For example, if Spanish is your native language, what are the different accents like within the Latin American world, or between Latin America and Spain? Or for French, between France and Belgium and Quebec and the Caribbean and West Africa?
What accents are close to each other?
For English, I find that Canadian is pretty close to many American accents (perhaps not so close to American Southern accents), while Australian, English, Scottish, and Irish accents all seem relatively close to each other, at least in my ears, though they’re certainly not close to identical.
If you want to talk about which accents are closest in Spanish, in general, think about regions. Caribbean accents are generally similar to a non-Caribbean, while South American accents may be similar to non-regionals, especially the southern-most ones (Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, Uruguay).
Spanish accents vary by region, but for a non-Spaniard, they may sound generic “Spanish”, barring those from the Canary islands.
Even within the Islands there are big differences; one of them (I never remember which one) sounds Argentinian although without voseo, the others are closer to Andalusian.
The wiki.es article about IPA for Spanish differentiates (or did last week) the following major groups:
Mexico-Central America,
Caribbean,
Argentinian,
Northern Spain group,
Southern Spain group.
But of course within each of those there are differences, and the “borders” of accents don’t necessarily follow those on the map. To me, a Catalan gulped-l or a Manchego /x/-for-/s/ are big neon signs, but they go waaaay above most people’s head. I can spend hours discussing the subtleties of accent and dialect with a similarly-oriented Aragonese, Navarrese, Basque or Riojano for our own Navarro-Aragonese area, but don’t ask me to do it for the Southern-Spanish group… which I have seen people from that area discussing at great length. I can tell you there are Southern locations which have /s/-for-/θ/ and some which do the opposite and some which do neither, but I can’t tell you offhand which are which: a Southerner can.
The relationships between Spanish dialects and Latin American ones are directly linked to migration patterns. Argentina got a lot of Galegos, and also a lot of Italians, and you can hear things from both: for example, elongating syllables to stress them is done in Italian and in Argentinian, but other Spanish dialects will only do it when “going Sesame Street on someone” or for sarcasm. Locations where diminutives are formed with -ito had a lot of people from both Castilles; -illo indicates Andalusia and Extremadura; -ico is from “the North” and “the East” (Santander, Euskadi, Rioja, Navarre, Aragon, Catalonia, Valencia). I don’t think I’ve ever heard someone from Spanish-speaking Latin America use the Galaico-Portuguese -iño (spelled -inho in Portuguese), but that doesn’t mean it isn’t there - only that I haven’t run into it.
I’m not native Japanese, but lived there 25 years.
The biggest split is between Kanto, east Japan and Kansai dialects. Of course, since Kanto is where Tokyo is located, it was selected as “standard” Japanese hyojungo.
There are various dialects and the further you get from central Honshu, the more pronounced they become. I first lived in Kyushu and at first it was impossible for me to understand them. Even in Kyushu, each area has its own dialect.
In Okinawa and the surrounding islands, the Ryukyuan languages are spoken but are dying out. They are not mutually intelligible with Japanese or even with each other. There is an Okinawan dialect of Japanese.
Belgian, Swiss and Quebecois accents are quite distinctive, but the latter is the most obvious. Not all the Belgians or Swiss have a clear Belgian/Swiss accent. All Quebecois I have heard do, but there are large variations in how heavy this accent is. In some cases, it borders the unintelligible for me. West-African accent is pretty distinctive too.
Essentially all French region used to have their own accent, but over time, they have faded a lot. Despite its peculiar Celtic culture, I can’t notice any accent when I’m in Brittany, for instance. I have a lot of family in Auvergne, but while the accent of my older relatives, even those living in urban areas, was obviously recognizable when I was young, recently I was surprised to even hear it in the mouth of some farmer interviewed on TV. The “Ch’timi” accent in northern France is still famous…but you won’t find many people still speaking with this accent there. We’re are left IMO basically with three recognizable accents : Provençal (and even this one is seriously fading), Alsatian and a less obvious “south-west” accent.
