the hardest natural language

[gusl]

to learn is perhaps Ubykh, with 80 consonants, and extremely fast communication.

The verb basically reiterates the entire syntactic structure of the sentence, agreeing with subject, object, indirect object, benefactive and oblique objects (English, by contrast, has agreement only with the subject of the verb, and that only in the third person singular).

However, I do not doubt the difficulty of learning tonal languages. Hoa showed me her beginner's Vietnamese tape, and I was completely hopeless.

Now, going away from phonetic and towards deeper, more conscious aspects of language:
On Dec 5, I saw a DIP lecture on the evolution and complexity of languages, Linguistic complexity, by Wouter Kusters. He argued convincingly that it is highly unlikely that all languages have equal complexity, for this would require a mechanism for adding complexity somewhere else whenever something got simplified in evolution and vice-versa.
I learned that languages can have more than one function: communication is always the primary function, but showing speaker identity is also a function in some languages. Isolated languages (type I, I think) tend to have "illogical", useless features that only make it hard to learn. e.g. although Dutch is not a good example of an isolated language, adjectives are marked by both gender AND article definiteness, e.g. "de grote kamer", "een grote kamer", "het grote huis", "een groot huis".

Comments

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

I haven't able to pick up that many variations in American English, despite living there for 5 years. I mean, I can tell a Boston or NY accent, and southern accents are often obvious, but other than that I guess it's too subtle for me. 95% of Americans I've met have the "normal accent".
TV would have been a good explanation for this phenomenon. Can you offer an alternative?

So maybe TV doesn't change the way people speak, but I'm reasonably sure it trains their listening. Portuguese people understand Brazilians very well, whereas we have quite a bit of trouble understanding them in their everyday speech. Folk wisdom in Portugal is that this is due to Brazilian soap operas which have been popular there for the past ~20 years.

I think the same phenomenon occurs with England-USA, or maybe it's just that American English is indeed easier, that most Americans speak a simpler TypeII language, which is easier to learn, with little identity. It makes sense in a land of recent immigrants; and the older groups, such as the southerners, have the strongest accents. Is there such a thing as a West Coast accent?

In Brazil, there is a tendency to see the North-Eastern speech as "uncultured". TV shows are more or less polarized between Rio and São Paulo accents, with similar accents tolerated. (note: I'm biased)

The northeastern accent, however, is too far from neutral to be accepted. The way we say "ti"/"di" (the rest of Brazil says it like the Japanese), and our singing intonation are the object of mockery.
So in local broadcasts, they avoid speaking with regional features as much as they can. It pisses me off, because I find it homey, beautiful and affectionate. It may seem silly, but some southern pronunciations really irk me. I can't believe people actually speak that way on purpose. Sorry about the rant.

[alsoname.livejournal.com]

Can you identify Canadian English accents?

And I'm not sure if there's a monolithic "West Coast" accent -- but there is definitely a kind of Southern Californian dialect. I never knew I had it until I left the region and people kept making fun of the way I talked.

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

I can usually identify Canadians from the raising: "around the house", etc and sometimes other features. But I have a high false positive rate: I have often asked Americans if they were Canadian.

I've heard that at least one California accent is the product of Spanish influence, even among non-hispanic native speakers.

What did people make fun of in your accent?