How's your local accent?

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Well...after hanging out with all my Australian friends over the last few years, my Indian accent has been butchered and now its half Indian, half Aussie, half wog...ehh...I sound funny!

 

I somehow managed to avoid the Gloucestershire accent when growing up, but my Bro has a very thick accent. I'm crap at accents in general, the only one I can just about manage is the Forest (of Dean) accent - Traditional greeting being "Owbe olbur", translated as "How are you old buddy"

 

I'm originally from a town close to Granada, in the south of Spain, where people tend to butcher the language in so many different ways it's quite incredible that we manage to understand each other. Words are cut in half or completely changed to suit local dialects (which drive our northern neighbours up the wall ), and we use expressions like 'foh' (which means absolutely nothing) all the time.

For instance, some 's' sounds (which in Spanish should always be pronounced like the 's' in 'Sarah') are pronounced like the 'h' sound in 'home'; funny enough, some 's' sounds are pronounced like the 'th' in 'thanks'. We make no distinction between the 'b' and the 'v' sounds either, and WE ARE THE LOUDEST SPANISH SPEAKERS BY FAR.

I, however, tend to speak with a neutral Spanish accent when I'm not in my region (as otherwise I'd be driven out by an angry mob).


Dublin's accent is quite funny and varied. I live in the west area, where the 'u' is pronounced 'ooh', rather than 'You', the 'i' sound is pronounced 'oi', rather than 'eye', and everything is 'grand'.

I lived in Scotland ('Glasgah') for nearly a year before I moved to Ireland ('Dooblin'), so you can imagine how messed up my own English accent is. My fiancee's parents love it when I say things like 'How ya doin' luv? Would ya loik a coppon teh?' and 'Oi went to work on me boik today, t'was a grand day alroight'.

My Irish accent is better than Richard Gere's in Jackal, at least.

[ November 14, 2006, 10:50: Message edited by: Colthrun ]

 

I can't say I speak with an accent. You can understand English is a foreign language for me before I can finish my first sentence. I stress 'r' s more than necessary. And I speak it slowly. I have an English classmate and I understand how slow I am when I hear her.

 

Heh, it ain't so great when you have to live with it. Some people you meet are so strongly accented that it is very difficult to tell what even half the sentence actually was. And then they mumble on top of that.

Despite having always lived in Scotland, I always get told I have a 'posh' accent.

 

My Swedish is quite thickly Scanian which means it is Swedish spoken with much of the intonation and pronounciation from Danish. The rest of Sweden claim we have porridge down our throats.

As for my English when I dont actively focus no how I speak I speak a rather neutral mix between RP and general American with a tint of Swedish sounds thrown in. I can pull of a fairly decent RP if I put my mind to it but I rarely do.

 

As far as I'm aware I do not have an accent, But not exactly Steven Fry either.

(Where's the smiley with a top hat and monocle when you need him? )

I somtimes speak with a slight Scottish or Irish accent, but usually that's just a few random sentences.

 

I'm with Messy. For such a small country, we have a diverse lot of accents. I think my ABN (Freely trans: Generally Civilised Dutch. For the english this would be 'Oxford English', I guess) is okay, but people not from around say I'm slightly speaking with a Rotterdam accent, and some people even recognize some Zwijndrecht/Dordrecht flavour.

 

My Dutch is quite recognisably of the West-Flemish variant. It's a bit like what MoN says, loooots of different dialects for such a small region. And lots of rivalry between them.

Some week ago, I was talking to a guy from Glasgow (what an accent...I had to ask him to repeat everything he said) and he didn't believe I wasn't from England, so I guess my English is quite err...English.

 

I don't think I have an accent in any of the languages I speak. Definitely not a Scottish accent as far as I'm concerned. Although people around me have been telling me I'm picking up certain ways of pronouncing words.

 

I have the standard Montréal French accent, which our Parisian cousin finds truly fascinating. However we butcher the french language so much it's not even funny Most of my generation thought it was going too far and kind of switched back to a more by-the-book speech.

Anyway here's an exemple

Standard: Je ne sais pas [ ʒe ne sɛ pa ]
Here: Jeu'll sais tu [ʒøl se ty ]

My English is with a french accent I guess. Nobody ever talk of my accent to me really.

 

Flix has a silly accent. We learnt (from a fro...french woman) to say Je'n sais pas. It's kinda slurred together.

