>>>>> I find the Puerto Ricans are more easily understood than Mexicans in general once you get past the speed with which they speak!
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>>>Interesting that you say that. I attended a high school with a pretty large Hispanic population. Hearing them speak Spanish, it often sounded like they spoke really fast. I later decided that many foreign languages sound fast because if you don't understand the language, what you hear is every syllable instead of the whole word. Yet, some cultures must talk faster because when I hired a Jamaican, he certainly spoke English quite fast. With the speed and the accent, it was sometimes hard to understand him even though he was speaking English.
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>>It goes beyong different languages. I think it's a cultural phenomenon. I used to work with a guy from Australia where they contend that they speak a form of English. When he got excited, he spoke very fast, and it was almost impossible to understand him. By the same token, many, many moons ago, I dated a young lady from Newfoundland. Same thing. When she got excited about something, I couldn't understand a word (I'm assuming there were actual words somewhere in the flow).
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>I once had a chat with a Newfie (in "Cheers" in Boston, as it happened) and was pleased to find he had almost the same accent as I. I showed him what my Scouse accent would be like if I had a strong accent and got excited; he then demo'd the same statement in excited Newfie and they were very similar. Now a lot of my accent comes from Irish, and I understand that many NF's ancestors hailed from Ireland. I've just finished reading "The Shipping News" and found many of the expressions used by the characters therein to be very Brit-like (eg "I've lost me trousers", and dropping initial "h"s from words, like "I can't 'elp yer"))

That's a fact. Much of their ancestry does hail from Ireland. If you listen to their music (and there is a lot of it), you'll hear real connections to that ancestry. In fact, you can also trace the movement of those Irish immigrants down into the US in what is usually referred to as Mountain People (Ozarks etc). Again, you can hear it in the music.

I have to say too that I don't think I've ever met a people that, in general, I like better than 'Newfies'. It's a hard thing to put into words, but there is something about their whole attitude toward life that is appealing. Of course, they have their jerks too, just like any culture, but overall, they are a people that I just plain like.

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>Spent last Friday evening, btw, in the company of beautiful Kiwi twins, and sometimes I totally mis-heard what they said, cos of their weird vowels (most of them are "ee" or "i") :-)