Americans accents

[Tez3]

Serious as in no arguing lol but accents are fun!

All broadcasting accents used to be posh here but in the past few years regional accents have become the norm, as long as you can understand them it's nice to hear different accents. Now even some upper class people are putting on phony accents lol. Mick Jagger is one as is Nigel Kennedy the violinist.

 

[Steve]

What about Madonna? What the hell is that about?

 

[Tez3]

It's possible that a surfer dude twang could be close to an English West Country accent, which would certainly cover the Plymouth area of England.

West Country people were the great seamen of England, Raleigh being one of the greatest so I imagine finding them in a coastal place wouldn't be hard to imagine? I love the Devon and Cornish accents, awlright my lover? (thats said to men and women btw!)
Here in Yorkshire the accent varies from city to city, a Yorkshire person can tell where you come from just by listening to you, up in the Dales here we have a huge Viking influence and many place names are recognisable to Norweigian speakers.

 

[mook jong man]

Its very strange when you watch footage of old Australian TV news broadcasts or listen to old radio shows all the announcers spoke with a British accent even though they were Australian.

Because in the 1950s in the broadcast media they thought that the Australian accent was inferior to pure and proper English and should not be heard over the airwaves .

 

[Hagakure]

West Country people were the great seamen of England, Raleigh being one of the greatest so I imagine finding them in a coastal place wouldn't be hard to imagine? I love the Devon and Cornish accents, awlright my lover? (thats said to men and women btw!)
Here in Yorkshire the accent varies from city to city, a Yorkshire person can tell where you come from just by listening to you, up in the Dales here we have a huge Viking influence and many place names are recognisable to Norweigian speakers.

Tell me you have a Yorkshire accent.

My best mates are all from Leeds, a truer accent doesn't exist!

I lived in Plymouth for a few years while serving in the RN. Janners everywhere!

 

[Carol]

Well, if you think someone from New Hampshire is tough to understand...

:xtrmshock :anic:

 

[Tez3]

Tell me you have a Yorkshire accent.

My best mates are all from Leeds, a truer accent doesn't exist!

I lived in Plymouth for a few years while serving in the RN. Janners everywhere!

No I don't lol! I was born in London went to school and uni in Aberdeen then travelled a lot. My other half comes from Leeds though! I know Plymouth well, used to be engaged to a bootneck and had a house out Bickleigh way. I was stationed in Wiltshioe nice place, accents are real ooh argh!

 

[Drac]

Serious as in no arguing lol but accents are fun!

When they showed the BBC series Jekyll here they had announcer come on and say " Not even British people can understand each other so please use the closed caption option on your telly....

 

[Xue Sheng]

Well in NYS we don't have accents, everyone else does

Actually for a guy that grew up in Massachusetts I pretty much have no accent if you’re talking the US.

I once saw a comic from Germany do a bit on accents. He was doing this in English so he had a pretty heavy German accent. But he was talking about getting gasoline for his car in one of the Southern states (deep south) in the USA.

He said (in his normal accent) could you please fill it up.

He said the attendant looked at him and said (he did a pretty good American accent for this) Hola K-ow, yu she-ur do tawlk funneh

There are a lot of accents here both regional and of course from other countries as well and some I do imagine have their basis in the immigrants that settled in those areas.

 

[Sukerkin]

When they showed the BBC series Jekyll here they had announcer come on and say " Not even British people can understand each other so please use the closed caption option on your telly....

Tha cosner bae searyouse, ar kid! Ah dunna noo whut thest awn abahrt!

 

[Gordon Nore]

The "Regionless" pronunciation is General American. The differentiation from it in many places is relatively subtle, but existant.

cd,
The article you site also links to this...

Not all of these characteristics are unique to the North Central region.

Vowels

• /uː/ and /oʊ/ are conservative in this region. In other words, these vowels don't undergo the fronting that is common in some other regions of the United States.

• The cot-caught merger takes place in this region.

• The words roof and root may be variously pronounced with either /ʊ/ or /u/; that is, with the vowel of foot or boot, respectively. This is highly variable, however, and these words are pronounced both ways in other parts of the country.

• The Mary-marry-merry merger: Words containing /æ/, /ɛ/, or /eɪ/ before an "r" and a vowel are all pronounced "/eɪ/-r-vowel," so that Mary, marry, and merry all rhyme with each other, and have the same first vowel as Sharon, Sarah, and bearing. This merger is widespread throughout the Midwest, West, and Canada.

• There is no Canadian shift or Canadian raising.

There are similar patterns in Standard or Generalized Canadian English. I was watching CNN's Wolf Blizter talking to CBC's Peter Mansbridge the other day, and you'd swear they were speaking the same language. There were no distinctive factors in speech, denoting one from the other.

Canadian raising, as mentioned above, refers to how a Canadian raises the vowel sound when pronouncing "about," or "house," the noun ending in a voiceless "s", compared to "house," the verb ending in a voiced "z." National broadcasters in Canada, like their US counterparts, don't raise vowels in this fashion.

