There is a national broadcast standard. There is no national standard because one accent is as legitimate as another.
If you were in radio or television, you would probably have to make a few changes. Otherwise, you are just fine! Ignore it when people with one accent tell you that you are talking in a non-standard accent. They are misinformed.
It depends what is meant by a “standard accent.” There certainly is such a thing as Standard American English. It’s what is taught in foreign countries when learning English, assuming that they are being taught to speak in an American accent. It’s (mostly) what actors outside of the U.S. learn when they take dialect courses in acting schools to learn to speak an American accent. It’s what TV news people often tend to align their accents to.
Of course there is no governmentally approved standard accent. There isn’t in most other countries either. It’s no longer as necessary in the U.K., for instance, to force yourself to speak Standard British English if you want to rise in the world. There is a tendency to align one’s accent to a standard accent among many people who rise higher in society, in the U.S., the U.K., and most other countries, but that’s more often an unconscious thing than a conscious one.
You know, you could have avoided all the linguistic nitpicking if you would have asked something more like, “What dialect or features of dialects does Michele Obama exhibit?”
'Cause, you know, we *all *speak dialects, and phonetics are only one facet of them.
I think you are confusing accents with dialects here. Standard American English and Standard British English are not accents. It would be perfectly possible to speak Standard British English with an American (or Scottish, or Dutch) accent.
No. She has a tiny bit of nasal twang but it’s about as close to perfect mid-west English as is physically possible.
Does M. Obama move her eyes as she reads the teleprompter? Yes she very much does. I at no point thought she was making eye contact with me. It seems like she was looking below the lens.
OK, different point: Is it possible that slavery (yes, I know it’s bad, please don’t come here to remind me) accelerated “survival of the fittest” to a point unseen recently? I taught 4th grade in Compton, CA, and I’ve never been around so many 5-8 to 5-10 women. I also think that the men have a deeper timbre to the voice, and that I can often pick them out even when they have native British accents and have no raising with AAVE at all.
(Just to fend off the knee-jerk criticizers): This is not a problem, just an observation. You also don’t see many tight curls on white people. That doesn’t make them wrong.
I’m sorry, but ‘nasal’ seems to mean nothing more than ‘different that how I speak.’
Are you posting this in the wrong thread, perhaps? One not about Michelle Obama’s speech patterns?
hibernicus, Standard British English and Standard American English are dialects, but dialects involve all parts of the language - the vocabulary, the grammar, the pronunciation, etc. Part of what defines Standard British English and Standard American English is the pronunciation - i.e. the accent. First of all, go back and read the post by Zoe that I was replying to. She said:
> There is no national standard because one accent is as legitimate as another.
As I said, that depends what one means by “standard.” It’s true that there is no such thing as a governmentally approved Standard American English. That’s true and yet irrelevant. There isn’t a governmentally approved Standard British English either. There isn’t a governmentally approved standard language in many countries. So what? “Standard” doesn’t mean “enforced by the government” in this case. It means “what most people believe is the standard.”
What defines a standard language is the perception of what is standard. If a course in English is established in some country where English isn’t spoken, the first thing that will be decided is whether to teach the students to speak British English or American English. (It’s possible that they may decide to teach some neutral version and just explain the differences when they come up, but that’s awkward.) Having decided that, they will teach the students to speak Standard British English with a Received Pronunciation or will teach the students to speak Standard American English with a General American Accent. I find it hard to believe that courses in English in foreign countries would ever be organized to teach Standard British English except that they will teach the students to pronounce everything with a thick Scots accent or that a course would be organized in which Standard American English is taught expect that they teach the students to pronounce everything with a thick Texas accent.
It is, of course, possible to speak Standard British English with a heavy regional accent. It is also possible to speak Standard American English with a heavy regional accent. Indeed, most people can iron out any differences from standard in their grammar and vocabulary so that they can keep their native pronunciation while speaking the standard language in other respects.
