Thank you all for your answers on dialects.
Exactly! American English is actually all we need.
I agree to you. Am E is widespread. And its knowledge is enough for practical needs. But British is also widely used and popular cause they have stronger methods system of teaching and "supporting" it(books, TV, British Councils). So its better at least to understand it too.
Australian English just cracks me up, the way they pronounce the words and some word combinations they use are so funny.
They also have some unusual native words replacing English ones. Espessialy in agriculture.
The only "English" I totally don't understand is Jamaican!!! Of course, it's the hybrid of English and some native (local) Jamaican language, but Jamaicans still call it "Broken English". By the way none of my co-workers are able to understand it too. So seems to be we need to find the definition of where the English ends and something different (hybrid in this case) begins
I've never heard about Jamaican English before(may be for better
). I guess this case is closer to "language death".
Actually, if we are completely not able to understand the dialect, we may say of another language. I think it has a right to be the one. In fact, lots of languages appeared artificially in different times that's why they are close to each other even if they derived from different language families.
I?ve had some difficulties trying to understand Indians, especially the way they speak with each other mixing English words with Hindu or whatever language they speak. Once there was a funny situation when I said to my friend in Russian that we had to buy a watermelon. An Indian guy was in the same room and started laughing when he heard the word ?арбуз?. It turned out that in Hindu they say ?garbuz?, so we found at least one common word that Indians and Russians use. Now I wonder where the word garbuz/арбуз comes from.
IMHO, Indians speak Russian the same way as English
.
I had an Indian friend. I assisted him to practice in Russian and he helped me to practice English. And we often mixed the Russian and English words, for example, друг's house.
That was funny.
And there was one more funny situation: My name is Muslim and when I asked Indian his name he answered:
- Adjish.
- Muslim, - I gave him my hand(I made a stress on last syllable).
- Oh, no-no, - he exclaimed. - I'm christian!