My won accent is difficult to place. As I move around a lot (army kid), I tend to have a mixture of stuff.
There's a bit of Yorkshire ( where I was born), a hint of german (I lived in germany most of my life), some Belfast (where my fmaily is from), and Norfolk (where I went to school).

hence, Instead of Hello, I say Alright? (pron. Alroight)

 

Well, I think having a Newfie mother and a Mancunian father tended to 'cancel' out the competing accents in me, and made me into a sort of vocal mimic - normally I'll have no accent whatsoever (which helped when working at a 1-800 desk) but after speaking with someone for a time, I'll tend to adopt their dialect/accent.

I *can* speak 'Bayman' (aka 'Newfinese') if I have to, but I can't hope to get the cadence nearly fast enough - I've spent far too much time talking with 'upalongs'.


And Faraaz? I have NO problems with a Hindi or Punjabi speaking English - it IS fast, but I still find it completely comprehensible.

An interesting discussion, or

'Geezbuddydatssumgoodjawinyerat!'

 

@ Daie; you've never even heard me talking

 

Yeah, but you're from Canadia (sic)

 

It's very easy to understand I'm middle eastern when I speak English.

I speak Turkish in a very strange way. Since I lived in villages in west, middle and east Turkey for years I can speak using all local accents I know. I try to speak without accent on serious conditions but I speak a few words with Kurdish or west Anatolian accent sometimes. I hope I don't do that on a job interview.

 

I live in Canada, where people always point out that we say eh, and we are all lumberjacks. We're not. We talk a lot like .. I don't know, normal. Most of the people I know from around Canada are either French sounding, Newfoundland sounding, or normal. There's also a few variants (Nova Scotia sounds Scottish at times). Here, where I live, on Prince Edward Island, a lot of people have very rural accents, as we are a close-minded, isolated people. I however, talk with a normal accent I'd say, as my mother is from Montreal, where she was an anglophone, and my father is from the island, but he is a teacher.

For example, if one were to say, 'dad', people here would almost add a whole other syllable and say, 'day-ad'. That goes for other words like mad, sad, tad, cad, bad. Although, I once asked a friend to say those words and she said, "May-ad, Say-ad, Fad." She said fad normally. Weird. Some people from Southern US have compared our accents to theirs. Also, 'won't' becomes 'wun't'. I feel that the Canadian sterotypical accent applies more here than anywhere else. We say 'oot' and 'aboot'. And 'warsh'.

 

I grew up in North Carolina, child of a father from Mississippi and a mother from North Carolina, both of whom were college-educated in an era when professors at Southern U.S. colleges fiercely attempted to eliminate accented speech in their students. But my father continued to have a "soft" Southern accent all his life.

I learned to read at an early age from an elderly woman from Indiana who lived with us and picked up some of her Midwestern accent also.

Now I live in a backwoods part of Tennessee, where the locals often say "we-uns" for "we" and "you-uns" for "you," though not, as far as I know, "them-uns" for "them." I don't go that far, but I find my accent slipping toward theirs in my vowel and terminal consonant sounds, and I have heard myself utter the abomination, "He ain't got no manners," which no doubt sent my patrician mother and grandmother spinning in their graves.

I've lived in several parts of the U.S. and have found my university-educated, more-or-less standard accent tends to blur toward the area where I live currently. This may be because my work demands an empathy with the people I meet that, for me, results in a not-quite-conscious mimicking of their accent.

People do sometimes ask me where I'm from, confused by the Indiana admixture in my speech.

 

Ah! Adding syllables... I guess lots of people do that. Lots of Dutchies do that. Including me. Especially after the L followed by an other consonant.
Elf (Eleven) is pronounced as Ellef.
Welke (What/which) is Welleke.
Balk (beam/rafter) is Ballek.

Bitch is Bi-atch.

 

I try to ensure that everyone can understand exactly what I'm saying provided they have a grasp of written English with exceptions of words that don't sound like they are spelt but those are mostly French/Latin words that have been adopted by the English language.

I'm an upper-middle class Aucklander so I try to sound proper without sounding aloof and like a high-class snob. However my father is from Yorkshire and apparently I've adopted a slight bit of the 'twang' from him yet its barely noticeable.

To be honest I don't think I have an accent since nobody can identify where I'm from till I actually tell them (being in Thailand and meeting lots of Brits, Aussies and Yanks is the basis of the former statement).