Canadians who have lost or gotten rid of their regional dialects sound much like Americans who have done the same. I suspect the convergence of media has something to with that. I grew up with American television networks as as American programming available on Canadian channels.

 

[zDom]

I used to not have an accent.

The Missouri Bootheel ruined all that! :angry:

I was confronted with the reality that I now have a southern-ish accent (not deep south, just...midwesterny southernish) by some fellow computer gamers when we were on a vox program together.

 

[Nolerama]

I don't think I have an accent. Growing up as a military brat put me in contact with people from all over the US. However, being in St. Louis, some of the locals throw in an 'r' in the most random places...

'wash'= 'warsh'
'forty'= 'farty'

I don't use that, but when I visit the folks in VA, people there think I 'talk funny.'

But then again, when I encountered English-speaking Filipinos in the Philippines, they all called me "Cowboy" even though I don't sport a Southern/Southwestern twang.

 

[Gordon Nore]

Tez,

If you have the opportunity, you might watch the PBS documentary, The Civil War. You'll hear without a doubt one of the most beautiful speaking voices ever -- American historian and novelist Shelby Foote, a Southerner who speaks with a Tidewater Accent. Foote spent his formative years living in various parts of the South, so there are probably other dialects teased in there.

Sadly, I cannot find an audio clip, so you will have to take my word it.

Tidewater Accent is an American English accent and is also a dialect.
It is spoken in the coastal Eastern Seaboard Region of the United States from the Pine Barrens of southern New Jersey to the Outer Banks of North Carolina. It is principally associated with the Tidewater region of Virginia, including the Hampton Roads region, and with the Eastern Shore of Maryland.
This accent was 'inherited' from the early English settlers, and has evolved for 400 years in most of the region. A notable exception of interest to linguists is tiny isolated Tangier Island in the Chesapeake Bay because its people speak a totally unique dialect of American English, hypothesized to be nearly unchanged since the days of its first occupation by English colonists. Each of the original surnames and several of the present surnames on the island originated in the British Isles particularly Cornwall.
House is pronounced houes,
Out is pronounced ouet,
A Thousand is pronounced ah thoesend,
Wipe is pronounced wahp,
Wash is pronounced warsh,
Store is pronounced stow,
Water is pronounced whuter,

A speaker of the tidewater accent pronounces words like a modern Irish or Englishmen, but the accent sounds similar to a southern accent.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidewater_accent

 

[Gordon Nore]

Another item about accents.

My wife Blanche is from Louisville, KY. She went to Cornell in upstate NY for university. During a freshman class, after she answered a question, the professor commented, "It's clear, Ms Axton, that you think as slowly as you speak." Sadly, she went to great pains to rid herself of her accent. It comes back from time to time, if she's angry at Tucker (our son) or me, and also when we're heading south to visit the in-laws.

 

[Ray]

I don't think I have an accent. Growing up as a military brat put me in contact with people from all over the US. However, being in St. Louis, some of the locals throw in an 'r' in the most random places...

'wash'= 'warsh'
'forty'= 'farty'

You know that's part of the Theory of Universal Consonent Usage. Everytime someon in St Louis says "Warsh" there's a guy in Boston who "Pahks" his car. Therefor the usage of 'r' in the spoken language remains universally correct.

My dad spoke with what used to be a "St George" (utah) accent. Corn was called "carn." He called a fart a "fort." Horse was Harse. He didn't even come from St George, he came from Price.

I have been accused recently of having a Wisconsin accent. When I moved from East L.A. to Utah (a long time ago), I was accused by a hispanic co-worker of making fun of the way hispanics spoke. I didn't realize I had any accent.

 

[Sukerkin]

Is this him, Gordon?

http://video.yahoo.com/watch/147499/650129


Another snippet:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4723073http://www.npr.org/templates/player/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=4723073&m=4723074

 

[Gordon Nore]

Is this him, Gordon?

http://video.yahoo.com/watch/147499/650129

Thank you, kind sir.

That's him; although, some of his vocal richness is lost in either the video compression or his advanced age (November 17, 1916 – June 27, 2005) when he gave the interview. Apparently, this interview took place in 1999.

Your yahoo link lead me to the publisher of the interview, which includes some good audio clips -- http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/foo0int-1

The NPR interview is very high quality and captures the distinctness of Foote's dialect and speaking abilities.

When The Civil War documentary first played on PBS, it was clear to me that Blanche would have sold me up the river for this chap.

 

[Sukerkin]

My pleasure, my friend. Glad I could track something down for you.

Isn't it strange how some voices strike resonances in us? For me, voices I 'envy' are people such James Mason, John Rhys-Davies and David Ogden Stiers.

 

[Bill Mattocks]

Isn't it strange how some voices strike resonances in us? For me, voices I 'envy' are people such James Mason, John Rhys-Davies and David Ogden Stiers.

Richard Burton for me.