Well, according to my Linguistics professor, SoCal doesn’t have an accent. It has a very distinctive speech rhythm, however. You can always tell a native Southern Californian (but you can’t tell them much!) by the rhythm and spacing of their speech.
Chalk me up on this one. I was raised for standard mid-western English (with a overlay of SoCal surf, dude.
But I find that I get a better response out of my staff if I alter word choice and speech rhythm to mid-south. Sort of a Carolina’s thing. So I do that. I also alter it to that if I’m discussing business matters with other men.
For technical matters I’m back to flat tech-speak.
It’s all about perception.
Bingo. It’s almost amusing sometimes.
Me too.
It can be embarassing, people think you are trying to make fun of them but I can’t help myself. I’m a Myna bird.
My wife’s a myna bird too. I can tell who she’s speaking to on the phone by her accent. I can even tell if she’s spent time with someone of a non-Irish nationality during the day, from the residual traces of their accent, hours later. She speaks four languages fluently, and her French accent is so good that French people think she’s from Paris. I am certain the two things are connected.
Me, I’m less flexible, though I have deliberately changed my accent a few times. I was born in England, but went to Texas at a formative age. When I returned to England, my accent was completely broad Texan. This was so cool and trendy at school that I persisted with the accent to keep the girls swooning. However, recordings of me aged 11 reveal a nasty, twisted mid-Atlantic monstrosity. Eventually I realised I was faking it, and ‘let go’. My accent became Home Counties English. Then I moved school, where I got bullied for being posh, so I had to change my accent again to make it more working class. Then the bullies left school when I stayed on, so again I let go. Then I went to drama school and was taught Received Pronunciation (RP), so my accent lost its very posh edge to become more ‘BBC English’. 12 years ago I left England and lived in Asia with a bunch of Aussies, Irish, and Americans, and now I live in Ireland. I spent a few months in England, and when I came back my Irish friends said I “sounded really English”, so I guess my accent must now be full of Irishisms.
Bit of a mess really.
Hmmm. I’ve had the opposite experience. I have an southern accent, but I can speak in broadcast English easily, due to TV. of course. I’ve found that in dealings with non-Southerners, speaking in a southern accent is not advantageous. I get that little fucking yankee smirk that says “oh, goody, it’s one of those cousin-fucking morons from down South”. Hence the broadcast English in my dealings with Yankee strangers.
I’m from Southern Ontario, where there is not much of an accent to begin with. Perhaps there’s a regional thing about the pronunciation of ‘ou’ sounds, but I’ve all but eradicated it from my speech. I chose a career in radio announcing, so I have that North American Broadcast Accent, free from regionalisms. I don’t even say “eh?” at the end of sentences. I’ve lived in The South for six years now, and I haven’t started to talk like a Southerner. I can imitate the accent, but never do, unless it’s to make my wife laugh. She was born and raised here, but has no more accent than I do. Her mom has only the tiniest one, her dad speaks in the famous Southern Drawl. I can do a pretty good Liverpool accent. It must be good, because I floored a native with my imitation of it one time. He said he’d never heard a non-Englishman speak in that accent so well. I also do a good comic Indian speaking English. An accent that I couldn’t even hope to replicate is the one from Atlantic Canada. The people there have such a pronounced accent and dialect that the rest of us can barely comprehend what they’re saying! I’ve known guys from Prince Edward Island who left for Toronto, and they could not make themselves understood!
Where I used to live, we were 40 miles away from the dreaded Western New York accent. A Canadian announcer I used to work with did some voice work on a commercial to be aired in WNY, and they had to get him to redo it so that he said ‘dallahs’ instead of ‘dollars’. No one down here has ever heard me speak and remarked, “Oh, you’re from Canada…” So I haven’t had to lose an accent, but I can pick one up fairly easily. I try not to, so it doesn’t invade my regular speech. I wouldn’t like to be seen as making fun of people.
I worked in the same pub for my last year in England. It was a freehold. None of those brewery rules. Friday and satuaday night we drank along with the punters (Maida Vale). My accent was damn near perfect by the time I came home (even after a major S.E Asia detour).
Sadly when I got home the accent was hard to shake. After a couple of drinks it just ooooozed out :D. I was known as “Kell the Pom” for longer then I wanted to be 
I grew up in Toledo, Ohio and moved to Nevada at age 25. There was one thing I had to change about my midwest accent: the way I said /o/ as in top. The westerners say “tawp”. The way I would say it sounded like “tap” to them. Now I’ve adopted the accent…my family in Ohio really gives me a hard time about it.
