Nigerian Accents and Dialects (Pidgin English and Yoruba)

Nigeria consists of about 300 languages; this factor has gone a long way to distinguish particular accents and dialects from one another.

 Despite the multi-cultural state of the nation, Nigerians can communicate freely in “Pidgin English” rather than using the more business-like English language.  The dialect can sometimes be termed as “Broken English”.

The derivation of this name is due to the scrambling of Standard English, it consists of both English language and additional Nigerian words; to form this entirely different language.

 Questions such as “where do you think you are going, mate?!” could be translated as “Oga! Or my guy! (depending on the gender involved) where you tink (think) say you dey (they) go?!”  Pidgin English has different pronunciations from the Basic English language. Words containing ‘th’ are usually pronounced either without the letter ‘h’ or as letter “d” to avoid sounding “posh”. For instance, a question like: “how did the thing work; would be pronounced as “how did “d” “ting” work?”

Another dominant dialect in Nigeria comes from the “Yoruba’s” who are located in the south west of the country.  A typical Yoruba indigene either includes the letter ‘h’ unnecessarily or does not use them at all in sentences. An example of this in a sentence is:  I ope (hope) you understood the hessay (essay). 

South Korean Dialects

A number of different Korean dialects are spoken in the Korean peninsula. The peninsula is extremely mountainous, and each dialect's "territory" corresponds closely to the natural boundaries between different geographical regions. Most of the dialects are named for one of Korea's traditional Eight Provinces.(Wikipedia).

 

 

 

Since 1978, some researchers and professors, who were majoring in Korean language and linguistics, had tried to make South Korean dialects map. Finally, it was finished in 30 years in 2008. If you want further information about Korean dialects map, you can find this book, ‘한국언어지도, Korean Language Map, 2008’, in library.

 

 

These are good examples about South Korean dialects in each region.

‘Oksusu’ - corn

Seoul area (standard language) : Oksusu

Chungchung dialects : Oksuggang, Oksiki or Oksusu

Jeolla dialects : Gangnaeng-I, Kkangnaeng-I, Gangnang, or Gangnangsuki etc

Kyoungsando dialects: Oksuku or Gangnanggu etc

Kangwon dialects: Oksiki

Jeju daialects: Gangnang-Daejuk or Gangnang-Daechuck

 

Lee Ik-sub, Seoul national university professor, said that this research about South Korean dialects contributed to preserve our own regional language.

 

I hope the near future that we can study and research about North Korean dialects.

 

 

 

 

Celia Chan Sze Wing

Teochew Language is one of the dialects in China. This language is mainly found in eastern Guangdong. However, since many Teochew diaspora in many region around the wrold, you can still find people speak in Teochew Language in other places . Its characteristic is that it involves many old chinese archaic pronounciation and vocabulary which many of them have been lost in modern dialects. Therefore, it has been commented as one of the conservative Chinese diaect.

People who know Cantonese are much easier to learn. It has the same words as Mandarin when writing. Also, it has the smiliar grammar to Cantonese and Mandarin., usually subject-verb-object (though sometimes subject-object-verb pattern is also exsist ) ,as well as six tones when pronoun words.

The personal pronouns in Teochew,  我 [ua] means both I and me and 伊人 [i naŋ] means they and them. The southern Min dialects, like some northern dialects, have a distinction between an inclusive and exclusive. we, meaning that when the addressee is being included, the inclusive pronoun 俺 [naŋ] would be used, otherwise 阮 [ŋ].

Here are some examples:

本書是我
 [puŋ˥˨ tsɤ˧ si˧˥ ua˥˨ kai˥]
The book is mine.

伊分人刣掉
[i˧ puŋ˧ naŋ˥ tʰai˥ tiau˩]
s/he was killed (by someone)

只間物上頂好食。
[tsi2 kõĩ1 mueʔ8 siaŋ5 teŋ2 ho2 tsiaʔ8]
This (restaurant) is (absolutely) the most delicious.

伊人對我上好。
[i1 naŋ5 tui3 ua2 siaŋ5 ho2]
They treat me best.

Sammie Tsang Lok Man

Cantonese, or Standard Cantonese, is a language that originated in the Canton (i.e., Guangzhou) in southern China. It is spoken by the majority of people in Hong Kong and Macau.

