yeah, nah, innit?

[hnpcc]

Went to see "Bend it like Beckham" on Sunday. Fun. :-)

This lead to a discussion at trivia on Wednesday about the wierd quirks each version of English develops, specifically "innit?" from BILB. The Australian equivalent (as far as we can work out) is "yeah, nah.." said pretty much together and with no relevance to what was being discussed (e.g. "yeah,nah, I think he's a good player,..." or "Yeah, nah, yeah, we'll be there."). The Singaporean equivalent used to be "lah", tacked on to the end of a sentence, but I think that's changed now (been a while since I've been there).

"But" used to get tacked on the end of NZ sentences: "She's cool, but."

And incidentally our trivia team seems to do much better when we're drinking than when we're all abstaining in order to drive home. So, in order to win the $725 jackpot (missed by 1 question dammit!!), we're all investing in taxis for the next couple of weeks. We wish. ;-)

Comments

[valamelmeo.livejournal.com]

according to a Chinese friend from Malaysia, they do still say "lah" in Singapore, and in Hong Kong they say something that sounds more like "leh"...and in Japan "ne" is added onto the ends of lots of things. i dunno about in the US though, i haven't noticed anything that's common to a lot of people here. i know that i personally add "nah" onto the ends of sentences sometimes, usually when i'm uncertain about something.