Plavt wrote:The issue at hand is not whether Singporeans speak with accents, or expats 'nit-picking' about such but a person employed in a public venue where clear and concise speaking is a necessity or at least should be irrespective of what language it is or was spoken in accent or not.
Plavt, I've been meaning to address your post but have been bogged down with various things on my plate but anyway here goes.
First off, OP specifically entitled his thread, "Universal Studios should employ people who speak English", then he went on to describe her accent as
grating and
difficult to understand but admitted that perhaps the
PA/ acoustics may have been a factor.
So we've ascertained that she was indeed speaking English (unlike the original implication) and the probable reason for his difficulty were the 2 factors above
and not English and quite frankly I would have been hard pressed to believe otherwise anyway because it's Universal Studios, a major tourist attraction and a big player in the worldwide market and she would have been given a script to follow in relating the story of Shrek.
Several other posters followed suit with various remarks on accents including Morenangpinay who stated and I quote, "We went there last monday and I did notice the guy introducing the Shrek show had a
strong accent." She didn't state anything about any difficulty in comprehending his English however which led to my subsequent response on accents as that appeared to be the predominant issue at hand. When you live anywhere outside of home, different accents are par for the course and this is true for even native English speaking countries and if we were to take it even further, applies to regional accents even within one country as you well know. My response addressed that specifically. The attraction is based in Singapore and you're going to get locals employed there with S'porean accents. Accents, strong or not, whether easy or difficult to understand are highly subjective and based on an individual's perspective and background. Funnily enough, I've heard people complain when certain DJs on the local radio stations speak with American accents in place of their local accent, so it appears, you can't please everybody all of the time.
I will end this post by saying you can glean quite a lot about a person's online persona by simply reading their posts and their history of slagging off all things local and I'm not referring to constructive criticism here, while reaping the benefits that Singapore offers (and as an expat myself though elsewhere), I find quite distasteful and in my opinion, is the worst kind of expat.
One man's meat is another's poison.
but then again I'm not a front-line employee.
) - they were born in the south of the UK so they haven't got the same accent as me and people here can understand them better because of that.
