Sounds kind of Canadian. They seem to do that “aboat” thing. You also notice the “Septembah”, “neighbah” etc.
It did actually remind me a bit of the Kennedys, Mayor Joe Quimby etc., although I thought people insisted that the Kennedy accent was unique to them.
As Ximenean says, they sound a bit Canadian mixed with Kennedian :). Am I right in saying though that all those people linked are exaggerating the accents a tad for comic effect?
Probably. But I think these are authentic.
Some of those do occasionally sound a bit British. Don’t get me wrong, they’re still very definitely American and would be instantly identified as such by any Brit, but some of those vowel sounds are interesting. When Vern Ray from Greene says “probably [about] half an hour at a time” at 1:53, that could almost be an English farmer speaking.
I, a non-native speaker, was once asked by a Glaswegian friend “Do you really understand what T. from Elgin is saying? I don’t understand a single word”. The thing is, she also has a very thick accent and I have to concentrate hard when both are talking. I guess she might not have that habit when listening to someone talking her own language.
Amazing indeed. I’ve met tens of thousands of Brits and never come across anyone who spoke like that (apart from Dick Van Dyke). It reads like a ludicrously exaggerated parody of old-fashioned cockney. I suspect you were/are having the piss taken out of you.
Glaswegian also has the intrusive R, so this isn’t strictly correct.
To throw a spanner in the works re. the yanks, let’s try the Outer Banks accents. A couple - and just a couple - of the vowel sounds are strikingly West Country (“High Tide” = “Hoy Toyd”). The rest sounds American in a weird way, but those vowels really stand out.
You’re saying you’ve NEVER heard a Brit change a TH for an F, or drop the L off the end of a word . . . so if I go out of my way to find audio/video clips of native Britons doing this, you’ll be completely blown away?
Watch* Eastenders* some time.
Trust me, plenty of Londoners promounce “th” as “f” or “v”.
BTW, tens of thousands of Brits? That’s more than I’ve met, and I’ve been one for 36 years!
I wouldn’t say that the change of th to f is actually a feature of accent or even dialect. Th is a difficult sound to produce if you haven’t mastered it already, It requires the tongue to press against the top front teeth and then blow through. F is a much easier sound, so some people use it - incorrectly okay, but it’s not always a feature of their accent. I’ve known people to say flim instead of film, because the i and the l look so similar when written. Likewise, I’ve heard people say Pacific for specific and this time it’s because of the mixture of s sounds made by all the c’s and the s. They simply get confused.
It’s not an issue of difficulty. It is a feature of particular accents. The [ð] and [θ] phones simply do not exist in certain dialects.
Once you reach a certain age, it is difficult to learn any new phone.
Hijack time:
This is an old thread. While reading it I noticed that Chowder hasn’t posted here since last January. What the hell happened to Chowder? He was a prolific poster for a long time.
LOL. Some of the posher people in Cosham try to insist that it’s ‘Cozam’
Yes, I’m aware of the fact that some people say Cozam instead of Cosham, but it is not so universally accepted (and by that I mean locally) in the way that the sh sound is z in Bosham. And what gives credibility to this is that the train announcements distinguish the two. So they have done their research and not tried to pander to any specific group - simply followed the historical precedent.
No, it really is. I’m surprised to hear fellow Brits disputing this. Th-fronting (yeah it’s Wikipedia but it has good cites at the bottom).
Incidentally I spent most of my childhood in Bosham.
I visited Bosham for the first time in my life last weekend (although I’ve been to Cosham many times) - lovely place. Must go back there at high spring tide to see the cars get washed away.
No, it was more about the hilarious defence you’ve mounted for a post pages ago.
Yinz tahk weird an’at.
Thank you. Thank you, thank you, THANK YOU, for using an approximation of the pronunciation which actually approximates the pronunciation.
Huh?