Nearly 30 years ago, I was having dinner with a Serbian (who had been living in the US for years and had excellent English), a friend who was originally from Georgia (split between Atlanta and Savannah) but had lived in Cleveland for most of his adult life. My friend asked the Serbian how different Serbian was from Croatian. He sighed and said, “I have been out of that milieu long enough to admit it. It is less than the difference between [my English] and [my friends].” (He had used our actual names.) I’m from Philadelphia.
To what extent to speakers of non-English languages recognize specific accents from the speakers of other languages? For example, if someone from Texas (who speaks with a relatively typical Texas accent) were to try to learn Hungarian, would they be recognized as speaking Texas-accented Hungarian or would it more be the case that native Hungarian speakers would only recognize a vague “American” accent or even just an “English language” accent?
English has a lot of ways to “mock” a foreign accent (e.g. “Ve haff vays of making you talk”, “I’m so ronery”, or “You want shirt clean? Two dollar.”). Do other languages have these? For example, is there a standard way to mock how a Czech speaker sounds when trying to speak Estonian, or how a Swedish speaker sounds when trying to speak Greek, or is this kind of thing unique to English?
Of course, why wouldn’t they? In Spanish, for example, there is a mock that is incorporated into jokes about Asians (mainly Chinese) speaking Spanish, based on the “l” vs “r” sound.
Example of lame joke:
Customer eating Chinese food, asks the cook what meat is it.
Cook: “Es cal(r)ne de lata” (It is tinned/potted/canned meat)
Customer: “¿Carne de lata?”
Cook: “Sí, de la lata que pal(r)e latoncitos.” (Yes, of the rat (lata instead of rata) that gives birth (pare) to litte rats (latoncitos instead of ratoncitos).
There are also jokes and mockery between the various accents.
The most remarkable difference within Kansai, IMHO, is between Osaka and Kyoto. Osaka is a bit grubby (or at least it was where I lived in Panasonic country near Kadoma, and I understood it gets worse at the port). Yet up the road (a forty minute train trip) you have snooty Kyoto, which I suppose has pretentions because of its status as a former imperial city. "Ookiini (spelling?) is a very Kyoto, posh way of saying “thank you”. I have never heard it anywhere else in Japan, and I was able to pick out a travelling chalk artist in Florence as being from Kyoto when he used the word.
As for Australia, my home country, there is an urban accent and a broad rural accent not necessarily related to education: my brother-in-law is an agricultural scientist who works with farmers and he sounds like he just stepped out of a shearing shed. I sometimes think that Western Australians and South Australians have more of an apple in their accent, while Victorians and Queenslanders are more nasal. There is something to the New South Welsh accent (my mum was from Sydney) but I couldn’t say definitively what it is other than perhaps certain accented consonants (and for some reason, in writing rather than speech, many Sydneysiders cross their numeral “7” in the European style).
Only if you’ve encountered the specific accent before, but that also happens with our own accents. Most people can differentiate accents/dialects from within their own group/area better than those from other locations because of that: go to any thread about “bad accents in movies” and you’ll find Southerners discussing that so-and-so’s character is supposed to be from Georgia but he’s actually doing a real bad Texas accent.
If we haven’t encountered specific accents before, we may notice that Bill and Harry “sound different”, we’ll guess it’s got to do with being from different places, and we’ll ask where are they from. Bill is American, Harry is English. Aaaaaah, that explains it. OK, so now we’ve filed “sounds like Bill” under “American” and “sounds like Harry” under “English”. Then we run into Joe, whose accent is again different. Turns out he’s from Louisiana… but that’s in America! Huh. Hah! Guess Bill is not from Louisiana! Hey Bill, I know you’re American, but you sound different from Joe here who’s from Louisiana - you’re not from Louisiana, are you? No, Philadelphia… and so, we get more granularity.
Conversation overheard at work last week, in Spanish:
“Man, I’m sorry, but I’ve got serious problems understanding the Indians. And they all sound the same to me.”
