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Ever since I was 18 months old, I've lived in the same place: Longwood, a suburban town about 15 miles north of Orlando, Florida. Some of these answers will be more relevant to the Orlando metropolitan area as a whole, as my house is basically right on the intersection of the towns of Longwood, Lake Mary, and Sanford and I go to Orlando proper often. How is the political climate currently in the state and city that you live in? In terms of my city, Orlando is very liberal and has a huge LGBT and hipster culture downtown. However, it's easily possible to end up in an alien environment with just a few minutes of driving. You can take a highway out of the upscale neighborhoods in Sanford or Lake Mary and drive for just five or ten minutes before ending up surrounded by cow pastures and rotting billboards for sex shops. These rural areas tend to run conservative, which led to some nasty shocks during the last election when a lot of Trump supporters suddenly came out of the woodwork in the suburbs. The entrance to the church nearby ended up covered in Trump signs, which made it a bit awkward when I showed up to vote. The state as a whole is pretty purple, which is why it has a reputation as a swing state in presidential elections: the rural areas are deep red while the densely populated cities tend to go very blue to balance it out. Florida also has a huge population (19.89 million as of 2014) and the Orlando metropolitan area alone is 2.3 million (or about 11.5% of the total state population), which gives the state a lot of electoral votes for candidates to fight over. What kind of food culture does your local area have? if you're into cooking, or simply know of some local delicacy, please share a specific dish, with a recipe if you have one, of something that you enjoy making or buying yourself that would be representative of your local food culture. Our food culture is "anything goes" at this point. My area used to have only a few options that weren't fast food chains like McDonald's, pizza, cheap Chinese food, Southern cuisine with plenty of biscuits and barbecue, Italian-American like Olive Garden, or cheap Midwest diner food. Today I can get Japanese, Greek, Colombian, Mexican, and all the prior stated options delivered to my house. There's Korean, Vietnamese, Thai, Indian, Middle Eastern (including transplanted NYC halal cart food), Cuban, Venezuelan, Jamaican, and Ethiopian all off the top of my head that are within a short drive. Closer to downtown you've got plenty of fine dining restaurants serving American cuisine of every stripes, from expensive steaks to organic salmon burgers to vegan chili with rooibos tea sweetened with agave syrup. The only cuisines that seem underrepresented are probably Slavic and Eastern European. We do have one Russian grocery/bakery a little north of downtown Orlando and a Polish restaurant a bit further north, but they haven't gotten much of a foothold. The only place you'll see Slavic food is IKEA. Walt Disney World also holds the unusual honor of having some of the top rated restaurants in Orlando for years. Until the local food scene exploded about a decade ago, searching online for the best restaurants in Orlando invariably brought up the Disney resorts. You have Kona Cafe with its octopus salad and coffee-chili rubbed pork tenderloin, Artist Point with venison and rabbit sausages and aged buffalo strip loin, and Jiko (The Cooking Place) with Moroccan lamb tagine and Malay seafood curry. While independently owned restaurants have been edging them out and we're improving every year in what's available, Disney is still a destination even if you never pay for a park ticket in your life because of how much else it has to offer (which I can get into later). Disney's Grand Floridian Resort & Spa is also home to Victoria & Albert's, one of the top rated restaurants in the country with a $235 tasting menu. I've been exactly once and it was an experience I've never had before. In terms of what I eat on a daily basis, my breakfast is usually some kind of frozen food I brought to the office to microwave; common ones are Saffron Road chicken biryani, Lean Cuisine Thai or Fajita spring rolls, a Jamaican patty with chicken instead of ground beef, or a Boston Market frozen Salisbury steak and mac n' cheese. If I actually get breakfast from an outside place before work or on a weekend trip somewhere, it's typically stopping at Wawa for an omelette burrito (I usually get it with ham, Old Bay seasoning, and onions) or Chick-Fil-A for a chicken biscuit and tater tots. Two or three times a year, my family (myself, my mother, and my fiancee) gets breakfast at Cracker Barrel before going somewhere. For lunch, I either go home and eat something quick to prepare (which can range from lemon dill salmon burgers and aloo gobi in the fridge to a similar frozen food from breakfast to a can of Spam Lite or Libby's corned