Thanks. I’ve been curious about this same question myself, and have asked more than once in online forums, and I always get flooded with responses detailing people’s personal expertise, and how they can tell in less than three bars if you live South of Wilshire Blvd. Okay, I got it. Thanks. But I’m really interested if Average Joe living in Average Town, Not-USA can tell the difference between the accents of English speaking people. I asked my mom this once a few years ago (Central American born, has lived in the states for decades now) and she said it took her a long time to be able to discern the differences between accents. For a while, it all sounded like English to her. Now she’s just as good as I am at separating accents, or at least American ones.
This is certainly true. Example: I was in Provincetown, Cape Cod, with my girlfriend last year and got chatting to a couple of New Yorkers. They started ribbing us about our accents, imitating our words. When they tried copying my girlfriend’s accent, they came out with something that sounded like Higgins from Magnum P.I. My girlfriend has a very broad welsh accent:confused:
I can go one worse - someone imitating my accent did an Australian accent!
I definitely think they they find it hard to distinguish just like I can’t distinguish between American and Canadian.
It must be all in the ear. I hear more breadth of diversity within Britain than I hear in the whole of the rest of the (natively) English speaking world put together - to the extent that the unqualified term British accent’ seems absurd.
The Australian accents I’ve heard sound similar to Kiwi, then South African, then a very small subset of American accents, all before I perceive similarity with anything here in the UK.
I could probably tell the difference between an American speaking French and a Briton speaking French, but I couldn’t tell you what differences I’d pick up on. And the issue might be confused by what accent in French they’ve learned to adopt. (For that matter, I might be able to tell the difference between an American speaking French and an anglophone Canadian speaking French, based on the former using a more European variety of French, and the latter a more Canadian one.)
An European French speaker and a Canadian French speaker don’t sound the same at all in English. A tell-all difference is how both will realise the voiced ‘th’ sound of English. In many English dialects it’s [ð], but this sound doesn’t exist in French, so European French speakers (from France at least, I haven’t heard enough Belgians and Swiss speak English to be sure) substitute [z] while Canadian French speakers substitute [d]. Around here, the most obvious (and funniest) feature of French people speaking English is all the “zee”'s.
As for me, I try not to sound like a Canadian French speaker when speaking English, but some of it can come through, especially if I’m nervous. I don’t exactly sound like a native speaker, although when I spoke English more often I was almost there. A few months ago I’ve been asked if I was Argentinian, but I don’t know if it was just a random guess or if my English has some characteristic that’s similar to Argentinians’.
Not sure I agree entirely, I have often thought that ‘Australian’ CAN sound a bit cockney like and it’s fairly common for Londoners to be asked by Americans if they are Australian – I’ve witnessed it a number of times, even in London, when you would think the location would be a hint.
An American and a British person are in Italy speaking Italian. Maria, a native Italian speaker who does not know English and has put no special effort into studying accents, hears them both. “You’re from America,” she says to the American, and to the British person she says “You’re from Britain.” She is able to make this call based solely on their accents. Is this surprising, or is this ordinary? (And as you vary Maria’s nationality, does it become more or less surprising in any interesting ways?)
I don’t know how the OP could fail to be understood, but hopefully the above makes it even more clear.
I understood you, bro.
If I make her say, Armenian, is she still in Italy speaking Italian to an American and a Brit? That would be a little surprising.
Looks like I didn’t. Thanks for the correction, OP.
I guess. Cockney has a sort of relaxed, earthy feel to it and so do some Australian accents, but I don’t find them all that similar - the dialect might be more of a factor (dropped H’s, use of ‘Mate’, etc).
However, when Americans do ‘British’ accents badly, I concede, there does seem to be a tendency to deliver something that sounds like the bastard child of Cockney and Australian.
(cite- actually purports to be a Brit aping an American accent, but any Brit will confirm this is not the case)
It just wasn’t abundantly clear whether the OP was talking about whether the Brits/Americans were being heard speaking English, or the listener’s language.
I didn’t either. I took the question as whether or not a non English speaking person can tell where an English speaking person is from. Do they detect accents at all in English when English isn’t their primary language. Perhaps I just wanted the question to be that because the answer interests me more.
And the answer is: it depends. It’s impossible to answer this generally. It depends on how far Maria’s native language is removed from English; how much exposure to different English accents Maria has had; what italian accents the Brit and Yank learned from their teachers; how much time and effort the Brit and Yank spent learning to speak Italian; what their own native accents are: is the Brit speaking Cockney, BBC or Oxford English? Is the Yank speaking Texan, CNN, or Valley Girl English?
I agree that Australian accents are similar to London accents. Long after I first started to become aware of foreign accents, I could not reliably distinguish between Australian and London accents. They were as similar to my ear as, say, Scottish, Northern Ireland and Donegal accents.
For me, there is a clear “grouping” of accents that includes Australia, New Zealand, Southern Africa, Malta, and accents from the south-east of England.
Of course, people from any one of those places won’t agree that their accent sounds anything like the others.
You may be surprised that I included Malta on that list, because many (older) Maltese people speak English with a strong non-native speaker accent. However if you talk to younger educated Maltese who speak English with native-level fluency, their accent is right there on that Sydney-to-Durban-to-Essex continuum.
Or indeed just people from somewhere other than yourself. That’s the problem - it’s all very subjective (I can’t honestly say your choice of groupings makes much sense to me, but there’s no particular reason why it should)
In my many years of English language teaching, the learners could always tell the different between my accent, British RP, and the accent they’d mostly heard on film, ie. American Mid-West.
When I lived in Eastern Europe, the people there could always - surprisingly, to me - hear a difference between my accent and the Americans there. It’s the stops between the words that make the difference, at least for Eastern Europeans. English in general tends to roll on from word to word, but British English far less than less than others. This is for those non-English speakers who were only really listening to the rhythm of the language, and knowing beforehand which language it was, without speaking it.
My best example for this is, strangely, Anna Friel. I once saw her on a talk show and she said that the best way to speak Aussie was to do a bad, slightly nasal Cockney accent (imagine Dot from Eastenders) and imagine that you have to squint against the sun, which makes your mouth go wide too, (try squinting and you’ll see what I mean), and then not move your mouth too much because you don’t want to let the flies in. Ta-da, generic Aussie accent!
Since we seem to be having two threads in one, yes, Hispanics not living in English-speaking countries can tell the difference between RP and American Newscaster, but that and “hot potato in mouth” is most people’s limit unless they have a personal interest in accents - and often, we can tell that two people sound different but not explain how, or at least in the same terms you guys would use (I know Irish people are supposed to have a “brogue”, but don’t ask me to explain what a brogue is).
I think part of the problem we have distinguishing or describing English accents is similar to the “everybody not of my race looks the same” problem: we’re used to focusing on a certain set of features, but the distinguishing set of features changes by language. For example, all Spanish dialects use the same vowels, and if a word is pronounced differently in different dialects, what’s different is the consonants; in English, vowels change between dialects.
This is inconsistent with my experience in Eastern Europe. As I said upthread, I work with hundreds of non-native English speakers. We also have a handful of American, English, Scottish, Australian, etc., natives. The closest my colleagues can come to differentiating the accents is that they say the Scots are harder to understand than the others.