Which makes me think of this scene from Hot Fuzz.
I dated a woman with a very strong South Jersey/Philly accent. It was extremely cute most of the time but in bed it was not the sexiest thing I’ve heard.
As a non-Spanish speaker I can usually pick out a Mexican accent and a (New York) Puerto Rican accent. All the others sound the same to me.
Growing up watching Brit-coms (Python mostly) I’m pretty good at recognizing accents. But I would say that your average lazy American kind of lumps English, Scottish and Irish together. They definitely lump English, Australian, and South African together.
Was that because you mentioned taking the “feeree across thi wahtah in thi haabaa”?
Oh wow. This is definitely a thing.
I spent a year teaching English in a French lycée; it was an exchange program run by the French government. The Americans participating in the program tended to be motivated Francophiles who embraced the language, but the Brits were different. They were university students studying to be French teachers in British schools, and as such were obligated to spend a year teaching English in France. They were not happy to be there.
As a rule, their accents were deplorable. Their grammar and syntax were usually up to snuff, but they pronounced everything with English phonemes.
For example: I lived in a little town called Alençon. The name of this town has a lot of nasal sounds due to the Ns and is typically pronounced with the emphasis on the last syllable. But the Brits pronounced it as though it were an English last name: Allenson. They used no nasal phonemes and swallowed the last vowel in that British way, so it was approximately “Allens’n.”
While there are many Brits who speak beautiful French, most of the ones I encountered couldn’t be bothered to pronounce French in any way other than the way they pronounced English. It was a running joke among the Americans in my cohort.
You’re describing two of the French-language teachers I had in my Scottish university. The two British ones had no regard for either French pronunciation or, in the case of the one who taught grammar, for teaching it with the names it gets in French. The third one was French and while still a bit green around the edges, was enthusiastic about the subject and introduced us to some really cool music and poetry.
As my German-born mother got older and her hearing and auditory processing speed got worse, I had to translate English-to-English when she saw doctors who did not speak English as their first language. She just could not understand a heavy accent anymore. They would usually look at me funny for a few seconds, until I explained the problem. After that they were happy to have me “translate.”
In her younger days my mom could tell the difference in various American accents and many British accents in a heartbeat. She spoke (and wrote) excellent English, and never quite lost her charming accent.
I traveled with a group of South American native Spanish speakers through Spain. I started the tour as the only native English speaker. And I noticed differences in pronunciation among them from the Spanish I had learned in school.
I was stationed in the Rhineland-Palatinate of southwestern Germany and noticed a slight French influence on pronunciation of hard “g” - “mozhye” instead of “morgen”.
Was the Scot a Weegie - a Glaswegian? Because that accent is particularly hard.
My aged MIL is similar. She’s American-born and has always spoken typical regional white American.
Her ability now to understand any accent other than fairly bland white American is just about nil. Given the ethnic and immigrant diversity around here that’s become a real handicap at a store, a doctor’s office, etc.
She always enjoyed the various Brit TV shows commonly shown on PBS. She can’t follow their dialog any more.
It’s a real shame.
Even English speakers can’t always tell the difference between different accents.
One of my co-workers is German-Australian (speaks both natively) and stated with certainty there are 2 major American accents: northern and southern. This is an office with at least 3 distinct southern US accents, none of which he could differentiate. Our Chinese co-workers can’t tell English accents apart at all (unless it’s an extreme accent - then it’s unintelligible). And I couldn’t tell the difference between Australian and New Zealand accents to save my life.
I’m from Southern England, central area, and I speak what is sometimes known as the ‘Queens English’ or in other words, English without an ‘accent’, so I am probably not the best equipped to judge this from an English speaking perspective - but I will anyway.
I can identify all the common English accents around the world, from Californian, to NY, to Scottish, to South African, Caribbean, Northern Irish, Australian etc - but not necessarily the difference between Trinidadian and Jamaican… because I haven’t spent enough time around the two accents.
I had a friend from Angola, and English was his second language. Even though he was fairly fluent, he couldn’t tell a Geordie from a Brummie - something a native British person could tell with ease.
Then again, he could converse with our Brazilian/English friend in Portuguese and laugh at his ‘silly’ Portuguese accent (the friend being brought up in Brazil with English parents)… but to my ears, they both spoke the same way.
I also think there are identifiers. For example, I can tell a Spanish person from say, a Colombian because of the lack of ‘th’ sounds in SA Spanish… but I couldn’t tell a Colombian from an Argentinian.
Bad example, as it turns out that the Colombian highlands is one of the locations which happens to preserve that sound. Some Colombian dialects include it, some don’t.
Oh, I knew one Colombian and many Spanish… She was from Medellin.
Do you mean someone who knows little or no English, or someone who has learned the language well enough to understand it? If the former, I’m not sure how the situation would ever come up. Otherwise, as a non-native speaker of German I know that there are slight differences around the country as to how standard German is pronounced. I can’t necessarily tell where an accent is from, but I do notice the difference.
My best friend, a huge anime fan, was watching an English-language interview with a popular Japanese voice actress. It was explained during the interview that she learned English from her French teacher. My friend said there was just something amusingly charming about hearing a Japanese woman speaking English with a French accent.
I was fascinated when I heard the Dutch Floor Jansen, lead singer of the metal band Nightwish, speaking English with a “standard” (like you hear from newscasters) American accent. She speaks, I think, five languages, and is currently learning to speak Finnish because she’s in a Finnish band. (She says they all speak English for her benefit, but she thinks that learning their language is just the right thing to do.)