I’m often shocked at the defensive attitude of Southerners on the board. The Southerners I’ve met have never struck me as particularly backward or yokel compared to their Northern compatriots. Actually, I’ve generally found them to be more charming if anything. Perhaps the Southerners I’ve met aren’t representative of the ones who chose to stay at home. Or maybe it’s just an offensive Yankee generalisation but without any basis.
In my case, I guess I’m a bit of a myna as well. My mother’s death when I was eight marked the start of the most miserable two years of my childhood. I immediately got packed off to stay with family in Northern Ireland while my dad stayed and got his shit together. It was a particularly bitter little town in the early eighties and we were the only Catholics in the street so the walk to and from school wasn’t great. Lots of Red hands, Union Jacks and calls of Fenian bastard before I got to school or home but school was where it got really shitful. I was the only kid in class without a local accent. Not even a single Pakistani or stutterer to take a little of the heat off either.
Anyway, I had pretty good motivation to moderate my accent. What with eight year olds having a capacity for cruelty that would make the Khmer Rouge shiver and all. Anyways, it worked a treat and about 18 months later, we came back to Australia. Now I’m back and have this weird arse way of talking and at a school where Anglos (or at least Anglo looks) were in the minority and all of them had Aussie accents. This is when I learnt Aussie ten year olds can be just as ugly as Irish eight and nine year olds so back to square one. Sigh.
Funny thing though is that on balance, I’d probably describe my accent as Australian and actually becoming broader in the two years since I’ve come back here to live. However if I’m upset, angry or speaking German, people hearing me for the first time swear I’m Irish (if they’re familiar with the province) or at least not Australian. The other funny thing was that at 22, when I first went back, what had been such a liability became an incredible asset. I still can’t say there are no hard feelings for the monstrously gloomy place it was then but access to Harp, Guiness and the craic that comes with them settled a lot of it.
I am not a myna bird, but I did sucessfully change my accent in a short period of time. I was raised in Texas, and by the time I reached high school, my accent had developed into a strange mixture of my original accent (michigan) and my newfound southern. I hated the way I sounded, so I went to speech and diction classes and learned a generic, vague american accent. For the most part, I sound “normal”, but a few people have told me that I sound like an english person trying to sound american. I’m not sure if that’s better or not.
I have that bland “american” accent that national tv anchors have. I also have a touch of “north” that comes and goes (long Os, boat becomes boooat), and I trained myself out of ‘warsh’.
People seem to think I’m from Michigan, if I meet them when I’m tired.
(born and raised in Western Missouri)
Ayup. I’ve gotten that one.
One of the first recordings I did was here:
http://www.aapcsite.plus.com/sound/texts/mp3/sparrow.html
Click on the Julie recording. I had people demanding to know where I really came from. I listen to it and think it just sounds like me and my whole family.
My husband is from Kentucky and he has a faint accent. He says he sounded like the rest of his family (verrry strong Bowling Green accents) until he got into CB and then ham radio in his teens. Then he deliberately changed his accent because he thought the old one sounded awful.
I’m an Australian living in London. Many English people I meet spontaneously remark that I don’t sound at all Australian. I don’t think my accent has changed, more that it was very neutral to begin with.
However, I do tend to unconciously adopt local idioms and patterns of speech,* so that may make people overlook my accent.
I found that in the US, Americans think that I sound English, but I suspects that’s because (many) Americans can’t tell the difference between an Australian accent and an English one.
- As an example, Australians would say “I haven’t been there”, contracting the words “have” and “not”. By contrast, the English contract “I” and “have”: “I’ve not been there.”
I was born and raised in Northern California, and I still live here. I have no discernable accent.
[quote=SolGrundy]
And still, people say “bowlth” instead of “both.”
[quote]
I have never ever heard any native NorCal people say “bowlth”. It’s always both with a long “o” sound. I’m not sure I’ve ever actually heard anyone say it with an “l” sound.
The only time I try to take on an accent is when I’m learning another language. And then it’s just that I’m trying to pronounce the words as properly as possible. I do have a slight tendency toward myna bird syndrome, but I lose it the minute I’m back home.
That difference also exists state-side. I grew up saying “I haven’t” but when I moved down to the southern part of VA I encountered things like “I’ve not” with such saturating frequency that my best efforts otherwise failed to keep me from gradually adopting such phrasing.
