I was listening to a call in show last night. One of the callers was from Liverpool, she talked with the host for about 10 minutes, and had an extremely strong accent. It was pretty much impossible for me to hear anything she was saying, she may as well have been speaking French for all I could understand her.
This is by no means a unique experience, oftentimes people whose first language is theoretically English are almost incomprehensible. I don’t understand how this happens nowadays; in ye olden days before mass communication you would probably only ever hear people who spoke with your local accent or dialect, but mass communication has been around a long time now, pretty much everybody has grown up with it, and would be aware of the standard pronunciations from an early age
In order to have such an incomprehensible accent you must have deliberately “leaned in” to the more esoteric twangs of your local area and worked hard to make your voice as difficult to parse as possible, so that rather than having a local twang you make it extremely difficult for people to understand you, this takes a lot of effort and I don’t understand why people do it.
I don’t believe it’s a matter of deliberately leaning into the more esoteric twangs of one’s local area. For the most part, I bet it’s unconscious. I met and married an Arkansan in another state, but we have sinced moved to the Natural State, and her accent has grown a little thicker and some of the idioms she uses has changed and on occasion I have to ask her to repeat herself or tell her, “I have no idea what that means.” I’ve heard arguements that such accents are indicative of a low level of education, and while I do think there’s some truth to that, there are also sterotypes associated with accents as well. My wife has a master’s degree in science, but the people she works with on a day-to-day basis are hard core native Arkansans involved in agriculture. Some of that just rubs off I guess.
I’m not a native of the state, and on occasion I run into people who are incomprehensible to me. One acquaintance of mine is a Scotsman, and I frequently have to ask him to slow down and repeat himself. And it’s not just me, I’ve heard others ask the same of him. He sheepishly told us that he had been asked on more than one occasion what his native language was.
I went to a Walmart here in Arkansas a few years back, and I paid with a gift card I received for Christmas. The conversation as I tried to pay went as follows:
Cashier: Reloawwww?
Me: I’m sorry, what?
Cashier: Relaowwww?
Me: I don’t understand.
Cashier (looking at me like I’m an idiot): Relaowww!
Me (Turning to my wife a native Arkansan): Do you understand what she’s saying?
Cashier (Annoyed and taking the time to enunciate): Re-load?
Me: Reload what?
Cashier: Do you want to reload your gift card?
Me (Not knowing what reload means in this context): No, I’m just using it to pay the bill.
So part of the problem right here was that I had no idea you could “reload” a gift card. I rarely use gift cards, and I didn’t know you could pay a cashier to add money to it. Had I known that, I probably would have understood what she meant when she asked me, “Relaowww?” But, on the other hand, where the hell did she learn to speak English?
And then there was the time I took my mother, a Californian, to lunch and she ordered a pie for dessert.
Mom: Does it have any pee-cans?
Waitress: I’m sorry, what?
Mom: Pee-cans? Does it have any pee-cans in it?
Waitress: I don’t know what that is.
Me: She’s asking if it has any pecans in it.
Waitress: Oh, no. No pecans.
I am an American and have traveled all around Great Britain. Some people do have thick regional accents, but everyone they know understands them, and they don’t care that you can’t. Even if I have a little trouble understanding them, I can usually get the drift of what they are saying. If it bothers you that much, just turn it off when you hear it, so you don’t get frustrated not understanding what they are saying.
Agreed. Despite 100 or so years of radio and movies with sound, and 70-ish years of television, regional and local accents still endure.
In most cases*, I don’t think it’s a matter of someone intentionally choosing to cling to a local accent, so much as the manner of speech that you grow up hearing – and listen to every day, in your interactions with your family and neighbors – may have a larger role in your natural, subconscious accent than the media you watch.
That said, in the same way that some people will “code-switch” – changing which vocabulary they use, depending on their audience – I suspect that there are people who slip in and out of local accents, as well. Speaking only for myself: I grew up in northeastern Wisconsin, where the locals have a noticeable accent (not unlike the Minnesota / “Fargo” accent). After going to college In a more diverse city (Madison), which is known for its “neutral Midwestern” accent, and then moving to the Chicago area, my Wisconsin accent faded; however, when I go back to visit family and friends there, the accent returns.