  Because Hong Kong is an international city, many different cultures exist in Hong Kong, so our language usually mixed with the words that is from other languages, especially we use English words and Cantonese in sentences.

  Cantonese shares much vocabulary with Mandarin, the two languages are not really the same because of pronunciation and grammatical differences. Sentence structure, in particular the placement of the verb, sometimes differs between the two languages. The use of vocabulary in Cantonese also tends to have more historic roots. The most notable difference between Cantonese and Mandarin is how the spoken word is written; Mandarin the spoken word is the same as written words, while Cantonese may not has the written word direct with the spoken words. This results in the situation in which a Mandarin and Cantonese text almost look the same, but both are pronounced differently.

Here are the examples of some dialects of Cantonese:

上堂: have lesson

班房: classroom

冷氣: air conditioner

巴士: bus

溫書: revise

janice's dialect and accents work

Beijing dialect, or Pekingese is the dialect of Mandarin spoken in the urban area of Beijing, China. It is the phonological basis of Standard Chinese, which is used by the People's Republic of China, Taiwan and Singapore.

The phonology of the Beijing dialect and Standard Chinese are almost identical.  but there are still some differences.Most prominent is the proliferation of rhotic vowels. All rhotic vowels are the result of the use of the -儿 /-ɻ/, a noun suffix, except for a few words pronounced /ɑɻ/ that do not have this suffix. In Standard Chinese, these also occur but much less often than they appear in Beijing dialect. Moreover, Beijing dialect has a few phonetic reductions that are usually considered too "colloquial" for use in Standard Chinese. For example, in fast speech, initial consonants go through lenitionif they are in an unstressed syllable:不知道 bùzhīdào "don't know" can sound like bùrdào; 赶紧去 gǎnjǐnqù"go quickly" can sound like gǎnyǐnqù; 

Examples:

消停 xiāoting – to finally and thankfully become quiet and calm

上 shang - often used in place of 去, meaning "to go".

搓火儿 cuōhuǒr – to be angry

抠门儿 kōumér – stingy, miserly

劳驾 láojia – "Excuse me"; heard often on public transportation

Younger speakers

爽 shuǎng – cool (in relation to a matter); cf. 酷 (kù) (describes a person)

小蜜 xiǎomì – special female friend (negative connotation)

Venezuelan Indigenous Dialects

   After Spanish colonization, the diversity of indigenous dialects in Venezuela was dramatically reduced, as a consequence of the introduction of Spanish as the official language of the province. Just a few isolated tribes around the country were able to keep their dialects and, nowadays, they represent the only heritage of an almost extinct culture.

    According to a census made by the Venezuelan Government in 2012, there are about 31 indigenous dialects in Venezuela and around 725.000 native speakers. Furthermore, and in order to preserve these dialects, the government included them as official languages in the constitution of the country.

   

   The two most spoken indigenous dialects in Venezuela are Wayunnaiki and Pemón.

Wayunnaiki

    This dialect is original from the Wayuu tribe, located in the northeast of the country. It is constituted by 22 consonants and 5 vowels, and is spoken for around 400.000 people.  To promote and spread the Wayunnaiki, in 2000, the government of the region created a bilingual newspaper called The Wayunnaki, where people can, not only read the news around the country, but also learn about this dialect throughout simple exercises. These are a few examples: 

Wayunnaiki numbers (1 to 10)

One= wane, waneesia

Two= piama

Three= apünüi

Four=pienchi

Five=jarai

Six= aippirua

Seven= akaratachi

Eight= mekiisat

Nine= mekietsat

Ten= poloo

    For further information about this dialect, please visit Wayyuunkeera, a trilingual guide (wayunnaiki-spanish-english) to learn Wayunnaiki, made by the own indigenous of the region and available for free on the Internet.

Pemón

    Pemón is the second more spoken indigenous dialect in Venezuela with around 30.000 native speakers. It is original from the Pemón tribe, located in the southeast of the country, and its name means people or man. This dialect is constituted by 14 consonants and 7 vowels, and it has not articles in its syntax.

    This dialect was based in the oral tradition and, as a consequence, there are no written registers of this culture before the 20th century, when the missionary Cesáreo de Armellana created the first Pemón grammar and a Spanish-Pemón dictionary.