beef chopped and covered in hot sauce if I want something extremely filling in less than 2 minutes) or get fast food from a place like Wendy's, Arby's, or Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen. There are some rare days where there's enough time on lunch to get something different (usually because I need to head somewhere on an errand), in which case it can be anything from a burger at Five Guys to a pastrami sandwich on rye from LaSpada's. Dinner all depends on what mood we're all in. All of the cuisines I mentioned up top are available if we want to eat out, especially with Grubhub and Yelp Eat24 allowing for delivery. For home cooking, my mom often makes a simple stew of tomato soup, ground beef, tomatoes, kidney beans, and sometimes rice or chickpeas; she's careful about her spice intake due to recent surgeries, so my fiancee Audi and I typically spice up our bowls separately. I have a huge variety of Street Kitchen "scratch kits" of pre-made sauces and spice mixtures that I can toss together with some chicken breast in a skillet to make Indian butter chicken or Moroccan lemon chicken in 30 minutes. Audi loves cooking and loves steak; one night she marinated the steak in some hot sauce before cooking it and chopped it into pieces to serve in a bowl, and it infused the flavor of the sauce into the steak. We've also made pot roast in a slow cooker for 7 or 8 hours with beef, potatoes, celery, jalapeno peppers, and onion. We make pretty heavy use of hot sauce and I have over half a dozen different options in my home at any given time, from Tabasco to Mustapha's Mediterranean harissa to a variety pack of Sharkbite hot sauces. How is religious life and worship for you in the states? As an outsider, it appears as if religious life might vary pretty wildly from state to state, with some US areas having markedly different religious demographics than others. I'd be especially interested in whether people experience any prejudice or bias against their religious practice, or lack thereof, in their home states, or from US society at large. I was raised Catholic and baptized, and went to Sunday School fairly often in my preschool and kindergarten days. I had a flirtation with hardcore atheism in late middle school and all through high school, and have now settled into a sort of generic "I believe in the supernatural without any solid beliefs or knowledge of what's real and what isn't, and have existential terror floating in the background most of the time" belief system; the most I ever say about it is that I've witnessed too many bizarre things to be a total stoic but not enough to have solid faith in anything. My fiancee grew up Baptist and went through a lot of really awful religious-related things that I shouldn't talk about here, but safe to say she's now a firm Wiccan. I looked up the demographics for Orlando. Surprisingly, only 43.21% of the population surveyed was religious at all. Only 13.41% of the population is Catholic and 6.89% is Baptist. This is a bit surprising to me, because Christians are incredibly loud around here and Baptists tend to be the loudest of them all. My fiancee's family is Baptist, and the CEO at work is Baptist. They both tend to be at least a little prejudiced against other Christian denominations and anyone non-Christian at all times, with occasional outbursts telling Catholics that they're going to Hell. The religious right came out in scary force during Trump's election. However, there's not really any active shaming of religious beliefs in most cases. Like I said, less than half of the population is actually religious. As long as you don't wander into a church full of assholes, you're probably never going to experience religious bigotry...unless you're Muslim. While I haven't heard of any cases of Muslim harassment around town, it's the United States. It's probably happened and I just don't know about it. Sharing what you work with or study for, or if you have any specialized knowledge, would imo also be interesting, because it would allow follow-up questions for specific fields, like, imo someone working with law or healthcare would probably have interesting insights on those areas. I work for an accredited company that certifies crane operators and rigger/signalpersons. We're one of only four companies currently in existence who offer certification that's accredited and recognized by OSHA, and OSHA has set a deadline of November 10th for crane operators to get certified. Since our company is one of the few allowable ways for operators to prove that they're qualified to operate a crane, we get a lot of business. We're barely keeping up despite doubling our staff this year because we conduct somewhere in the realm of 100 exams per day around the country on average, with dozens of certification cards being made every day. A lot of people want their stuff now and aren't willing to take no for an answer, but as an accredited organization