against the regional Chineses, enforcement has been held off against Cantonese. And Cantonese areas are still where you will hear the least Putonghua and the most regional Chinese in all spheres of life. Cantonese is also allowed on the radio and TV, whereas regional Chineses had previously banned from the media.

The Putonghua-only campaign has been too successful and regional Chineses are being wiped out. There is now a regionalism movement arising in China to promote and retain regional Chineses.

I think that the Putonghua campaign has been good, but that China should promote bilingualism. The Putonghua campaign has not yet been successful. As of 2001, only 53% of Chinese could speak Putonghua, but it has probably risen a lot since then as the government is really pushing this hard.

China clearly needs a language that they can all speak. For its entire history, many Chinese have not been able to speak to each other, including folks from one village to the next if you go to the southeast and the central coast. Provinces like Fujian, Jiangxi, Jiangsu, Henan and Hunan are notoriously multilingual.

Most of these places have a lot of very high mountains, and transportation was typically very poor. Even today, you can scarcely get around by vehicle and you sometimes have to walk from one place to the next, sometimes for dozens of miles! Bottom line is they were very isolated from each other.

These places also retained a tradition of being hideouts for “hillbilly” types where there was a lot of unemployment and many folks turned to crime. Also criminals fled to the mountains where they could hide. Upshot was that due to all of this, and people seen as backwards, lazy, stupid and thieving, people from the rest of China had no interest in going to these places anyway.
When people left these parts of China to go to big cities, they were stereotyped in a way similar to how ghetto Blacks and Browns are in the US. This made them want to stay in their mountains.

A Bit on the Celtic Languages: Welsh, Cornish, and Manx

@SHI comments on this post.

SHI: A Welshman fluent in his native tongue must be the saddest person around.

Why would a Welshman be sad? 20% of the population speaks Welsh now.

SHI: I believe the last native Cornish speaker died sometime in the 19rh century.

Cornish supposedly died out in the late 1700’s. The last speaker was said to be a woman, a fishmonger or seller of fish. But incredibly enough, it actually looks like it lingered on all the way into the early 20th Century or maybe later. A recent article I read said that actually Cornish never really died and has always been with us.

SHI: Manx must be doing well though. A separate island breeds isolation and preservation.

Manx died out in 1974, but it’s been revived lately too with 2,500 speakers. Some speakers are even raising their kids in Manx! There are now ~35 native speakers who grew up speaking Manx!

There is a Manx-native school too. The last speaker was Ed Mandrell, a fisherman who died in 1974. He was the last native speaker of Manx, not the last speaker of Manx. At the time that Mandrel died, there were ~300 second language speakers who could speak it more or less fluently but were not native speakers. So Manx actually never even went away! That second language speakers learned it as students.

Mandrell speaking in 1964. He’s talking to Brian Stowell, who learned Manx when he was older. However, Stowell is still alive and he is one of the best modern Manx speakers out there, with a large vocabulary.

That English accent of Mandrell’s is a kicker. It sounds very much like Scots, the English-like language still spoken in parts of Scotland. It’s actually not English at all. It’s a separate language and English and Scots have ~41% intelligibility. They split 500 years ago. Modern speakers from Man sound a lot like Scousers or Liverpudlians.

There are speakers in the comments saying that they speak Irish, and they can understand a lot of his Manx. Manx was created after all by a movement of Irish speakers to the Isle of Man. One commenter says it sounds a lot like Ulster Irish, his dialect of Irish.

English as a Genocidal Language Attacking Other Tongues Spoken in the Anglosphere – Ireland and the UK

Yes, English has devastated most of the native languages of the Anglosphere, talking here about Ireland and the UK.

Welsh is still very much alive, spoken by 20% of the population of Wales.

Irish Gaelic is in fairly good shape. It will survive to the end of the century as will Welsh. There are still children being brought up in Irish. Irish is undergoing a renaissance with a lot of literature being published. Keep in mind it is an official language of Ireland. All Irish have to take 12 years of Irish in school but they don’t learn much and you ask them to speak a sentence in Irish 20 years later and they struggle. The way it is taught is quite inferior.

Scots Gaelic is in very bad shape with only 7,000 speakers but there are also second language speakers and I believe it is still spoken as a native language out on the islands. Gaelic is now an official language of Scotland.

