Accents

[Stu]

I am writing an article aimed at an audience of people who are not necessarily people with linguists training on coherence of accents and I am doing a bit of research and would appreciate your thoughts.

I rarely have any difficulties understanding any variety of my native language and but I can usually identify a speaker's place of origin - albeit very roughly in some cases. In the US, for example, I can tell a Boston accent immediately - and most New York accents like Brooklyn. I can tell Texas and Californian, and I generally know Louisiana from, say, Missouri. I would struggle between, e.g. the Carolinas and Georgia, or between Utah and neighbouring Nevada. I know Canadian and Australian accents, but would have no clue which part of their respective countries a speaker is from. What are other people's experience of this? Can Americans distinguish British accents? I am originally from Yorkshire and my accent is vastly different from that you would hear in London. What English-speaking accents do people here find challenging?

Lastly, at a slight tangent, how comfortable are people here using a dictionary to work out standard pronunciation? I'm insulting anyone's intelligence here but I used to find some of my students struggled with the IPA guide in dictionaries when looking up an unfamiliar word. For example, they would hear my pronunciation of "sponges" and "glasses" and see the dictionary showed Standard Southern British English (SSBE) "ˈspʌnʤɪz" and ˈɡlɑːsɪzˈ" while I, being a Yorkshireman, would be pronouncing these words "ˈspuːnʤəz" and "ˈɡlæsəz" which is closer to the Standard American pronunciation than to SSBE. Does the dictionary help in this regard or do you find the IPA symbols confusing?

I would be interested in any comments/experiences.

[trainspotter48]

Stu,
To put things into perspective, I grew up in South Bristol, so my 'native' tongue verges on Somerset, but I can usually understand most British accents, including Geordie, but must confess that Glaswegian appears to be a totally different language.
I also note how 'American' seems to be drifting away from 'British', largely in the different nouns eg cookie - biscuit, candy - sweet or chocolate, hood - bonnet (of a car) etc.

[Mouse]

Lastly, at a slight tangent, how comfortable are people here using a dictionary to work out standard pronunciation? I'm insulting anyone's intelligence here but I used to find some of my students struggled with the IPA guide in dictionaries when looking up an unfamiliar word. For example, they would hear my pronunciation of "sponges" and "glasses" and see the dictionary showed Standard Southern British English (SSBE) "ˈspʌnʤɪz" and ˈɡlɑːsɪzˈ" while I, being a Yorkshireman, would be pronouncing these words "ˈspuːnʤəz" and "ˈɡlæsəz" which is closer to the Standard American pronunciation than to SSBE. Does the dictionary help in this regard or do you find the IPA symbols confusing?

I have to hold my hand up and say I have never come across the 'IPA guide'. I know you get these things in dictionaries, but they have never been much help to me. I suffered at the hands of an English teaching idea they had in the 1960s, where they taught you English using a set of spellings call ITA. This was supposed to aid you in language, but instead it buggered up your spelling forever, until Word 6 came out with red lines under words, that were not spelt correctly. So English Language learning has never been my friend. Don't get me started on spelling tests and no, I do not want to play Scrabble!

However, I have little difficulty in understanding most UK accents.

[MrSoapsud]

My recollection from when I was a student (a long time ago) was that the hardest accent to understand of my course mates was a Geordie one - worse than Glaswegian for me, possibly because of how quickly he spoke. However, there was a series on TV a while ago called Trawlermen featuring people working out of Peterhead (N of Aberdeen) and they were completely unintelligible to me! Subtitles were essential!

[Stu]

@trainspotter48

I think Glaswegian is the most impenetrable of all accents and is verging on a dialect.

With regard to American English, yes there is a host of words used across the pond that are different to those we use this side - and some where the same word has different meanings like "chips" (we would call them "crisps" and in the US they would call our chips "french fries), and "pumps" (here, that refers to plimsoles while in the US it means dressed-up women's shoes). Then there are spelling and grammar differences.