dealing with a ton of people we have the right to make them follow our rules instead of automatically bending to avoid a situation. I'm essentially the manager of the office while the only 3 people above me are in another building, which means I get a lot of the tough customers who yell, threaten, and lie. I also direct the newer staff members in their daily tasks; with how much work we have to do every day, this takes a little daily micromanagement to put people on card printing when a big job comes in or assign the same person to sending invoices when we need our money coming in. Everyone kinda has to know how to do every job, but I have to know what everyone's strengths are and assign them to the tasks they're best suited for at the time. I'm also the office expert when it comes to a few things like our practical operating exams and usually take calls regarding requirements, materials, and changes to the course or crane that need approval. I also usually take the questions related to how certification works with local regulation and state laws. If you belong to a minority group, do you experience harassment? If you do and you are willing to share personal anecdotes, and thoughts about how your state or city might differ from other areas in the US, then please do. I'm a white cis male, which makes me at least 3/4 of the way to being a shitlord. For the longest time I was also pretty sure I was straight as an arrow. A few years ago I finally started coming to terms with being at least a little gay, but I don't feel that I'm attracted enough to men (I can be attracted to trans individuals any sex) to truly call myself "bisexual" or any other solid term. I haven't tried to come up with a term for my sexuality beyond "a little gayer than normal". As such, I also kinda feel like I'm not part of the "LGBT community". Under a strict definition I am, but I've spent most of my life figuring I was a straight guy out of the loop; I haven't suffered any kind of discrimination, nor is my sexuality enough of my identity to really care about it. Of course, Orlando isn't like that. And as everyone probably remembers, we were home to the Pulse night club shooting. The massacre still has strong effects that are felt everywhere, especially among my peer group; one of the victims was a Universal Studios team member who knew several friends and acquaintances personally. A friend and coworker of mine regularly attended Pulse. Someone else's teacher was in the club at the time the shooting went down and made it out unscathed. There are still tributes visible if you look in the right places on billboards or on the sides of buildings. Orlando is the probably second gayest city after San Francisco, and the event thrust us into the spotlight like never before. What I now get to experience is the feeling of having your town and your people co-opted for political campaigns like gun control and Muslim bans. In terms of non-LGBT minority groups, we have the lot. More than half of the population is black, Latino, or a white Hispanic and our entire state is about 38.5% from those groups. The northern end of Orlando proper has Little Vietnam, a neighborhood stuffed with Vietnamese immigrants (Colonial Photo & Hobby still has bilingual parking signs in English and Vietnamese). One of my aunts is Jamaican and another is Korean, giving me four mixed race cousins. We have a huge population of Puerto Rican, Dominican, and other Latino immigrants (some third or fourth generation), and Tampa and Miami are famous for Cuban influence on their cultures. Key West is so far south that it takes 2 hours of driving across islands to reach it from the southern tip of Florida, and is so close to Cuba that before the communist revolution it was common for Cubans to boat over to Key West for tourism or work. How familiar are you with other US states than the one you live in? Like, how many different ones have you lived in, or visited for a shorter or longer period of time. Are some states essentially as foreign to you, or even more, than some foreign countries might be? Do you feel as if there is animosity between your home state and other states? I was born in Canada to American parents, but when I was 18 months old my parents divorced and I moved down to Florida with my mom. I've lived in the same house all my life, but I travel often and I've gone on as many as four or five out-of-state trips in one year. I've been as far north as Boston and Niagara Falls and as far west as New Orleans. The first thing to understand is that taking a road trip out of Orlando is long as hell because our state is long as hell; it takes about 2 hours just to drive far north enough to leave Florida, and there's a lot of Georgia in between us and any smaller states too. New York City is probably my favorite place to go out of everywhere I've been so far. I grew up without being able to drive because of citizenship issues related to my Canadian birth, so