proud of prejudice? are you speaking of my dislike for the southern accent?
that’s like me being a neo-nazi with a jewish religion. i’m just saying i’m not the only one in the south that thinks southern accents aren’t desirable. it’s a FACT that people, in the other regions, have mocked those from the south and used the accent to imply lesser degrees of education. i know what people think (because i have had it said to my face before) that people in the south (particularly the state in which i reside) don’t wear shoes and marry their syblings. and while this says nothing directly about the accent, when you speak with a southern accent, people know you are from the south and may assume the aforementioned circumstances.
trust me, i’ve been up north and have gotten the “you mean y’all wear shoes down there” (in an obvious mocking souther accent) more times than i can count. it gets old. and my point is that people can be prejudice about southerners or any other region just as they can be about those of different races.
i live hear, i know we wear shoes and that people don’t inbreed, so how i can i be prejudice when i am educated on the matter?
This is much, much harder work than it ought to be, but please try to understand that you and everybody you have ever spoken to, or ever will speak to has an accent. An explanation can be found throughout this thread.
Caine’s accent does seem to have approached Estuary from the Cockney direction. It is becoming more commonplace but it isn’t a refined way of speaking, just a compromise.
RP is indeed the version of English 'enry 'iggins tried to teach Eliza Doolittle, but surprisingly the royal family don’t generally use it. Nowerdays younger members probably use a version of it mixed with some Estuary and a curious, rarified version of English associated with the young upper class (google “Sloane Ranger”). The old guard (e.g. Her Maj, Phil and Charles) have a characteristic, strangulated way of speaking that would sound very odd if the ladies and gents at the BBC used it for announcements.
gerikel, I’m afraid I’m puzzled. You go on at length about the Southern accent being a disadvantage, with people assuming you’re a hick, and so on. It obviously is important to you what impression you give to other people by your communications. Then, you post stuff like this:
I don’t have any idea what you sound like in real life, but if I got an e-mail from you looking for a job, with those many errors, I’d likely pass.
[url=http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?s=&postid=3735163#post3735163]gerikel: You’ve not really been welcomed until you’ve been Pitted.
It sounds to me like a stereotype of the accents from the West Country of England (anywhere from Bristol to Cornwall). The local accent of Oxfordshire also sounds a bit like a pirate accent, though without all the "avast ye"s.
But besides using different words soda vs. pop and sub/hero/hoagie/grinder/po’ boy in different parts of America we use different vowel sounds.
Small story to illustrate:
I moved to New Jersey at a young age from Mass. and I got into a fight with my 2nd grade teacher.
“whodaya want in your group, alison?”(please read with a mellower Sopranos type accent)
“Olivia and Dawn (pronounced Dahn with an open low “a” sound)”
“You mean Da-won (Really pronounce that w when reading this)”
::nodding in agreement happy Dawn would be in my group:: “Dahn yea”
“Da-won”
::what is this lady trying to say we’ve only got one dawn in the class::“Dahn ummhmm”
“DA- WON”
We volleyed this name back and forth for a good five minutes ending with the teacher breathing hot air into my face. She was using the “if they don’t understand, speak louder” method for communication. Next week I went to speech class with the kid with the lisp.
I never fully pronounced an “r” unless it was at the end of the word “idea”
Doa was the sound for both drawer and door.
Gahl was the sound for girl and grill.
What a disgusting story, parlo americano. I suppose common sense would tell you you might have to put up with that kind of nonsense from the other kids, but a teacher? She shouldn’t have been allowed anywhere near children.
thanks everton.
just to give the story a happy ending:
it turned out okay, the speech teacher was very nice, the kid with a lisp turned out to be one of my best friends, and I ended up studying liguistics. Also, I’m pretty damn good at figuring out what non-native speakers are saying and helping them pronounce words more clearly. And I can speak other languages with an easily understood (mostly unnoticed) accent.
Got some “news” for you there, pardner. Lots and lots of people actually speak this way in real life, especially in the midwest (not up north like MI, ND, MN), including me. Yes, where I’m from in St. Louis there are some accents that one can discern with practice, but most of those whom I know from there speak generally unaccented English. Not just that we “can’t hear it” because we are the speakers; I focus attention on this from a linguistic interest standpoint. People speak this way, although probably not as well or as uniformly as a trained actor like yourself.
I don’t know about Sri Lanka, Malta, India, Australia, South Africa, and the Philippines, but I’ve been to Hong Kong and can tell you that English is definitely not the “first language” there. It is certainly taught in schools (or at least it was before HK was returned to China – I don’t know if it’s still taught there now), but the first language has always been Cantonese. Many of the people who learned English in school there don’t speak it particularly well, and many more people don’t speak it at all. All movies are filmed with Cantonese speaking actors, not English (although before the handover to China all movies were required to have English subtitles).
Yeah, I should have been more clear - I meant “the segments of the populations…”.
Incidentally, I lived in Hong Kong for three years and can confirm there are third- and fourth-generation caucasian and eurasian people in Hong Kong who do speak English as a first language, but they’re a tiny minority and thus not a very good example.
I didn’t mean to leave you hanging. Let me see if I can make better sense.
Originally, Chronos asked about the possibility of creating a Pan-English dialect. I maintain that, academically, such a dialect could well be conceived and created.
Let us now consider our proposed Pan-English dialect as a practical matter, as opposed to an academic matter. The presence and current influence of the existing American and British standard dialects would tend to diminish the contributions of Sri Lankan, Maltese, Indian, Australian, South African, Hong Kong, and Philippine English to any real-world application of a Pan-English dialect.
Black people here have a similar range of accents as do white people or any other category. There are some accents (e.g. Caribbean, various African ones) that would be much more commonly heard among black people than white for obvious reasons, and there are certain tonal qualities to black people’s voices that may allow identification on the phone or radio. But yes, a black person born and raised here does sound “British”.