As I have mentioned in another thread or two, when I was younger I made a decent living as a character actor specializing in roles that demanded accents.
These days I am a professional journalist but I still find my ability with accents comes in handy. On a number of occasions I have gotten interviews that virtually no others could get because my manner of speaking (accent) put the subject at ease. I realize that this sounds manipulative, but I don’t mean it that way. If there is anything I can do to put a subject at ease in an interview, I will do it. Creating an accent to do this I feel is a good thing rather than a bad.
I have interviewed Texans and southerners that felt somewhat theartened by Yankees, I interviewed a priest that relaxed and was communicative with me because I had just a touch of an Irish lilt. Recently I got an interviewed an Hispanic activist who I felt seemed self concious or at least defenisve about his southwestern Latino accent, but when he heard me speak with just a touch of a similar one (which might have come from a parent or other close relative) he was very willing to explain his point of view on the subject at hand because I suppose he felt that I would not look down on him for his accent. So by doing these accents I was able to help them get their points of view out.
TV
I’m originally from Buffalo, New York. I often watched the CBC news, and I think from that I picked up a somewhat Ontario accent - weird “abouts” and so forth. As I’ve gotten older, and as more people have commented on it, I’ve started to stifle it in the company of people who’ve known me for a long time.
However, now that I’m in NYC, where everyone has an accent of some sort, it’s easier to just let it slide. In fact, when I drink, I start to get almost indecipherable… and yes, I mean the accent. 
My earliest years were spent in rural parts of Arkansas, so I sounded like the ripest sort of redneck you can imagine up until about age 12. Then we moved to Fayetteville, Arkansas, where I noticed a couple of things: (1) most of the kids I wanted to hang out with were children of faculty at the university, and (2) they came from all over the country, and had a variety of accents, but they uniformly looked down on anyone who sounded like I did. I can’t claim that I consciously worked to get rid of my accent, but by the time I was eighteen I’d achieved a pretty non-descript American Broadcast accent – enough so that when we moved back to rural parts of Arkansas just before my senior year of high school, no one in my new town believed I was from Arkansas or even from the South.
In college, I discovered that I also have a certain facility with languages, and I attribute much of that to being a natural mimic, with a fairly sensitive ear for speech patterns and differences. I do unconsciously begin to sound like the people I’m around all the time. I travel a lot in my work, and I forever have people telling me I don’t sound like I’m from Atlanta, or from the South. They’re generally shocked when they find out that while I’m not really “from” Atlanta, I actually am “from” Arkansas and lived there until I was 22. It helps that no one in Atlanta is really from Atlanta either, so the prevailing accent around here is pretty generic American. When I spend an extended period in a particular place, however, or when I visit family in Arkansas, I do find myself unconsciously beginning to imitate the people around me – I’ve spent probably six to eight weeks in Wisconsin in the last eighteen months or so, and by Wednesday of a week-long stint in Appleton recently I was having to consciously listen to myself to keep from giving the impression that I was mocking the people I was talking with. So if I had a compelling reason to do so, and sufficient exposure, I’m sure I could “change” my accent deliberately, at least when sober and not utterly exhausted.
In my teen years, when I’d lived all over Arkansas (but only in Arkansas), my ear was good enough that I could generally tell you where in the state another native was from, within a 30-mile radius or so (and yes, accents and vocabulary do – or did at that time – differ enough even within a single state for this to be possible). I’m out of practice, and don’t have enough prolonged contact with any one particular group to do that anymore, but I have surprised Brits by being able to distinguish different regional British accents that most Americans just lump together as “English”.
I get what you and the linguists are saying, but I don’t know if “literally unable to hear” is the right phrase to use. I mean, the human brain is able to distinguish between countless sounds in our range of hearing. In my experience, it’s not an issue of literally not being able to tell the sounds apart, but not being able to process them as linguistically different when listening to people. For example, I can hear the German “ch” sound in “ich,” and tell the difference between it and the one in “ach,” but I’m sure my vocal approximation doesn’t come very close. If pressed, I could tell the difference between Arabic “q” and “k,” but if I learned Arabic, it would take a lot of conscious effort to bypass my learned (and now hardwired) tendency to group those sounds together, and ignore the difference as meaningless noise (like ambient background noise, and any normal meaningless variations in pronunciation), when listening to normal speech.