Everybody has their own unique way of speaking compared to others who speak the same dialect, sociolect, or other -lect. First tell us your native dialect and then any idiosyncrasies in your speech. I’ll start. My native dialect is Inland North.
I pronounce sore and soar differently (and saw ‘er is different still). I pronounce sore with a higher o vowel: /soɹ/, while I pronounce soar normally, with a lax vowel: /sɔɹ/. Oddly, this is the reverse of how they were pronounced historically: soar used to have the raised vowel and sore has always been lax. I don’t know how I arrived at this.
As in the previous example, I tend to pronounce the English diphthongs /eɪ̯/ and /oʊ̯/ more as pure vowels /e/ and /o/, which is also true of Irish and Scottish accents. If I pronounce the offglides at all, I pronounce them very slightly. I think the offglides were already pretty weak in the Inland North I grew up with.
I pretty much failed to adopt the Northern Cities Vowel Shift, unlike most people around me. My accent is even slightly different from my younger sisters who grew up in the same household with me.
I’ve consciously chosen to pronounce the name of h with its sound: haitch. This started in Ireland and I think it’s worth adopting. Likewise the second person plural pronoun yous. I prefer these Hibernicisms because they’re logical and they sound all right to my ear. I’ve also chosen to say the name of the 7th planet in the original Greek: Ouranos, because it sounds more dignified than the anglicized versions.
I actually made a video about my own accent / dialect on my Youtube channel, see here.
I did the “accent tag challenge” and then provided further self-analysis of my accent.
In short, I speak the way people (of my generation at any rate) tend to in Toronto. That is, a more neutral version of Canadian English than what is typically spoken in the interior. So: 1) I pronounce “about” pretty much as written, not “aboat” or “abutt” or “abeoowt”; 2) i say “praw-cess”, not “proa-cess” (many Canadians say the latter); 3) However, I do use short vowels like many Canadians as opposed to many Americans; 3) I do say “SOAR-y”, not “SAW-ry”.
I can’t think of any particular personal idiosyncracies, but there’s words I’ve started pronouncing differently over the years. For example, I THINK I grew up saying “MonDAY”, “TuesDAY”, etc. but picked up an older Canadian variant, “MonDY”, “TuesDY”, etc. from a teacher. Or for example the word “route”, I sometimes say “ROOT”, sometimes “ROWT”. The latter was acquired later.
In the neighborhood I grew up in, roof and root were pronounced /ɹʊf/ and /ɹʊt/. The kid next door was David, but other kids pronounced his name Davit (I didn’t).
I speak Canadian English, which is much like typical American English but with some subtle differences. I pronounce the word “sorry” the way I believe it was meant to be pronounced according to how it’s spelled. It is not, in my idiolect, pronounced like “sari”, which is a woman’s garment commonly worn in the Indian subcontinent, and not an expression of apology. There needs to be some respect paid to the “o” in that word.
Same with a word like “about”. No, you American critics, Canadians do not pronounce it as “aboot”. We say “about” with the same sound as “south”, which might have a subtle difference from the American pronunciation, but not by much.
Canadians’ pronunciation of “about” does vary. I do pronounce it with the same sound as “south”, that is, with a short aʊ sound. But many Canadians do pronounce it with the same sound as in “boat” (as do some Minnesotans), and some I think say “A-butt”. Rarely, only rarely, will I hear someone say a sort of “a-bee-oowwt”, which would come closest to the American stereotype of us saying “aboot”.
Another thing I’ve noticed: as might be expected of a big city, those from Vancouver tend to use “general” or “standard” Canadian English, a more neutral variety like we from Toronto, but I’ve heard more “aboats” from Vancouverites than from people from Toronto. Another thing, I think Vancouverites might stress the word “but” (for example, conservative political commentator Lindsay Shepherd often speaks this way).
I am of the Cleveland, OH region from a family of Slovak descent. So I guess I have a Cleveland accent. I can hear it in myself sometimes.
Apparently I pronounce “milk” wrong - I say MELK. I think I also say “pellow” for pillow. My boyfriend, who also has a Cleveland accent, says these are incorrect (he thinks it’s cute).
You’re right, it’s not “aboot,” but it is identifiable if you know what to listen for. I constantly spot Canadians based on “ow” raising. It’s a dead giveaway where the rest of the speech sounds like standard American English to me. And there are various forms of it depending on what part of Canada you’re from (and not every Canadian has this raising, of course. But whenever I’m listening to a podcast and I hear it, I check to see if it’s a Canadian, and it always is.) And it’s not used with all “ow” sounds, just “ow” sounds that precede an unvoiced consonant.