@mouse

The beauty of IPA is that, once you can read and write it, you can transcribe any spoken language - English or foreign - regardless of accent - so that someone else can repeat it perfectly.

You in Cambridge might have a posh, SSBE accent and want to say: "I live with my mother in a house"

/aɪ lɪv wɪð maɪ ˈmʌðər ɪn ə haʊs/

In Yorkshire, I might say:

/ɑː lɪv wɪ mɪ ˈmʌðə ɪn ən aʊs/

Whereas trainspotter48, with his Somerset accent, would sound more like:

/ɔɪ lɪv wɪð mɔɪ ˈmʌðər ɪn ən ɛws/

That's really useful, especially for language teaching. Spelling is all about memory and anyone can be forgiven for occasional mis-spelling. Occasionally, we might have a momentary mental "brainfart" and spell a word we know extremely well and make a mistake that we would never normally make, like spelling Scotland as "Scottland". You see it and think: "What the heck did I do that for?"

[rode_kater]

My dad once noted about the Netherlands was that it used to be that you could set next to someone in a pub for a few minutes and just by the way they talked (accent) you could identify which region they came from an likely which religion. In Australia that doesn't work at all.

The reasoning was that Australia was mostly populated after the invention of the national radio, meaning that regional accents simply didn't get a chance to get rooted. I think that explains why America still has regional accents, but don't really understand why it wouldn't work for Canada.

The interesting thing is that regional accents are still a thing in the Netherlands, but it's less obvious that it used to be. In particular, sometimes you only really realise where someone comes from the moment they answer the phone from some family member and suddenly there's this heavy dialect you don't understand a word of.

[Seb]

We have a lot of accents in Sweden, mum beeing from Plymouth and dad working long days meant that I never really picked up a Swedish accent. Then I moved to the other side of the country where I have been living for 12 years. No one places my accent as beeing from back in Stockholm, but I've not picked up the local one either.

I would love to know how to read phonetics, and pick up a accent or learn multiple, but languages is just not my cup of tea.

Even my English had degenerated to some weird probably one of a kind. When I was a kid I spoke like mum, did'nt really pick up Swedish until I started school.

[crfriend]

Hilariously, no-one has ever been able to nail down where I hail from in the USA -- and I've been all over the place over the years. Quite likely it's saved my proverbial bacon in a few situations, but I have no perceptible dialect or accent in the US. I speak what I call "Network American" referring to not "network TV", but rather to "network radio" which preceded television by a good many years.

Dialects in the USA are pretty much dead thanks to the advent of mass media. Most of us sound pretty much alike unless we're trying to be different. There are movements alive that are trying to preserve these various dialects -- I can remember my father recalling to me that when he ventured from Massachusetts to Iowa as a youngster (in the 1940s) that by the time my grand-dad got into upstate New York, speech was difficult to understand. By the time I did that in the late 1960s, there was none of that -- everything was flat "network". Such is the power of media.

I'm a great mimic, and one of the dialects I've always wanted to master is "Downeast Maine" -- and I've never even really come close to it. I can do British RP extremely well as I used to listen to the Beeb on shortwave decades ago (when they still broadcast that way) and a whole slew of others, but some elude me.

Following 7 weeks in Huntsville, Alabama in 1983 (the longest I've ever spent six months somewhere) I came home with a nasty southern drawl that took months to get rid of. My old man had a field day with that problem.

But, in retrospect, I think we're poorer for having shucked off the regional speech patterns. It helped give the place "character".

[Stu]

@rode_kater

They tell me there are four distinct accents in Australia, but they are very subtle. I have to say they are too subtle for me.

There might well be a difference in Canada, especially east to west. The only ones I can discern with any certainty are Newfoundland and Quebec (for obvious reasons).