Scots, very closely related to English but not English, is much more widely spoken by ~20% of the population. Scottish English is almost a separate language and it is spoken by about everyone. Scots is probably four separate languages. Shetlandic cannot be understood by other Scots speakers and is surely a separate language. Even inland, people in the south have a hard time understanding people in the north.

Cornish has been revived and there are 1,000 second language speakers. They can’t agree on an orthography and this is the subject of endless fights.

Manx went extinct maybe 50-75 years ago when a famous elderly last speaker died. He must have had no one to talk to. How sad. However, 2,500 people on the Isle of Man have learned Manx as a second language and are now Manx speakers. A few of them are even raising their children in Manx, so we may soon have Manx native speakers again.

Is English a Scandinavian Language?

Philip Andrews writes:

It is surprising how little attention is paid to the influence of the Danelaw on the English language. no one in Old English academia seems to want to touch it. It’s a Norwegian article that has claimed English is a Scandinavian language.
Anglo-Saxon and the Early post-Norman Conquest English church put the dampers on the Scandinavian influence. Even the story of the Norman Conquest’ reads quite differently in the Norse Saga version to how it comes through the AS Chronicle.
AS lost most of its grammar to the Norse of the Danelaw. That’s why English has not the inflection system of Continental Germanic but rather that of Norse. I’m happy to think of English as Norse in grammar and Syntax but mostly Latin-French in vocabulary. About 60+% of English derives from Latin-French.
Personally I question the old story of the Normans being ‘Northmen’. Another AS/Norman manipulation. It was 1,000 years ago but the Normands were in what is now France earlier. Records 1,000 years ago as now were subject to political manipulation.
Why did William go to the Pope for a Blessing for a Crusade? Because he was intent on driving the pagan Vikings out of England and Christianizing the place under Norman tutelage. Hence the Harrying of the North. Yorkshire is still far more ‘Norse’ than any other part of England. Listening to people north of Watford speak English and you’re listening to Norse accents speaking English. With Norse words in dialects. If William hadn’t come with mounted archers (from the East) he could never have defeated the Vikings.
Much of English history abroad (empire etc.) equates to versions of Viking raiding. Old Norse habits die hard.

I don’t really agree with this, but it is an interesting idea anyway.
I did some research on this question recently. England was settled by the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes.
There is a Low German language called Anglish which is spoken in an areas of the far north of Germany called Schlesweig-Holstein. Anglish is apparently the remains of the Low German language spoken by the Angles. This is a peninsula that connects Germany with Denmark. The southern half of the peninsula is Germany, and the north half is Denmark. Anglish is not readily intelligible with any other Low German language, even those nearby.
The Saxons were found a bit to the south, but I believe that they also came from this peninsula.
And it is interesting that in this part of Germany, especially around Fleisburg on the border, the dialect of Low German that they speak is more or less intelligible not with Danish but with a Danish dialect called South Jutnish that is so divergent that in my opinion, it is a separate language from Danish. Danish speakers have poor intelligibility of South Jutnish. From the Net:

Sønderjysk is often seen as very difficult for other speakers of Danish even other Jysk or Jutnish dialects to understand. Instead of the normal Danish stød, it has tonal accents like Swedish. Many of the phonemes are also different, including velar fricatives much like in German. It also has the definite article before the noun, as opposed to the standard Danish postclitic article. South Jutlandic is surely a separate language.

