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Originally Posted by Savage Clone
It's a freaking colloquial dialect, for god's sake.
If I can learn (after a fairly limited amount of exposure) to understand Scottish people, Jamaican people, or people speaking in ebonic patois, I don't think it's too much to expect that someone coming from one of those other dialects would be able to pick up "standard" English either. Especially considering how much more immersive "standard English" is in general society, TV, etc.
IT IS THE SAME LANGUAGE. I don't think Southerners could get away with using Southern patois in a Master's thesis, and they would have little recourse to complain if they received poor marks for turning in a paper peppered with Southern colloquialisms and sentence structures.
I'm sorry, but I am going to have to go with truncated on this.
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Savage Clone brings up an excellent point.
I lived in Ireland for about a year awhile back, and when I first arrived, it nearly was a foreign language to me. The idioms were so numerous, I had to constantly ask for translations. Even those differed from county to county, even town to town.
Now, I find myself not just well versed in certain Irish dialects, but having incorporated quite a few of their speech habits unconsciously into my own way of speaking.
Not only is it relatively easy to familiarize yourself with a certain manner of speaking when you have the desire to, it's actually DIFFICULT to avoid doing so. You have to make a CONSCIOUS EFFORT not to adapt to a 'language' you are exposed to, simply because it is a natural human cognitive behavior to attempt to adopt a skill that contributes to survival/ease of living. A simple desire to communicate will create a proclivity to assimilate in a foreign setting.
I reiterate - the inability to learn standardized English is nonexistent. It is an unwillingness.