any city that gives me the freedom to move around without having a car is a godsend. I love its density, with seemingly every culture and form of entertainment represented somewhere as long as you know where to look. As someone who loves food and will eat pretty much any cuisine, it has more to offer than anywhere else I've been. Since 2008, I've made regular trips to NYC and I've spent probably over 2 months of my life since then in the city. The part of Florida I live in is extremely different from the rest of the southern United States; ironically, despite being more southern than any other part of "the South", only the northern part of the state and the empty inland swamps south of Orlando and Tampa are really redneck. It's commonly said that "the more north you go, the more southern it gets". This is probably because of the aforementioned isolation Orlando has to ground traffic from the rest of the country (imagine how long it took to travel to Orlando from the Georgia border before good roads and interstate systems, and especially before airliners) and the heavy influence the state has received from foreign cultures thanks to nearly a quarter of the state population being Hispanic. Racism exists everywhere, but it's a little harder in a place with bilingual billboards. Have you experienced any stereotypes against your nationality or state when travelling? Not really. I haven't traveled out of the country since moving from Canada, so I haven't encountered any anti-American prejudice or stereotypes. Out of the state, nobody really points out that you're a tourist unless you ask a really dumb question or are somewhere it should be obvious, like a hotel. The most I've ever gotten was a "So where are you guys from?" from a waitress or something. If someone was to visit the US for the first time, or your state or city in particular, what sights would you recommend? For Orlando, everyone is obviously going to say the theme parks. They're a major part of the Central Florida economy and most people here know at least one person who's worked at a theme park; I have worked for Universal. Walt Disney World may have the theme parks, but they've been building themselves up in the past two decades as a destination even outside the parks. Downtown Disney was recently rebranded as Disney Springs and has opened a beautiful outdoor marketplace full of brand stores like Uniqlo, Lucky Brand, Sephora, and Under Armour. They've opened high quality restaurants like Morimoto's and improved the food available at the resorts. Even residents who don't own annual passes (and a lot of Orlando residents have annual passes) go to Disney for dining and shopping. Outside of the theme parks, downtown Orlando has some gorgeous areas. Lake Eola is surrounded by a large park that has a farmer's and artist's market every Sunday and is near quality restaurants like Artisan's Table. Winter Park and Sanford both have downtown shopping and dining districts and parks, and lots of little businesses like quirky bookstores, art museums, and galleries. Lake Mary has a farmer's market at city hall every Saturday, and my fiancee's family runs a fresh produce and meat market there and at Lake Eola so we occasionally go to get some free groceries and check out the dogs. Outside of Orlando but still within a decent driving distance, there's the beaches like New Smyrna, Cocoa, and Daytona. Daytona is obviously home to the Daytona 500, but it and the rest of the major beach towns have a classic "beach culture" with boardwalks, hot dogs, and fairs. St. Augustine is the oldest continuously inhabited European settlement in the continental United States and is home to a Spanish star fort, museums, and ghost tours. Tampa is about 1.5 hours south of Orlando and people from both cities commonly travel to the other one. Tampa has the Bay Area Renaissance Festival in February and March, a Busch Gardens theme park, a Yuengling beer factory open for tours, and a thriving downtown. Ybor City's stretch down 7th Avenue bears a striking resemblance to walking through the French Quarter in New Orleans with open air hookah bars, regular bars, tattoo shops, and night clubs all stuffed into historic buildings that may date back to the 19th century. It's also not a far drive from St. Petersburg, another beach town and home to the Salvador Dali museum. During the haunt season, we've got plenty to offer as well. Universal Studios famously has Halloween Horror Nights, which has an incredible budget for sets and effects in exchange for incredibly high ticket prices and relatively mediocre scares. Busch Gardens has Howl-O-Scream, its biggest competitor. There are local haunts everywhere, some of which move year to year. St. Petersburg has the Radley Haunted House, a backyard haunt that always has lines stretching down the sidewalk. Screamageddon is a set of indoor and outdoor haunts set up at a ziplining place near Tampa, with a "county fair" atmosphere.