Anyway, I live in a central-Washington agricultural town with a large Mexican population. The overwhelming majority of Mexicans here originate from Mexican states like Oaxaca and Michocan. A few years ago, I was in Seattle having lunch at a Mexican restaurant, and I could immediately tell that the Mexican employees were from a different part of Mexico (it turned out that most of them were from Mexico City and its vicinity). They were speaking English, but the difference in their accent was obvious to me because it was noticeably different from the accents I was accustomed to.
Depends on the person. Many Japanese I know can tell American from non-American, but that’s usually about the extent of it unless they’ve had actual experience overseas. You need a decent amount of exposure to get fine details, but even non-speakers of languages can figure out major differences if they pay enough attention or have a good ear.
I speak no Chinese at all, but from watching movies where they’re explicitly speaking Mandarin I know a few telltale sounds and the overall flow and sound of that dialect, which is pretty different from Cantonese. (I know from linguistics classes that these are actually separate language families that for historical and political reasons are considered “dialects”.) I can’t tell the difference between Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, or Malaysian flavors of Cantonese just from listening, for example, but if I had enough exposure I might.
My Japanese is good enough to pick out some major well-established accents (Kyoto vs. Osaka vs. Tokyo) and some small regional ones from the countryside where I used to live during the first few years in Japan, but I’m not good enough to get more exact than that for most.
Part of the difficulty is that there’s a lot of code-switching in Japan. Everyone knows “standard” Japanese 標準語 hyōjungo and will often use that on a formal basis (or when talking to non-natives like me) but use a regional dialect with friends and family from that area. Hyōjungo is kind of like RP in the UK.
There are a lot of traditional regional dialects in Japan — practically one per prefecture — since there were not only physical separations, but political and social barriers for literally centuries that kept people from traveling far from their area of origin. Post-War a lot of them have been disappearing. Some of the older people in rural areas are hard for even native younger Japanese people to understand.
Nobody understands what the hell people in Aomori say to each other. It’s seriously worse than Glaswegian compared to RP; might as well be actual Gaelic. Ryukyu (native Okinawan) is really a separate language, not intelligible to standard Japanese speakers, though they are supposedly branches of the same language family. Basically everyone speaks “Japanese” in addition to their native dialect, and modern media and travel have seriously eroded many major differences.
Many South and Central American Spanish accents are fairly easy for me to distinguish, even with only a few years of study spanning middle school and high school. I can’t often tell what area or social class someone is from, but I can usually tell the country. Growing up in California gives you a decent amount of exposure to different Spanish accents. Hell, just from roommates and friends at university I met Spanish speakers from Uruguay, Argentina, Mexico, Guatemala, and Panama.
I was really surprised at the amount of variation in Spain when I took a trip there about 10 years ago, though. I’d learned “Spanish”-Spanish in school (one native teacher from Madrid, one American who studied in Madrid, and another American who spent 3–4 years in Barcelona but consciously taught castellano) and had little exposure to the quite wide variation of different dialects in Spain. Even putting aside Basque, which is a language isolate and really different from anything else in Europe, I was totally thrown by the signs in Catalan when we were in Barcelona.
Looking at my experiences with both Spanish and Japanese which I first was exposed to in an academic setting, it’s kind of trippy how much isn’t taught when you learn a “standard” version of a language. It’s not like you can practically teach a bunch of different regional dialects, but it would be nice if teachers introduced and explained some, at least acknowledge their existence.
You know Catalan is a different language, right? It’s not just a different dialect. Galego is again a different language. And Valenciano, which used to be considered a dialect of Catalan but is now officially a separate language, is usually undistinguishable from Catalan in writing but sounds very different.
And what did you want the American teacher to teach you, if not castellano? You weren’t paying him to teach you Bable, Catalan or Welsh, you were paying him to teach you Spanish…
I know that now, but at the time literally had not one clue. It wasn’t mentioned in any of my middle or high school Spanish classes, I didn’t encounter it in college linguistics, etc. It wasn’t until I was in Spain in real life that I knew anything about it. I was curious enough to find out a little bit more later, and that’s when I realized just how much I didn’t know about just how many damn languages there are in Spain. I’m sure that’s true in many countries, if not most.
Yes, learning Spanish was the goal of the classes. My point was that in all that time, not one of them ever mentioned anything beyond different accents in the north, south, and central regions of Spain. Admittedly, actually studying those differences is way beyond what you should be talking about when you’re still at the ¿Hace frío. Donde esta mi abrigo? stage of things, but it would have been nice if at least one of my teachers had mentioned, “Hey, kids, there’s a metric assload of languages besides what we simplistically call ‘Spanish’ that are spoken in Spain. Just an FYI.”
I can’t speak for Sleel, but I learned Mexican Spanish in school, even though the teacher was himself from Spain.
I was actually unaware of that, that’s pretty interesting.
No method of distinguishing dialects is really foolproof- especially since indivdiuals sometimes have idiosyncratic speech patterns, in addition to the small scale variations between local dialects, but I’d guess that if you guess that someone who preserves the ‘th’ sound is from Spain, most of the time you’ll be correct. Likewise if I heard someone dropping the ‘s’ at the end of syllables I’d guess they were from one of the Caribbean countries, and if they additionally interchanged ‘l’ and ‘r’ occasionally I’d guess Puerto Rico. And if they pronounced ‘y’ like English or French ‘J’ and additionally pronounced ‘j’ the way they do in Spain, I would guess they were from Argentina or Chile. Oftentimes you would be wrong of course, but I think that would be a decent rule of thumb.