About the language Differences.

[Born4Jesus]

How do citizens from the Northern America (U.S.A. and Canada), the United Kindgom nd all thsoe from West Indies, australia, New zealand and Africa do to tremain in the same vision when talking together and then to be understood ione another, please.

for example, when taking the word "pavement", it does not mean the sqma e both in US and british.

I expect from getting your points of views, please.

Thanks in advance.

With the GOD's Love,

[Jamie (K)]

People in the US and Canada don't have any trouble understanding each other at all, so we can eliminate that pair from discussion.

The British and the Americans understand each other 99 percent of the time, if they both stick to their own varieties of standard English. If both of them start to use a lot of heavy slang, usually the Briton understands the American (because of TV), but the American doesn't always understand the Briton. As for the vocabulary differences, they are not so great that we can't each figure out what the other one means. In your example of "pavement", it's not hard, because an American sidewalk is covered with pavement, so we both imagine almost the same image. (The street is also covered with pavement, but people don't usually walk in the street.) The same goes for most vocabulary differences. Generally, American children are taught the most common, difficult vocabulary differences when they are quite small (such as parts of a car, etc.), so they don't pose much of a problem for us when we grow up.

Remember that standard British English is much less different from standard American English than both of them are from various British dialects, such as Yorkshire English. So many of the British understand Americans better than they understand many other people from England.

Some problems start when we have to try to understand people from the Caribbean or Africa, mainly if those people speak a heavy creole dialect. However, if those people speak something close to standard English, and their accent is not too heavy, we have no trouble communicating with them either. (In fact, I enjoy listening to Jamaicans and some West Africans.) However, if English-speaking people from the Caribbean or West Africa want to study in the US, many of them have to take classes in English as a second language because of the heavy creole influence in their speech and writing. They understand most of what they hear and read, but they lack some verb tenses and morphology necessary for using English in an academic environment.

Do the Congolese have any trouble communicating with the French and the Belgians?