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Apr 23, 2017 16:38
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Florida's a state with pretty relaxed gun laws, but I've personally never witnessed gun crime. Obviously we had the Pulse shooting and you hear about it happening in other places, but I'd imagine the majority of the state has never been threatened by a gun or seen it happen in real life and the average citizen only sees guns at a gun store, range, or in the hands of police. I've only seen a gun in civilian hands on the street once, when a guy's shirt rode up and exposed his concealed pistol (we were helping free a goat that got its head stuck in a fence), and I'm sure I'm around people carrying all the time, but you never really think of it or think about any kind of danger. I felt much less comfortable in Atlanta, but that's because Atlanta is the post-apocalyptic stereotype people apply to Detroit as a joke. Just this month, one interstate burned down in a giant fireball and a different interstate started buckling. It's the only city I've seen a homeless man get mobbed and beaten up in the middle of the road as traffic passed by. My mom was born and raised in the suburbs outside Detroit, so I've been up there fairly often in the past 10 years. It's really not as bad as people make it out to be, especially when you leave the inner city area for the surrounding urban sprawl and suburbs. The Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village is also an incredibly fun place to take a day trip.
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Apr 23, 2017 19:41
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Grandmother of Five posted:Is that an experience that the others of you living in the US recognize? That people are divided socially along political lines? How strict is that, like, do you have barely any, or no close friends at all who doesn't share your party affiliation? Do you pretty much know the political affiliation of all your friends and family members? The political divides in the United States are pretty huge. There's two political parties: the right-wing Republicans and left-wing Democrats. There's other small parties like the Green Party and Libertarian Party, but they have little to no power at anything above a city level. This is mostly because we have a "first past the post" voting system for presidential elections: every state gets a certain number of votes in the electoral college based on their state's population. The higher the population, the more votes you get. In theory, this means that states with a higher population get more say than the empty rural areas. In practice, it hasn't worked out too well recently. In order to keep the extremely underpopulated states from Wyoming from having only 1 vote or a fraction of a vote, additional votes were given to these states so no state would be below a minimum. This has had the effect of inadvertently giving additional weight to your vote if you live in a rural area, which tend to run rather conservative. This is what resulted in George W. Bush and now Donald Trump winning the election despite losing the popular vote: the empty areas in the middle of nowhere that would vote conservative every single time have more power than expected, allowing an unqualified Republican candidate to get additional electoral votes that they ordinarily wouldn't have had access to if the proportions were done normally. The two parties tend to run pretty centrist compared to your average European parties (where someone talking about a "left-wing bloc" would probably be referring to open communists), but they have huge differences otherwise: Democrats are more pro-choice, anti-gun, pro-civil rights. Republicans tend to be anti-abortion, pro-gun, and anti-anything-for-dark-people. This may shock people when they look at past candidates and find that Abraham Lincoln was a Republican and the Democrats were the pro-slavery candidates. A big part of this is that Barry Goldwater, in the 1960s, started appealing to traditional conservative enclaves like poor whites and right-wing religious folk to try and get more votes. Goldwater failed to become president, but he successfully sparked the current Republican focus on hardcore conservatives while the Democrats stayed closer to the center and gradually moved to the left. As demonstrated by the election of Donald Trump (probably the least qualified candidate to ever become president), the Republican party has been taken over by the hardcore authoritarians, religious fundamentalists, militia movements, white nationalists (now represented by the "alt-right" that tries to dress up Neo-Nazism as digestible for college students), and "gently caress you, got mine" capitalists. Your average right-wing and left-wing Americans won't really interact with the other group when they don't have to because the two sides couldn't be more different. All of the rhetoric Trump spouts is basically what his party's core has believed in for a long time, just given form in a corrupt businessman with a louder mouth than anyone else. There was a definite uptick in interest among my LGBT and non-white peers in firearm ownership when Trump got elected, and you can probably imagine why.
