SIMFOG, your post reminded me of an ex-girlfriend of mine from the US. We were discussing a (black) friend of mine in the UK, and she said “but he’s not really black, is he?” I replied “yes he is”. She said “but he doesn’t talk like a black man”. I was incredulous, but then I realised that she’d got it in her head that to talk with a “black” accent was to talk like a proportion of the US population that would be identified as African-American. This is crud.
I can assure you that cultural homogeneity that exists amongst African Americans is there for specific US-based historical reasons, and that black people the world over are as culturally diverse as non-black people.
No. In my vocal training classes, we listened to hundreds of speech samples. Not one sounded like the artificial “standard” we were learning. The “standard” dialect I’m referring to was specifically and artificially created to meet a particular purpose.
There is no such thing as unaccented English.
I’m shocked beyond words that somebody professing a background in linguistics would assert that such a creature as “unaccented English” even exists.
Then they don’t speak that way. Even assuming that “unaccented English” exists, if a group doesn’t speak it “uniformly,” then they don’t speak unaccented English. They speak a regional dialect of English. By definition.
Well, in the Philippines, english as a first language would be common for a very minute segment of the population. I do know of one woman who is from the Philippines who speaks english better than tagalog, but she’s very rare, and it would only be the very highly educated or rich. Most people speak Tagalog, or their local languages as their first languages, and only in school or here and there do they pick up English (though, most Filipinos if educated for any amount of time do speak some english).
Or should I say, “Blah blah blah!”?
Watching any given American movie (film), I can tell you from which coast an actor originated by the way she/he “flips the bird”/“gives the finger”/gestures “fuck you!”.
Now, if gestures can denote origin, how can spoken language possibly be free of regional identity?
Until I was 18, I though everyone pronounced “color/colour” in a way that rhymes with the surname of a famous blind and deaf woman named “Helen”.
Where am I from?
** gerikel,**
For me:-
I’m “Here”, you’re “There”. (= you have an accent)
But for you:-
You’re “Here” and I’m “There” (= I have an accent)
it’s all relative
if we were both in the same spot we’d both be “here” thats the equivalent of you not hearing a accent - but it wouldn’t make the whole frikkin’ universe revolve around the point we stood on
Living in Ireland it seems hard to imagine an Irish person asking “do Irish people have accents?” People tend to be aware that they themselves have an accent, and that other people can infer information about what part of the country they are from, their social and educational background, etc. The same goes for British people, in my experience. Maybe it’s because the tapestry of accents in Ireland is so rich, and we grow up with so much local variation that it is something we are very aware of.
To address one of the OP’s questions, to a non-US English speaker, all US native speakers of English have what we would call an American accent. Even if newsreaders sound to you as if they “have no accent”, to us they just sound American.
As a Southern Californian, I am very aware that I have an accent. Now that I’ve been transplanted to Northern California, I can usually tell which part of the state someone is from based on their accent so I’m curious to see statements in this thread describing Californians as accentless. Even if there were a way to speak any language without an accent, California has several accents of it’s very own.
Curiously, some people can’t tell where I’m from, because despite a clearly SoCal accent, a long series of moves as a child (to places like Maryland, Japan, and the Midwest) has left me with an oddly diverse slang library.