Stares from the rest of her group. “Are you serious? The ones from Chennai sound completely different from the ones from Mumbay! Kumar and Nita sound the same to you?”
“Uh… yes…”
“You really need to clean your ears.”
They weren’t even talking about the accents in Spanish, but in English (the Indians are barely starting to learn Spanish, the most daring ones say buenos días and gracias).
When I hear a French Canadian speak, it sounds somewhat like an English speaker speaking French. Any validity to that from the perspective of a person from France? The French Canadian accent allows me to understand more French than a Parisian accent does.
In my country, Uruguay, countryside people are often referred as Canarios, obviously, or at least supposedly, because their accent came from immigrants from the Canary Islands and is quite distinct from the one spoken in the capital, although I no idea if that accent still retains any similarity with the one spoken on those islands today.
I hear that. Take the word moins, for example. In France French, the final sound is, IMHO, less like anything in English than the sound as pronounced by French Canadians, where it’s like English “wank” without the final “k” – actually, quite close to just straight up English “-ang”.
I don’t think the Quebecois accent sounds in any way like a British or American accent.
I always wondered if there were similarities between the accent of English speaking Canadians (as perceived by other English speakers) and the accent of French speaking Canadians (as perceived by other French speakers). But I would need someone perfectly bilingual in French French and British English (and not a Canadian) to judge it.
English: I can recognize a few of the regional American dialects. I think Canadians sound exactly like Californians. I think my family sounds Californian though we’ve been told once or twice we have an Ozark drawl. I can distinguish Australian from British. Many Danes speak almost native English, but there are Aussies and Brits I’ve difficulty understanding.
Two anecdotes from my first trip to England long ago:
Breakfasting in Bradford, waitress took our order for “scrum” and told a joke. We laughed politely. When the waitress left I asked for a translation. “We didn’t understand a word either!” – I thought you were from Yorkshire? “Yes, but not Bradford; we’re from two valleys over!” :smack:
Later I mentioned that one guy in London had the quintessential British accent. This got laughter: “We think he sounds like an American!”
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Thai: There are several different languages from the Southwestern Tai subfamily spoken in Thailand, some not mutually intelligible, and fuzzy distinctions of language vs dialect. HOWEVER the language spoken in Suphanburi (near Bangkok) is definitely Standard Central Thai except with distinctive singsong tones. It’s fun to “play Henry Higgins” and tell people you know they’re from Suphan (or neighboring Singburi).
To me, the most distinctive French accent is Canadian. Clairobscur said :
I second this except that, unless I’m listening to an official broadcast or someone who is used to talking to people from both continents like Céline Dion, I have a really hard time understanding Canadian French at all. A few words here and there in the most extreme cases. It’s not just the pronunciation, very nasal and with lots of assimilated or altogether dropped consonants, that is difficult but a significant part of the vocabulary is markedly different (old words that we don’t use anymore in Europe or not with that meaning + lots of English influence). Frankly, I often understand Canadian English better than Canadian French…
Apart from that, the accent in Southern France is also very distinctive. I went to Marseille a couple of times and always got a kick of the fact that they palatize “t” before “i” so that “ticket” (teeKAY) sounds frankly like “tchicket” (cheeKAY). Northern and Parisian French are noticeable, too. The rest is just “generic French” to me: I cannot pinpoint it to a particular region but I definitely hear it, much to the French’s astonishment (“I don’t have an accent, I’m French !”).
And Belgium ? Well, this video sums it up nicely (I’ve linked to it before): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ft-ib9dv7W4. Basically, you discard the first one which is the Flemish accent thus the accent of someone whose mother tongue isn’t French and you’re left with the Brussels accent, the posh Uccle accent (as the actor says: Brussels’ Beverly Hills) and the much-derided Liège accent, which was my original accent - I lost it very quickly after I moved to Brussels.
Since there are several Francophone folks in this thread from different places …
How easy is it to make out the Cajun French sung in this song? Is this song intelligible to French speakers from around Paris, from other parts of France, from Belgium, from Quebec?