So, what is it about accents? I understand the premise of regional tang, but why can I pick up an accent within a few days of living with someone with a different one?
Some people do, Rage. I am an American but when I am around someone from another country for a day or so, I begin to speak English with the accent the other person uses. It is not a pretentious thing. It even happens in the presence of family, which is very embarrassing.
Sometimes picking up the accent can be a matter of choice – subliminal or otherwise. In the US, a woman from the North who moves to the South is more likely to pick up a Souther accent than her male counterpart. And when a man from the South moves to the North, he is more likely to lose his Southern accent than his female counterpart.
I’d say that was very sexiest Zoe, except people still think I talk like a “Yankee” even though I’ve spent most of my life in the south. However, people up north think I speak like a “southerner”, which proves that people notice the words you pronounce differently; not the ones pronounced the same.
Experts (linguists?) claim that with enough information, your accent could trace you back to the street where you live.
This may have been true in the past, such as in Pygmalion/My Fair Lady. In modern times people move around so much and are so influenced by external factors like TV and movies that speech is becoming more and more standardized.
Now, I’ve never had the problem of picking up someone else’s accent, but my husband does. When we went to London, he started getting a distinctly British inflection within days.
Me, I have a hint of southern accent. (People generally think I’m from the South.) I live in the Northeastern US, but in my region of the state, people speak with varying degrees of a southern accent. It’s rather localized: sixty miles to the north, people speak “Yankee.”
When I’m around folks from other places, my accent remains the same. (For example, I spent two weeks with people from Boston who kept snickering at the way I said certain words.)
My sister once met a linguist who was able to identify her (correctly) as a Clevelander, but with north Appalacian connections. So there’s still more than enough information left in speech to pick up cities. Streets might be a little difficult, but distinct neighborhood accents would surprise me not at all.
Accents are interesting to contemplate. I don’t think I agree with Zoe’s gender based analysis above, but I do think some are more infectious than others.
I used to go out drinking with a couple of Irish gals, and after six hours of ginning with them, I’d involuntarily begin to pick up bits an’ pieces o’ der brogue. Same used to happen when I dated a woman who had grown up in the Bronx.
As to regionality - New Orleans. While I never hear it pronounced as we sometimes see it here, N’Orleans, when there I here different pronunciations from natives and long time residents (such as Li’l Sis). Dawwthy (aforementioned Li’l Sis Dorothy) says NueWhalins, while others say Nue Orlee_ahns. Nevertheless, a New Orleans accent is distinct from the creole of the South Louisiana - there is the southern thing with a bit of New York terseness.
Another funny aspect of accents I’ve noticed is that they become more apparent with the consumption of alcohol. I don’t really understand how that works, but I know I’ve been informed that booze brings out the drawl, y’all. Why would that be?
Heh. I used to have a drinking buddy from Baton Rouge. When sober, she had the “standard” Louisiana accent, but get a beer or two in her and she’d sound more and more like Justin Wilson. By the 5th beer she’d be speaking in a jibberish of French and cajun slang that nobody could understand.
It was fun to drink with her.
This is widely believed amongst the general public but there isn’t in fact any evidence for it and the consensus amongst actual linguists, as far as I can tell, seems to be that it isn’t true. TV (and the media in general) have some influence on our vocabulary, but that’s it. And regional accents are still diverging rather than becoming standardised.
See Bauer and Trudgill’s Language Myths.
I’m an aglophone, and having lived in several English-speaking cities around the world in the past few years, I never assimilated a local accent. (At least, not to the extent that I or anyone back home noticed.) I speak a little German, and only four weeks after enrolling in a German class here in Budapest, I sometimes find myself speaking German with a Hungarian accent. I find this incredibly annoying, and will usually correct myself after the first few words. The problem happens only when I’m intellectually tired–say, near the end of the two-hour class, or late at night.
You probably have a musical ear.
I do, and I pick up accents in a few minutes. I can usually place them, too.
My native language is a dialect form of Dutch, Flemish. I’ve lived in Ireland for 4 years, now. I speak English with an Irish accent, actually more of a Dublin accent. I was taught British English in school, so I had a British English accent when I came here. I can tell you I got quite a bit of slagging, those first weeks. After that I adapted, not consciously, but it did happen. Since English is not my native language, I found that i have no “set” accent, or dialect. I speak as I am spoken to, in short. I take over the accent of the people around me. It’s the “parrot effect”.
I can distuingish australian or New zealand, english scottish and welsh, south-african, northern state US and southern state US, and according to how following speak English from EU countries, I can distuingish whether they’re from france, germany, belgium, holland, spain, portugal or italy. They all speak English quite differently, and their accents are easily picked out (and up).