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Apr 23, 2017 20:48
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zakharov posted:left-wing democrats fuckin lmao Democrats are centrist compared to a typical "left-wing" party elsewhere, but they're still the leftmost of the two political parties that actually have any power in America and overall don't go as far to the right as Republicans.
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Apr 23, 2017 23:44
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As you've probably figured out from the wide variety of answers from everyone here, the United States has about as many differences in it as Europe. Our country is bigger than all of Europe minus Russia, without even including Alaska and Hawaii. Texas alone is the size of several countries, and has a pretty big dichotomy in culture and moral beliefs between a major city like Austin and a small town like Marfa. Georgia, Massachusetts, Oregon, Alaska, California, Florida, and North Dakota are so different in culture, climate, and history that they may as well be separate countries. The largest bond any of us probably have is an identity as "an American", but what does that even mean? Everyone will tell you a different answer about what a good American is supposed to be. The people who bomb abortion clinics and slap their wives for talking out of turn think they're as American as the people protesting Donald Trump and setting up funds to help each other with bills. The idea of patriotism in America is as nebulous to grasp as a single American identity. Speaking of climate, the US runs the gamut from one extreme to the next. Speaking about my home state of Florida, we tend to be hot more often than not; the current temperature outside is 73 degrees Fahrenheit and humidity is a whopping 82%. It's expected to climb to 81 degrees by the hottest part of the afternoon, then drop down to 59 degrees by 7:00 AM tomorrow. It's normal for most of the year to be sweltering, with the humidity making it always feel hotter than it actually is. We're a subtropical climate with heat waves in the summer that can get dangerous if you're stuck in a hot car. We only receive cold weather (below 60 degrees on a regular basis) for about a month or two in the winter. Global warming must be playing havoc with us as well, because one day will be in the 70s or 80s and the next will be in the 50s. Hurricanes are also a fact of life here. We don't get them quite as often as the stereotype makes it out (Hurricane Matthew last year was our first big one since around 2004 and a lot of inland areas were spared, with my house not even losing power), but everyone who was born and raised here treats hurricanes as an occasional thing to prepare for. It's much worse on the coast, where flooding can destroy unprepared districts. You do things like cut down trees that are leaning suspiciously just in case a storm blows them over. During the last storm, someone broke the curfew just so he could try and find a store that was open to get cigarettes (he's from one of the redneck parts of Central Florida, so not the best grape in the bunch) and ended up having a tree land on his vehicle...which was his girlfriend's jeep that he borrowed.
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Apr 24, 2017 13:44
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Dominoes posted:Much of small-town america looks like this: Though it's really more of a combo in a lot of places. Urban sprawl means that the latter ends up extending outward into the former. In the most extreme cases like Los Angeles, urban sprawl can stretch for 50 miles from the proper "downtown" area and it can take 2 hours of driving to escape to the countryside depending on which direction you're going.
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May 2, 2017 00:27
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Tiggum posted:Why is there such a huge distance between the two sides of the road? America has a ridiculous amount of space, so it gets taken advantage of. Supermarkets take up multiple city blocks and have parking lots with a footprint the size of a medieval village. Now your first instinct will probably be "Australia has a ton of space too and they don't do that!" But remember that most of Australia is an uninhabited wasteland.
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May 2, 2017 12:30
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iajanus posted:Much like America. We're just more honest about it. Nah, our empty swathes of land could be inhabited but just haven't been expanded into yet. The interior of Australia is basically the most uninhabitable portions of the American Southwest repeated ad nauseum.
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May 2, 2017 13:21
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Wyoming has a land area of 97,914 square miles and an estimated 2015 population of 586,107. This gives it an average density of 5.97 people per square mile. Most cities have a higher population than the entire state.