With my ideolect, it’s more vocabulary and phrases than actual accent, I think. I’m not sure. I’m sure I have some accent quirks, but I’m too inside myself to know what they are. I spent many formative years in a mixed-expat community, so I do findmyself saying words like “lift” and “flat” reflexively if I don’t catch myself. I used the phrase “I would have thought so” more often than an average American speaker would. “In hospital” sometimes creeps in there. I tend to pronounce Budapest as “Budapesht” instead of “Budapest,” (from living in Hungary) but I bounce back and forth between the pronunciations. “Chuffed” is another one I use. Bringing it back to the US, the construction “my clothes need washed” is not native to my dialect, but I find myself using it from time to time, as I find it rather concise.
I’m sure there’s more, but that’s what I can think of.
I speak Northern Californian with a few Bostonisms inflecting here and there. I wasn’t aware of the latter (picked up from my Newton-raised grandfather no doubt) until I met my current partner 30 years ago, who is from Boston and was struck by my pronunciation of words like “yes t’dee” (yesterday).
When I was five or six, I heard myself on the radio, and that’s when I realized I had a Southern accent, and I was horrified. I trained myself out of it, until by the time I was a teenager, I had a few different people ask me if I was from England.
Because I read a lot, I pronounced a lot of words they way they’re written, and have gotten laughed at for “victuals” and “segue” (which surely is “seg”). But even common words can confuse me: I remember in college getting teased for pronouncing the /l/ in “walk” and “talk.”
In English I probably sound a tiny bit like I’m from Scotland (at least for vowels) because when I’m distracted or in a hurry or unsure about a word’s pronunciation I pronounce like it would sound in Spanish.
I learned English from Scifi and Fantasy books I HAD to read and were unavailable in Spanish.
At first I struggled with some common words because they were not so common in SF&F, I used to joke that I knew how to manage an interstellar empire in English but didn’t know how to order pizza.
With time, practice, and the internet bringing shows and movies without dubbing to my living room I’ve improved a lot, but I’ll probably forever write way better than I speak.
ETA: I also tend to pronounce (or try to) all the letters in a word, it didn’t occur to me that a letter in a word could go unpronounced until I was 25 or so.
Perhaps it’s not as strong as “aboot” but the words “about” and “sorry” are dead giveways of a Canadian accent. They are noticabley different from American accents.
It is not pronounced like “sari” in my accent either (New York City & environs.)
I do too. What’s weird is I’m not sure how I pronounce yolk when I’m not thinking about it. Closing my eyes, picturing myself in the kitchen saying “Now to separate the white from the yolk” - how do I say it? With my tongue tip making a lazy gesture in the direction of /l/ without quite getting there. That gives it a very slight +ATR (advanced tongue root) over yoke.
It would be if it was French or derived from French - it certainly looks like it might be, but in fact it’s an Italian word in which all the vowels are pronounced.
I pronounce the w in wr- words. I can’t hear a difference, but I can feel my lips move for wright / write in a way that they don’t for right / rite. I’ve always done this, and I must have learned it somewhere, but I’m told that English speakers simply don’t do this.
Otherwise, my idiolect is a mixture of where I’m from, levelled out by my education, and then pushed by where my spouse is from and where I live now. I sound like I have a slight accent everywhere.
Fairly bog-standard US west coast (Oregon originally, now No. California). I’m not aware that I have any oddities of pronunciation within that framework.
Anecdote: when I was young, there were two sisters who lived on Vashon Island, Washington and who came to visit their grandparents across the street from us every summer. They seemed to speak the same basic dialect as we did, except they pronounced the word “wash” to rhyme with the word “rush.” It wasn’t just a lazy schwa, it was an actual short u sound. I’ve never heard anyone else say it that way.
Is that where that came from? I’ve heard various people on British TV use that pronunciation, some of them English, some Irish. Some of them (Jimmy Carr comes to mind) seem to use both pronunciations interchangeably. Some of those English folks are likely to drop the h in a lot of words, so I thought that adding it to the name of the letter was somehow ironic.
Pure Midwestern General American, to the core, although now that I’ve lived in the Ozarks for the past decade and some change, someone from back home in Springfield (IL) would be able to pick up the slightest bit of a Southern drawl. The slightest.
because when I’m distracted or in a hurry or unsure about a word’s pronunciation I pronounce like it would sound in Spanish.