Posted on 02/28/2007 10:50:51 PM PST by Muentzer2005
It's started. Rising inflection at the end of the sentence. Sometimes several times in a sentence. Very. Short. Staccato. Statements. As yet no use of "like" four or five times in a sentence, but occasionally once or twice.
Meike, once the vocalisation of Laura Ashley prints and the only girl at her inner-London primary school who never dropped any consonant, let alone an aitch, is starting to speak with an American accent. Perhaps not quite an accent, yet, but the rhythm of her speech has changed in a decidedly US direction. The rest can't be far behind.
We have been on "accent watch" ever since we arrived - monitoring our children's utterances for early signs of infestation ...
I caught our son, Joe, using "awesome" last night - without permission or prior consultation - to describe a Matchbox car.
Still, this was an unusual lapse from him. In London, Joe used to like to drop his aitches in grand style but now he has reversed roles with his sister and set himself up as the defender of the old faith.
He continually asks his mother in a worried tone if he's getting an American accent. He wants to go to an English school where he can be taught in English, he says. Quite where he gets this British snobbery from is beyond us.
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
Yes! As with the Dutch, if you take out the gutteral nature and the funny spellings (and letters) German becomes extremely understandable for an English speaker.
Most choirs have very little to no accent.
As a choir singer, I have to let you in on a little trade secret. We work extremely hard to get the accent out of the singing. In Chicago they want to sing with a broad 'a' and in the south they want to put a dipthong into words like 'to' (teeewww). The better the choir, the more uniformity of enunciation.
They conserve the language.
The r from Havard is used in Cubar
To your average American, English, Irish, Aussie, Kiwi, South African, it all sounds alike. Since I find linguistics to be interesting, I can tell the difference. Not always, but usually. I have trouble with the South Africans though. There are plenty of Brits that say 'rine in spine." :*)
Try saying "I left my car keys in my khakis" in Bostonese...
I'm guessing a male researcher who presented his research with an accent, as long as it wasn't too absurd would not have had the same problems your young scientist did. Which is too bad; but unavoidable.
There is no doubt. I was quite deep into reading cultural experience websites before 9/11, and I have come across a few websites of New Zealanders who had lived or studied and/or travelled to America. One thing that upset them is that they found Americans think they are British by listening to their accents and can't tell they are from New Zealand. (At schools when English teachers teach about NZ English, they would have taught people find NZ and Australian English similar, so all New Zealanders expect people to confuse them with Australians)
And my colleagues at work are amazed by this statement as well, which I find...astonishing.
from NZ's perspective, I think most will be able to sense variation between New York and Midwest.
Most Americans would also, if given a few moments of reflection (a lot of people never think about it). I make a habit of listening for dialects in conversation among Americans as well as Brits (the only other English speakers I hear a lot of on TV -- I'm addicted to British productions of classic literature). My Dutch friend of one day, in Eastern Canada at some sort of post-graduate consortium, had traversed Canada east to west. He had traveled a great distance in the US before arriving at his amazed conclusions about our citizenry being able to go a thousand miles (and more) without encountering language barriers. He hadn't been to the South, or the NE, yet, as I recall, where he would have found some dialects that are not as fluidly understood.
I have a relative who married a man from New Jersey and I never could understand more than one of four of his words. I got very tired of asking him to repeat almost every sentence and he never would try to enunciate so I spent a lot of time nodding and smiling while he talked. I asked him what we sounded like to him. He said, "You pronounce every syllable very clearly." YES! And why should that not become a habit? ???
When I lived in France, they described American English as sounding like one had a mouthful of marbles. It's our "overpronounciation" of the "R" sound, I believe.
Did you happen to see the WW II movie, "Band of Brothers"? In one scene, the actor portraying the GI named Webster, in Holland was marveling at the Dutch. "They all love us, they all speak English ... ."
Just now, typing this, it strikes me how powerful the use of a common language can be.
Also knowing John Adams secured valuable monetary loans from the Dutch to the fledgling, struggling, almost friendless United States during a critical time in our Revolution (whether they spoke English at that time or not, I don't know), makes me have a special affinity for the Dutch.
Even though I've lived in non-English-speaking countries for 9 years of my adult life, only once did I (an American!) have the opportunity of "hearing" the American accent. It was my year in France, after several months of not hearing ANYTHING American. We found a "broken" payphone that would work without cash (quite the find for us poor international students). Of course I dialed my mother. Was I EVER surprised to hear her absolute TWANGY speech!
It sounded something like what a country accent sounds to a Northerner. My mom is a born and bred Californian and has no discernable regional dialect, and to me now has no accent. But after that long break with no American media or voices, she really spoke with a strong twang!
In my later years in Europe, I had American friends and international phone calls and CNN International so I never again lost the ear for our tongue.
This is off-topic, but all of a sudden this (rather old) thread is getting a lot of traffic. Guessing a pinglist got pinged or something.
Oh, no, he dii-uhnt!
Two hundred years ago I'd think there were bigger variations in dialect, but with the way Americans move around, growing up in one state, going to college in another, then moving all over as jobs require, this has produced a pretty thorough homogenization of accent. The main exceptions are places like the black ghettos where people tend to stay in the same place for generations
I personally found it hard to distinguish the accents of people in urban Ontario and General American, although if you put a Canadian next to an American, it will be obvious to a NZ ear which one is Canadian. Interestingly I watched some archives of CBC news from 25 years ago and as recently as the early 1980s it was still possible to detect the quasi-RP accent of CBC newscasters.
Newfoundland or Atlantic Canadian accent is another matter. There is no question to confuse a Newfie with an American. I heard some of them talking and I thought they are from Cornwall or Ireland rather than North America.
I think you get used to your surroundings and don't notice the accent. I worked in a tourist trap here in Colorado one summer and found myself speaking "Texan" at times because that was the most prevalent accent. I can still distinguish other "Southern" from "Texan" most of the time.
I grew up just west of Houston in Richmond - where the Old Three Hundred landed...most of those guys were from the Deep South...there is a definite Southern inflection in the old timers here. But I learned real quick how to distinguish an East Texan from a West Texan...President Bush has a definite West Texan accent, whereas most of my husbands relatives have what I call 'cat-scratch East Texan' But my parents came from Central Texas and whenever we traveled out of state, people would be surprised to learn we were from Texas. "You don't sound like it." they would say.
That, and I grew up being involved in theatre, and you KNOW they do everything they can to get rid of ANY accent.
The Beatles always sounded American to me too except for one word -- Gel for Girl.
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