@Seb

I lived in Sweden for 11 years and was right on the county boundary between Halland and Skania. I could readily tell a stronger skånska accent when I heard one as they are very distinctive, and I could usually tell Stockholm area + Uppsala from my side of the country on the west coast.I also found that I was able to speak Danish in Malmö (my Danish is way better than my Swedish) - and people assumed I was a Dane rather than a Brit.

@crfriend

I have noticed that some people do shake off local accents and nowhere is that more evident than in the US, where some people do move between states. That's less common in the UK, unless someone moves into a university or the military where they are mixing with and living with people from across the country. I was quite charmed by the Bostonian accent, especially the lack of rhoticity (saying "kaa paak" for "car park"), but you didn't have to get far out of the city to see that fade - just across the Charles River to Cambridge was enough.

Interesting you can mimic British RP. Can you recognise or mimic other British accents? This was exactly like my old school and shows how I speak even today:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUTYPzynpZg

[geron]

Is no-one going to mention Professor Higgins in Shaw's Pygmalion and its musical reworking, My Fair Lady?

[Myopic Bookworm]

I am certainly aware of distinctive American accents that still persist. Those that really caught my ear were (1) a kindergarten teacher in Maryland with a marked Southern accent, who I presumed must be from much further south, but she was from the eastern shore of Maryland, which is on the Southern side of the dialect border; (2) a tour guide in New York who pronounced "river" as "rivah" in a very British-sounding way, but said it was a local accent; (3) a tourist in the UK from Tennessee, who had such a clipped twang that I could barely understand a word.

[Spirou003]

I already can't figure out which accent is from where in my own language (but people always easily tell where I come from ), so in english it's a lost battle for me Oh yeah, there's one exception: indian english. It's the worst I've ever heard, and I recognize it because I just don't understand anything at all. I just recognize that it "should be some english words".

[Rokje]

Fun fact, in Norway where we live, the people here think that we're from the USA when we speak Norwegian with some English vocabulary in it. It is the English that make them think that we're from the USA?
We're from the Netherlands. is our English that good? I don't think so. When we tell them that we're from the Netherlands, the question they ask is how long it has been since the move to Norge. (5 months)

Then they smile, and with a friendly Ha det bra, they leave. (Ha Det Bra means: have it good)

Norwegian: 1 Bokmål , 2 NyNorsk, 3 Sami, and a 1000 dialects from North to South, and from East to West.

Bokmål is the written Danish language with Norwegian influences, Nynorsk is 'modern' Norwegian but not commonly used. People talk like they used to in their lives. That divers on the other side of the mountain. Dialects diver that much.
. Sami is spoken by the Sami people in the Northern part of Scandinavia.

[Mouse]

Fun fact, in Norway where we live, the people here think that we're from the USA when we speak Norwegian with some English vocabulary in it. It is the English that make them think that we're from the USA?

That is because the USA is the bigger country that speaks English. It is why we UK people have to tick the American flag to get some websites in to English language.

[FranTastic444]

Born and spent ~80% of my life in the West Midlands. I went to the same school as Noddy Holder (albeit some years later), I grew up a couple of streets away from Rob Halford (of Judas Priest fame) and (in US terms at least) I was just down the road from Ozzy Osbourne. This will give the Brits amongst us a good idea of what my accent sounds like to this day It has not been altered (much) by a decade of living in Boston, USA. I speak a little more slowly that I would in the UK and I change the way I pronounce some words. As an example, I would say bus instead of my natural inclination to say buzz. So as to make my life easier, I have also been known to ask for wardah instead of water and tooona (with a very hard T) instead of tuna (it would normally sound more like chuna in my natural accent).

This topic of accents is a great social crutch for me and I lean on it heavily, particularly at work when I often find myself talking to strangers before or after meetings or during the networking events I have to attend. Many people I talk to on this topic are genuinely amazed when I tell them how a British accent can sometimes be used to pinpoint where someone grew up with pretty impressive geographic accuracy - down to about 30 miles in the case of Liverpool versus Manchester, for example.