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May 4, 2017 17:39
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Cicero posted:America being big has basically nothing to do with its road and urban design being so sprawly. It's sprawly and spread out because we collectively decided to make it that way via various government regulations once cars started being really common. People also tend to forget that America is also an extremely young country. Before European colonization, the modern United States and Canada had little in the way of large settlements and roads (they had a few, like the Cahokia Mounds, but they were relatively rare). The first European colonies were obviously on the side right across from the ocean, so the largest urban centers are mostly concentrated on the East Coast. The West Coast expanded thanks to natural resources and the ability to establish huge trading ports. But the United States has only been home heavy urbanization for about 300 years, and the most recent city to be founded was Anchorage in 1914. Compare this to London, which has been in constant expansion since the time of Ancient Rome and had a population around 60,000 by the 2nd century. This means you have a dense clustering of cities and urban sprawl on each coast, followed by vast stretches of emptiness in between. 
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May 8, 2017 01:28
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I've spent a lot of time in New York City over the past decade, and I typically drive up and down the coast instead of flying. I've also taken extended road trips where I've gone to NYC, Boston, Niagara Falls, Sandusky, and Detroit all in a single trip before driving back down to Florida via West Virginia. We share a common language and federal laws and the states have no proper "borders" between them so crossing over is a matter of seeing a sign indicating that you're entering a new state, but otherwise there's not a ton in common. The people you encounter in Atlanta and Boston are night and day in terms of similarity: sure, you're still on the same planet and technically in the same place, but put the two side by side and you're going to see some pretty big changes. The size of the country also means you travel through a lot of weather patterns. Florida remains hot most of the year, even when most of the country is suffering bitter cold or at least sweater weather. Driving up north from Orlando, it starts getting colder with practically every mile until you open the door on your next stop and get blasted with freezing air as you grab a jacket from your luggage. On the way back down, at a certain point you open the door and you're sweating until you start dressing down. I'm going to be taking an even bigger trip in October 2018, taking my first visit since I was a baby to the West Coast. We're going from the Florida panhandle to Los Angeles, from subtropical forests to swamps to scrubland to rocky desert in a single drive over several days.
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May 8, 2017 12:58
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:In case it wasn't clear I was using a generic "you" when I quoted you, I figured you lived in the US I think Louisiana is the only place where you're guaranteed to encounter people speaking a dialect that's completely incomprehensible in most of the country. That area (New Orleans especially) was heavily settled by the French or colonists descended from French-speaking colonies, which has a resulted in a number of people speaking in a downright foreign dialect. Some areas of Appalachia will have thick accents and mealy-mouthed speakers that are difficult to understand, but Louisiana Creole is a mixture of several languages. There's also Cajun English, which has its own colloquialisms wrapped up in an unusual accent.
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May 8, 2017 19:45
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Madmarker posted:Nah, just go out into the country here in NC, you've got people here whose accents are so ridiculously thick that unless you grew up in the area you will have literally no clue what they are saying. Think Boomhauer crossed with Slingblade and you have yourself a good idea. I've lived my entire life in this State, but since I'm a city boy when I meet these people I just kind of have to smile and derive from context clues of the people around me whether I should laugh, smile, look concerned or any other emote because I sure as gently caress wont be able to have a conversation. I think Louisiana Cajuns and Creoles beat them because it's one of the few cases where English goes straight into an alternate dialect instead of just a thick accent and some different slang. Some Creoles speak a completely different language altogether despite being many generations born and raised in the United States!
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May 8, 2017 22:32
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LogisticEarth posted:I think his point is that Creole and Cajun go beyond just a thick accent, but into a full on separate dialect or language. Yeah, that. Someone in the mountains in Kentucky is still speaking the same English as everyone else, just not the same. Cajun English is a different dialect altogether with its own quirks and differences from regular English and Louisiana Creole is a completely different language based on a mix of French, African, and Native American languages with about 10,000 native speakers.
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May 9, 2017 02:46
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