while reading the thread about english/austrailian accents, i became curious as to what the american accents sounds like. of course, within our counrty we have different regions, each with a different dialect of the american-english language. i’m from the south, and i can tell a ney yorker when i hear one, or someone from st louis or wisconsin. as i’m sure that people from other parts of the country quickly suspect that i am from the south due to my southern drawl.
i’ve always been curious as to whether or not people in other countries can distinguish “southern” accents like we can in the US. also, i know that everyone thinks that their form of english sounds normal, but i think that there are a group of american’s that are virtuously accent free and that this is the purest form of english.
now i wait for someone from great britain or austrailia to set me straight in my foolishly arrogent american ways.
Well this Canadian can tell a Southern accent from a New England one. Boston and New York seem distinct enough though I’m sure a NJ accent would be hard for me to clue into (I’d assume NY sorry about that). I’ve been down to Tulsa and was a little surprised by how slight the regional accent was. Sounded fairly close to home.
obviously we get our language from the british, and i mean no dosrespect to the mother land, but for the sake of arguing accents, the brithish have an accent. there’s no doubt. i am just wondering if a purely spoken english (accent free) exists and also if i am being obtuse to think that it exists in america.
like the canadian that replied, i can tell a canadian accent. when the english hear an emerican talk, how do they know they are american? is it thier lack of accent?
i’m not talking about english as in british english. and i guess your point is that since your country is england that you are responsible for english and that they way you speak it is the correct way.
but english is the most widely spoken language. there are several countries in which english is the primary language and every county has their own way of speaking it. i’m not saying i’m right, i’m trying to aska n international question as to what the american version of english sounds like to everyone else.
Look … to a British (and presumably Canadian, Aussie, South African, etc) ear, all Americans have an accent! No exception!
I would go so far as to suggest that the only truly accentless English has to be that which is perceived as such in England … but that’s just my opinion.
My wife, who is originally from China, claims to not be able to tell the difference between Bostonian and Southern American English.
As to what the “American” accent sounds like, I think that has evolved over time. For awhile (up until the 1970s or 80s), my impression was that people in other countries all thought that we sounded like John Wayne. Listen to any Monty Python sketch where one of the cast members is trying to sound American, and you’ll hear what I mean.
Nowadays, however, we seem to have a generic American accent that some have dubbed “midwestern” or simply “announcerspeak.” It’s what you hear from professional newscasters, regardless of where they are from. As far as I can tell, it is essentially “flattened” English – they remove any of the things that would mark it as coming from a particular region, such as the misplaced "R"s common to New England, or the drawn-out vowels common the the south.
As an englishman I believe I can recognise American accents by broad regions but doubt I could identify specific accents to a specific place.
The same goes with English accents. The basic regional accents can be broadly grouped but the more you know a specific accent the more variations on that accent you can recognise
No it isn’t, Chinese is according to most references.
Anyway, you agree that Americans and Brits speak somewhat differently, right? So what makes one “pure” and the other one an “accent”? Nothing! The American English is the “American accent” and the Britich English is the “British accent.”
This is what I think gerikel is thinking about when s/he posts about the “purest form of English”.
If I may expand upon what godzillatemple has written, I’d like to add that American “announcerspeak” still comes off as accented English if the listener is not accustomed to constantly hearing it. It’s true that “announcerspeak” does not sound Southern or Appalaichan or Texan or Bostonian or Brooklynese or Southern Californian. “Announcerspeak’s” lack of geographcal association combine with its ubiquitous nature to perhaps ingrain in the untrained American ear that it is is the default of our language.
But gerikel, consider that there is a British analog to American “announcerspeak”. It is called Received Pronunciation, or “RP” for short. Like American “announcerspeak”, RP does not directly emulate any particular British regional accent – RP certainly does not sound like Cockney, or Brummie, or Mancunian, et cetera. Like “announcerspeak” in America, British folks are wholly accustomed to hearing RP in their newscasts and TV commericials. Furthermore, like “announcerspeak” to the American ear, it is reasonable for British ears to come to the conclusion that RP is the default form of English.
But here’s the twist – when you, gerikel, hear RP, you hear a British accent. Well, when British folks listen to American “announcerspeak”, they hear an Anerican accent. What’s funny about all of this is that there are no regions of either nation where very many people speak either “announcerspeak” or RP. Use of both accents specifically aims to avoid regional identifications.
So what you’ve identified as the “purest form of English” is essentially an artificial construct. An idealized, but unnatural, form of the language. The same can be said for RP.
Based on the OP’s lack of understanding of the basic rules of capitalization, plurals, and spelling, I would hate to think it is representative of the “purest” form of English.
Based on the OP’s lack of understanding of the basic rules of capitalization, plurals, and spelling, I would hate to think it is representative of the “purest” form of English.
The purest form of English is probably that which comes from a cheap text-to-speech or speech synthesiser system. That removes a lot of the factors which we use to characterise accents: like tone, speed, drawled/diphthongized vowels, and vocabulary (which isn’t even a part of accent, but is used to make judgments on where people are from). But even if you strip these away, there are more fundamental differences, such as the distinctions made between vowels, seen in pairs such as “caught”/“cot”, “dug”/“dog”, “look”/“Luke”, whether “r” is pronounced, and whether “wh” is pronounced distinctly from “w”. Ultimately, there is no way of deciding which set of pronunciations should be used, and therefore no way of establishing a proper accent.
If you looked at what version of English is truest to its historical roots, you would most likely have something very far from current ideas of refined speech. Certainly, unlike RP and US announcerspeak, it would be rhotic. Since modern English is descended from the dialect spoken in the English Midlands, it might also sound like contemporary Brummie.
)