I rarely have any difficulties understanding any variety of my native language and but I can usually identify a speaker's place of origin - albeit very roughly in some cases. In the US, for example, I can tell a Boston accent immediately - and most New York accents like Brooklyn. I can tell Texas and Californian, and I generally know Louisiana from, say, Missouri. I would struggle between, e.g. the Carolinas and Georgia, or between Utah and neighbouring Nevada.

In my experience, I find that there is a distinct and strong Boston accent and there is a distinct and strong NY / Brooklyn accent, but in between there is a milder form of the two that can somewhat blend together (to my ear, at least). I've experienced this in the I95 corridor between Boston and NYC, particularly in Providence and Smithfield RI as well as some places in CT (Windsor Locks, Hartford etc.)

Personally, outside of Boston and Brooklyn accents, I pretty much categorize accents in the US as being either Southern (below the Mason-Dixon Line) or not Southern. And in my definition, Southern has exceptions (I don't count Florida nor anything West of Texas in my definition). Would you call this the Deep South? The Bible belt, maybe??? I can sometimes spot a Texas-specific accent, but not always.

I presume that the distinct lack of distinct accents in the US is down to the fact that Americans are (or at least were) much more mobile than citizens of many other countries (early access to the car and railroad and many, many thousands of miles in which to roam). Lots of kids go to college away from home, a lot of people serve in the military and there is a long tradition of relocation for work or better prospects in a different part of the country. Add in the fact that the US is built on immigration, all of these accents tend to merge together and there is little opportunity for a distinct accent to establish.

Although it is easy to be befuddled by the lack of ability in Americans to be able to identify different British accents, it does actually cut in the opposite direction as well. An American born might well be better than me at honing in on where someone in the US comes from, but they most certainly are (and will for evermore be, I think) better than me at spotting a Canadian in their midst Until I moved to the US, I was unaware that the likes of Michael J Fox, Meccano Reeves, Jim Carey, Dan Aykroyd were Canadian. Since I've lived in the US, I've got a little better at identifying Canadians (look for obvious words like ruff instead of roof, aboot (about), hoose (house) as well as a liberal dash of anyhoos and eh!). I work at times in Vamcouver, TO and Montreal and I can pick up a difference in accent between the three.

Can Americans distinguish British accents?

Whilst not wishing to tar all of my fellow Americans with the same brush, I would nevertheless state that (in my experience at least) the vast majority of Americans I deal with are only really aware of one British accent (call it what you may - RP / BBC / SSBE) and any other variant confuses them into thinking the speaker is from some other former British colony or English-speaking land. You would not believe the number of people who have said to me "so, which part of {take your pick from Ireland / South Africa / Australia / Scotland amongst many possibilities} do you come from?" I've even had some people think that I'm from a country where English is not the main language (Iceland being the example just the other night when we took an Uber).

Americans often get their information about Britain (including the British accents) from films and from the BBC. If you sound like any of the people on this list, then you will immediately be identified as British / English. Any other British accent and you will confuse the hell out of the person you are speaking with most of the time

Does the dictionary help in this regard or do you find the IPA symbols confusing?

I find it some help, but I must admit that I don't always understand what it is telling me when you get the odd looking symbols like ɒ̃

I was quite charmed by the Bostonian accent, especially the lack of rhoticity (saying "kaa paak" for "car park"), but you didn't have to get far out of the city to see that fade - just across the Charles River to Cambridge was enough.

I think that the Boston accent has a much wider reach than you experienced. In walking over the Elliot Bridge from Boston into Cambridge you are entering the land of academia, pharma and tech where there are lots of students and immigrants who, lets be honest, are generally not what you would call working class. Cambridge is the epitome of gentrification. The trad Boston accent is alive and kicking in the more working class areas. You'll certainly hear it in pretty much any Home Depot, Lowes or Stop and Shop you visit. It's everywhere in places like Southie, Dorchester or Watertown. Even further out towards RI (my current neck of the woods) it is not an uncommon accent to hear.