So in this part of Germany, there are Low German lects that are actually intelligible with Danish lects. So here is where “German” and “Danish” are nearly transitional. However, Standard German and Standard Danish are not intelligible with each other at all. Nevertheless, German speakers can pick up Danish and other Scandinavian languages pretty easily.
And South Jutnish itself is interesting in that Jutnish was one of the languages spoken by one of the tribes that invaded England, the Jutes. So one of “Anglo-Saxon” tribes that invaded England actually spoke something like “Danish.” South Jutnish itself is said to be quite a bit like English, especially the older forms of English. There are stories about speakers of the pure Scots language spoken in Scotland going to the South Jutnish area and being able to converse with South Jutnish speakers.Scots can be thought of as English from 500 years ago because Scots split from English about 500 years ago. So in this case we have West Germanic and North Germanic speakers who are able to actually converse.
There is also a suggestion based on the fact that North Germanic South Jutnish is intelligible with whatever odd West Germanic Low German lect is spoken near Fleisburg that South Jutnish itself may be nearly German-Danish transitional.
A few take-home points: the “Anglo-Saxons” actually something a lot more like Low German than Standard German. Low German and Standard German are separate languages and German speakers cannot understand Low German. And the “Anglo-Saxons” also spoke something like “Danish” in the form of Jutnish. Also all of these Low German lects that made up “Anglo-Saxon” came from the far north of Germany where “German” and “Danish” start to nearly blend into each other or better yet where West Germanic and North Germanic are almost transitional.
In addition to the evidence coming from the Danelaw area of England where actual Danish speakers settled, it appears that the Scandinavian or North Germanic influence in English is more with Danish than with any other Scandinavian language.
However, 2/3 of the Anglo-Saxon components were actually from West Germanic Low German lects which are not readily intelligible with any Danish, not even with South Jutnish.
It is often said that the closest language to English is West Frisian, spoken in the northwest of the Netherlands. This is a Germanic language that is close to Dutch. In fact, some say that West Frisian itself is straight up from Old Saxon, which is the language that the Saxons of the Anglo-Saxons spoke. A man who is able to speak Old English went to the West Frisia area of the Netherlands and spoke to an old farmer there who spoke good West Frisian. They were actually able to hold a conversation in English from 1,000 years ago and West Frisian of today. West Frisian of course is a West Germanic language.
However, if you look into the mater a bit more, the language that is closest to English is the endangered North Frisian, with 66% cognates with English in the most frequently used words, a bit more than West Frisian. Nevertheless, 66% cognates in the most frequently used words doesn’t do any good for intelligiblity. I listened to a 10 minute broadcast of an old woman speaking North Frisian and I could not understand one word.
North Frisian, which actually may be up to five separate languages, is also spoken in that same peninsula of far northern Germany that Anglish, Saxon and Jutnish were spoken in. However, it is spoken on the east coast of the peninsula whereas Anglish and Saxon were spoken more to the west. So once again with North Frisian and English we see one more connection with this far northern part of Germany that borders on Denmark. Yet North Frisian is a West Germanic language, not a North Germanic Scandinavian language.
A language called Ingeavonic was spoken long ago in this region, and some put “Anglo-Frisian” in a West Germanic node under Ingeavonic. For a long time there was something called the North Sea Fisherman’s lect that originated in this same part of Germany but over on the west coast by Fleisburg rather than on the east coast by the North Frisian language. It was said that fishermen from all over the North Sea from the nations of Germany, the Netherlands, England, Scotland, Norway and Sweden spoke this lingua franca or trade language. This North Sea Fisherman’s language is said to have looked a lot like Ingaevonic.

Robert Burns, "Tam O Shanter"

This poem was written in and is being read in a language called Scots, which is not a dialect of English as many people think. Scots split off from English in ~1500, or 500 years ago. This is approximately what two languages sound like when they have been split apart for 500 years. I listened to this, although I can make out some words and even phrases here and there, honestly, I do not have the faintest idea what he is talking about, and I am missing most of this language. I can hear ~25% of it, if that. However, a good friend of mine from England listened to it and she said she could make out ~70%. So there you go. See if you can make heads or tails of this stuff.

Is Wurzel English a Separate Language?

Warren Port writes about Somerset English. See the link for a baffling sample of this strange form of English.

Admittedly it is a very bad English, and he is exaggerating for effect but I understand most of it except for the odd word. When I was twelve we moved from London to a tiny village called Cattcott ten miles from the Mendips where this recording is from. In the eighties there were some people who spoke that way, probably more diluted now.