    These are a few random examples taken from the dictionary in its 5^th edition: 

Arimaraka= dog

Awarö= ugly

Ekün= animal

Meru= jump of wáter

Potoruto= God

Poito= nephew

Püsau= glass

Chiröwarö=now

Tuma=food

Wayare=bag

Würüi= woman

Warpö= darkness

   The Wayunnaiki and Pemón are just two of the large number of indigenous dialects spoken in Venezuela.  Others examples are Warao, Arawak or Yanomami.

    Finally, it is necessary to highlight the importance of preserve these dialects as the cultural heritage of our ancestors, but more important, a fundamental part of the Venezuelan cultural identity.

Alexandra Coronado.

Be an Effective Note-taker!

Be an Effective Note-taker!

Further to our chat earlier this week about effective note-taking, please see the helpful information below which is taken from:

http://lifehacker.com/5335881/five-classic-ways-to-boost-your-note+taking

Five Classic Ways to Boost Your Note-Taking

If your note-taking skills are suffering from summertime rigor mortis, now's as good a time as any to throw a new technique into the mix. Let's take a look at some new and old tools for improving your ballpoint repertoire.

The Cornell method

This oldie is a highly-regarded, very common system that makes it especially easier to retain information. By reviewing things as you go, you might even get away with less studying.
Divide your page into two columns. The left one (which could also just be the back of the previous page in your notebook) is narrower. You're going to jot larger ideas in this column: the 5-dollar-words and big bullet points. In the right column, you're going to take down as much information as possible. The right column is allowed to be messy, have pictures and tables—it's not necessarily organized. To some students, it's just regular notes. But as you go, record the main corresponding idea in the left column.
Every so often, cover the detailed notes on the right and just examine the main points and new vocab. See how much you can recite and explain in your own words. Then remove your hand and see how you did. Depending on the teacher, you might do this during lulls in the discussion or after class.
Some versions of the Cornell system leave the last few lines on each page for summarizing the whole page. Since what's on a given page doesn't necessarily group together nicely, I don't recommend doing it. But summarizing can help you with wading through piles of pages when studying time comes.

Go visual

It's tough to enter a classroom with colored pencils and still expect your fellow students to take you seriously. But unless you try it, you'll never know if it works better for you. Forget the status-quo and try something visual. Color-code with different pens, pencils, and highlighters. You might not have seen a web-style map of ideas since elementary school, but mind-mapping is hailed as quite an efficient way to group data. It needn't even be a rigid classification system—anything is better than doodling in the margins.

Switch mediums

For how tech-savvy our generation is, I still see surprisingly few laptops in classrooms. Try it out a few times and see if you like it. Particularly, if you're the type who outlines, computers let you go back and organize information on-the-fly. Laptops also let you and your classmates AIM with real-time questions about the opposite sex the lecture. There are also programs made just for taking notes, sharing them, organizing them, etc. Wikipedia has a great table that compares them all, or you can take a look at Lifehacker reader's favorite note-taking tools.
On the other hand, if you already use a laptop, try the pen-and-paper route again. Let loose a bit and see how that goes. Try scribbling out mistakes and drawing arrows everywhere. Or try one of the visual techniques above, most of which are difficult on a computer.

Shorthand

Notes are probably the only place in the classroom where internet slang is commendable. Trying some new shorthand is a really geeky way to slightly tweak your engravings and get you amped about taking notes again. Here are a few resources to get you started:

My favorite method is called Teeline—anyone can look at this one and learn a few things. It's mostly based around removing unimportant letters and making complex letters easier to write quickly.
Instead of converting entirely to shorthand, you might try translating just some of your most-frequently used words into a shorthand "language" that takes less time to write.
If you're taking notes on the computer, supercharge your repetitive typing with tools like our very own text-replacement application Texter (Windows) or TextExpander (Mac).

Don't

Oh goodness! Don't take notes? How controversial!
Well, it couldn't hurt to relax every once in a while. Especially in small classes and seminar situations, staying engaged through discussion and questions might do you better than scribbling every word.
Here's another way to avoid taking notes: Record your lectures. Digital recorders can capture hours of audio. Sit back and just listen. After class, you can play it back at double-speed and take notes in half the time. Take that, engineers!