Let me say this once again clearly. Far too many people are still traumatized from their experiences in school, where teachers tried to beat into students that there was something wrong with them if they didn’t speak and write “correctly.” There is nothing inherently more virtuous or more educated about speaking in a variant dialect. The Standard British English and Standard American English dialects are arbitary constructs. They are only standard in the sense that they are perceived to be standard.
Just a small coda: I put “deshtroyed” into Google, and pretty much every hit that came back referred to Michelle O’bama’s PSA. And this thread is top result!
Do I get a cookie?
How about a fish biscuit?
Did anybody happen to notice if Michelle Obama pronounces the word “aunt” ant or ont. The first time I heard a black person use the ont pronunciation, it sounded like a English affection, but from what I read it is actually common among African Americans.
I hear it occasionally in the Pacific NW, more from blacks, but pretty much all races. One of my kids has picked up “ont”, the other one uses “ant”.
I’ve run across it a lot in Chicago. It’s strongest among those who are of Ukrainian decent, and seems to have influenced other Chicago accents.
She might well have had a lisp when she was younger and learned to suppress it, leading her to slightly over-enunciate.
I’m from Kansas City and now live in Chicago, and have a very standard Midwestern accent, although I don’t flatten my vowels as much as many other folks from Kansas City. I’m pretty sure my accent became identified as the “standard American accent” from the prominence of people from the area during the last half of the twentieth century - Johnny Carson, Walt Disney, Walter Cronkite, Harry Truman - and the desire of television executives to suppress stronger regional accents to achieve more national acceptance. Dan Rather, in his book The Camera Never Blinks wrote about working to suppress the “Texas” in his voice, saying that one of the network vice-presidents told him that he should sound as he if grew up in the vice-president’s office.
Interestingly, voice recognition systems seem to really like my accent.
Keep in mind that “ont” is the standard pronunciation throughout New England. I"ve completely lost my Boston accent, but I can’t bring myself to say “ant” for “aunt”.
It’s “Aint” here in Mayberry.
Ex. “Kin Ah have some of this apple pah, Aint Bea?”
Do you have the pin/pen vowel merger, too? I.e., does “Can you pass me that pin?” sound the same as “Can you pass me that pen?”
With the exception of the pancake mix: Aunt Jemimah. But that was always pronounced, in my house, as if it were “ANjah-MYmah”.
I clearly recall one of the first times I heard Michelle Obama speak and the "shtrong " was evident - before the election. It was nothing special to me then, but ever since, I have noticed more and more the emphasis of this dialect/local/family quirk in news broadcasts. Previously, I might have thought about it and said it was some black thing/ street thing/ Chicago thing or maybe even Jewish thing, but I hear it popping up all over ( and from some I didn’t notice it in before) and I really think now that if anyone was self-conscious about it before, they aren’t anymore - “after all, the First Lady can do it, so why not me?”.
I am just waiting for someone to report on that “first small step for (a) man” to have been accomplished by a Neil Armshtrong", then I suppose I will have to accept it as a done deal. Perhaps it is a problem in the software ???
Sooooooh, have at it, and God bless Free Shpeech.
news flash: Joe Biden’s son, Beau, also pronounces STR as SHTR. I don’t believe he’s had all that much to do with the city of Chicago during most of his life, and he otherwise has no “lisp.” I am therefore one of those who still wonder where this habit of speech originates. The only idea left to me is that perhaps this is a device of practiced public speakers who wish to avoid “spraying” their words when having to “project to the back of the theater.”
Michelle Obama speaks with a pretty flat Midwestern accent with a few AAVE shadings. This is her most formal dialect. We don’t know how she speaks in less formal settings.
Take my own accent: I speak to outsiders with my most formal urban southern accent which is similar to how Bill Clinton talks. Among locals, I speak in a choppy and rhythmic dialect that shortens syllables and blurts out so many words so fast that some outsiders barely get it. Boomhauer from King of the Hill is a parody of this accent. On the road in small towns I have to twang it up and slow it down.
Michelle has a pretty normal formal accent, so do most Americans who have to interact with lots of different types of people.