I am a linguist. We don’t really call anything “bad English.” All dialects are as good as any other. I just figure if you can’t understand it, it’s a foreign language. I would like to split English into some separate languages because some of them pretty much are.
Really Wurzel is just as much of a valid way to speak English as any others. This man speaks Wurzel, and he is able to communicate just fine with other folks who also speak it, so it is a valid lect. The only problem is that rest of us English speakers speak another English language that is very far removed from this English language, so we can’t understand him. Someone ought to write this language down. It’s cool because it seems like it has a lot of new words that I don’t have in the English language that I speak.
At a minimum, as separate languages, I would probably split off:
Scots. There appears to be more more than one language inside Scots. Scots itself is already split off as a separate language. There appear to be 4 separate languages inside of Scots.
Doric Scots. Doric is spoken in the northeast of Scotland in Aberdeen, Banff and Buchan, Moray and the Nairn. It has difficult intelligibility with the rest of Scots.
Lallans Scots. This form of Scots is spoken in the south and central part of Scotland. This is the most common form of spoken Scots. Difficult intelligibility with the other lects.
Ulster Scots. This is the form of the Scots language spoken in North Ireland, mostly by Protestants. It has many dialects and has difficult intelligibility with the rest of Scots.
Insular Scots. Includes the Shetlandic and Orcadian dialects. Spoken on some Scottish islands and is reportedly even hard for other Scots speakers to understand. Of all of the Scots lects, this one is the farthest from the others.
Scottish English. We can probably split this off as well because it is probable that there are Scottish English speakers who can’t understand pure Scots very well. While some British English speakers can understand this lect well, others have problems with it. In particular, the dialect of Glascow is said to be hard to understand for many Londoners.
Hibernian English. English spoken in Ireland. There seem to be some forms of Irish English such as the hard lect spoken by the spokespeople for the IRA and its political wing like Gerry Adams, that are very hard for Americans to understand. Some English people also have a hard time with Ulster English.
Geordie and related lects from the far north of England up around Scotland. These lects are spoken around Newcastle in the far north of England on the east coast. Even the rest of the English often have a hard time with Geordie, and when people talk about multiple languages inside English, Geordie is often the first one they bring up.
Scouse. Really hard Scouse is barely even intelligible outside of Liverpool, not even in the suburbs. There is a report of an American who lived in Liverpool for a long period of time, and after 8 years, she still could not understand the very hard Scouse spoken by young working class Liverpool women. While some speakers of British English can understand Scouse, this is mostly due to bilingual learning. Other speakers of British English have a hard time with Scouse.
Potteries. Spoken almost exclusively in and around the city of Stoke on Trent in northern West Midlands. The hard form is not readily understood outside the city itself. The dialect is dying out.
Welsh English. The hard forms of Welsh English are not readily understood outside the region. There are at least 4 separate languages inside Welsh English.
South Welsh English.Welsh English is not a single language but actually appears to be four separate languages. The varieties of South Welsh English spoken in Cardiff and West Glamorgan (Swansea, Neath and Port Talbot) cannot be understood outside the region. It is not known if West Glamorgan English and Cardiff English can understand each other well. North Welsh English, South Welsh English and West Welsh English are as far apart as Newcastle, Cornwall and Birmingham; therefore, all three of them are separate languages.
North Welsh English. This language is spoken in areas such as Anglesy and Llanberis. It often has a soft lilt to it that people find pleasant and soothing. Probably poor intelligibility with West and South Welsh English.
West Welsh English. This is spoken in places such as Aberystwyth and Cardiganshire. Those two dialects are said to be particularly pleasant sounding. Probably poor intelligibility with North and South Welsh English.
Monmouth English. This form of Welsh English reportedly cannot be understood outside of Monmouth itself. Monmouth is a city on the eastern edge of Wales towards the south.
Wurzel. In particular the hard Wurzel form of West Country English spoken in Somerset at least until very recently is not well understood outside of Somerset. In addition, many younger residents of Somerset do not understand it completely. It sounds similar to Irish and has a lot of new words for things. Hard Wurzel is dying out, and its speakers are mostly elderly. The language of Bristol may be possibly be included here.
Weald Sussex English. A variety of Sussex English spoken in the Weald region of Sussex was traditionally very hard for outsiders to understand. It is dying out now, but it still has a few speakers.
Newfoundland English. There are reportedly some hard forms of Newfie English spoken by older fishermen on the coast of the island that are very hard for other North Americans to understand.
Appalachian English. Some forms of Appalachian English from the deep hollows of West Virginia are hard for other Americans to understand.
Mulungeon English. Some of the English lects spoken by Mulungeon groups in central Virginia in the Blue Ridge Mountains, particularly the lect spoken by the Monacan Indians living near Lynchburg, are very hard for other Americans to understand. They seem to have an archaic character and use a lot of new words for things that I could not identify when I heard it. This may be a type of English often said to be archaic from centuries ago that is still spoken in the mountains. The degree to which this is intelligible with the rest of Appalachian English is uncertain.
Tangier English. Spoken on an island off the coast of Virginia by fishermen, this is a relatively pure West Country English lect from 1680 or so that has survived more or less intact. When they speak among themselves, they are hard for other Americans to understand. The degree to which this can be understood by West Country English speakers in England is not known. Unknown intelligibility with Harkers Island English.
Harkers Island English. Spoken on Harkers Island off the coast of North Carolina on the Outer Banks. Has a similar origin to Tangier English. It is hard for outsiders to understand. The degree of intelligibility between Tangier English and Harkers Island English is not known.
New York English. There is a hard form of New York English, not much spoken anymore, that cannot be well understood at least here on the West Coast. Tends to be spoken by working class Whites especially in the Bronx. In general, this lect is dying out. In my region of California, we recently had a man who moved here from the Bronx, a young working class White man. Even after 2-3 months here, people still had a hard time understanding him. He did not seem to be able to modify his speech so he could be understood better, which usually means someone is speaking another language, not a dialect. Finally he learned California English dialect well enough so that he could make himself understood.
Nonatum English or Lake Talk. Spoken only in Nonatum, Massachusetts, one of 13 villages of the city of Newton, mostly by Italian-Americans. Many residents came from a certain village in the Lazio region of Italy. It appears to be a mixture of Italian and Romani, the language of the Gypsies. Not intelligible to those outside the village.
Yooper. Spoken mostly in the Michigan Upper Peninsula, this lect is also spoken in the northern parts of the Lower Peninsula and in parts of northeast Wisconsin. Heavily influenced by Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish, Flemish and French, this lect is hard for outsiders to understand largely due to the influence of these other European languages.
African American Vernacular English or Ebonics. This lect is spoken by many Black people in the US, often lower class people in ghettos or in the country. The hard forms of it cannot be understood at all by other Americans. I once had two Black women in my car for an hour or so. They were speaking AAVE. Over that hour, I do not believe that I understood a single word they said. They may as well have been speaking Greek. Forms spoken in the ghettos of Memphis and in the Mississippi Delta by rural Blacks may be particularly hard to understand.
South African English. While some Americans can understand this hard dialect well, though with difficulty, others cannot understand it. It is not known how well speakers of other Englishes such as British and Australian English can understand this lect.
Jamaican Creole English. Jamaican English Creole is already split off as a separate language. At any rate, in its hard form, it is nearly unintelligible to Americans.
Gullah English Creole is a creole spoken on the Gullah Islands off the coast of South Carolina. Already split off into a separate language. Not intelligible to American English speakers.
Nigerian Pidgin English. The harder forms of this may be rather hard to Americans to understand, but this needs further investigation. The hard forms are definitely quite divergent and seem odd to many Americans. Already split off as a separate language.
Australian English. Some forms of Australian English can be hard to understand for people outside the continent. I found that a form spoken in rural Tasmania was particularly hard to understand. I even have a hard time understanding Helen Caldicott, the famous physician. Other forms spoken more in the rural areas of the main island can also be rather hard to understand. Nevertheless, I can understand “TV Australian” well. However, speakers of British English are able to understand Australian English well, so it is not a language but rather a dialect of British English.
New Zealand English. This is similar but different from Australian English. While most New Zealand English is readily understandable to Americans, some of it can be a bit hard to hear. In the video below, the announcer speaks in TV New Zealand English, which I actually found a bit hard to understand, but I could make out most of it. The comedians spoke in a strong rural New Zealand accent. I could make out a lot of it, but not all of it for sure. However, British English speakers can understand all of the dialogue in this video. New Zealand English is not a language but is instead a dialect of British English.
Indian English. Some of the Indian English spoken by speakers in India can be quite hard to Americans to understand. What we need to know is whether this is a first or second language for them. If they were brought up speaking this Indian English, then it is a separate language. If it is simply English spoken as a second language by a native speaker of Hindi or another Indian language then it is not a separate language. Requires further investigation.
In conclusion, it seems that there are at least 25 separate languages and 3 creoles/pidgins inside of macro-English. 1 other case is uncertain.

Category: Scots