*- There are some examples of accents which are (or were) specifically adopted/learned, including Received Pronunciation in British English, the “Mid-Atlantic” accent (now mostly extinct) in the U.S., and American newscasters who intentionally adopt “neutral” accents to further their career options.
I’ve spent a lot of time in the north of England, so I’ve picked up the ability to understand the Scouse accent. But, I still have problems at times with nearby accents from Manchester and Lancashire.
If you want some fun, try streaming BBC radio Merseyside and see how well you understand it
I was on a business trip to Tennessee, and I had to stop and explain myself to a client once, because she couldn’t understand what I was saying. I think I actually laughed, because I have a pretty damn “neutral” accent (I grew up in the suburbs of Washington, DC, spent some time in Pittsburgh and Long Island, and then lived 20 years in Phoenix). People can rarely figure out where I’m from, offering up “somewhere on the East Coast.”
Anyway, I said the word “billing,” and she couldn’t understand it. They pronounce it “beeling.”
Yes, there’s no deliberate effort to have a strong regional accent. Plenty of people strive to lose accents*, largely due to the stereotype that they equate to ignorance.
I take satisfaction in not having any accent that would allow people to deduce my origins. At the same time, I enjoy visiting local venues like auto parts stores and the Rural King since they’re a great source of vintage Kentucky accents.
*while retaining the ability to slip back into them, in order to maintain credibility with the folks back home.
People learn it from their Mothers. September 11 seemed unreal to me until I heard some ambulance drivers who had driven from Tennessee to help. Hearing someone speaking about it in the tongue I learned to speak at my Mother’s knee made it horribly real.
I will fall into local dialect when I am speaking with an Arkansan with a rural accent.
My former wife is from New York. We would occasionally ask the other what the hell they were saying.
Remember Justin Wilson, the Cajun chef who used had a show on PBS in the 1980s and 1990s (Basically the same era Bob Ross was on the air)? I could never understand anything he said when I was a kid. I can understand him better as an adult; maybe it just comes from experience from hearing people from different regions.
I guess since he was a TV personality it’s possible he was indeed leaning into the Cajun accent for his show.
I clearly recall the first time I heard an accent as a young child before I knew that accents were a thing. I was watching the tv show The Bugaloos. I could understand what they were saying but didn’t understand why they talked so weird.
I think children learn their accent from their peers at school rather than their parents. My brother and his wife have accents typical of London and South East England, but their sons both picked up the accents of the Fife region of Scotland from the time they started kindergarten.
I have heard “incomprehensibly” thick accents from New Zealand, Scotland, Atlanta, etc. that were absolutely not fake or “leaned in”, so there you go.
I also know people whose native language is not close to English that are much easier to understand than some native English speakers, because they speak like old-fashioned BBC radio announcers, precisely because that is the universal “standard”, or at least it used to be, so that is what they learned.
I talk to people all over North America and once had a confusing conversation with someone who worked at a tar factory. He needed some literature to do something with the tars which sounded weird in the plural but, sure, there are probably different blends and types of tar. He gave me his email address which was something like (I forget exactly) ...@firestone.com. Oh, tires, of course.
Another time, there was a man with the most Dakotan/Canadian accent I ever heard, I almost thought he was putting me on and he had to repeat himself a few times. From his email address, I figured out he was a member of the Hutterite community:
One time I was listening to The Jim Rome Show (syndicated sports talk radio program in the U.S.) and he was interviewing an NHL ice hockey player. I didn’t catch the name or the team, but listened through the interview transfixed by the player’s accent. He grew up somewhere in Saskatchewan, but his accent evoked a thick Irish accent. Could he have been a Hutterite?
Most of what I know about Hutterites is from reading that wikipedia article but I don’t think there’s a Hutterite accent. Rather, they live in somewhat insular circumstances and probably tend to not pick up new accents or lose what they have from watching a lot of contemporary movies or reruns of The Office. It seems unlikely that there are many Hutterites in the NHL, though.
In my experience, these UK accents that Americans find “incomprehensible” tend to understood just fine in the UK. So the impetus to try and change one’s accent to be more understood wouldn’t be there, even if one moved to the city.
While accents do have to come from what you hear, I think the bigger drive for what accent you have is social–about how you interact with others. If sounding like the people on TV or the movies would make you sound like an outsider, you don’t do that.
That seems to be the case all over. It seems quite rare to encounter people who get their accent from TV rather than the people they interact with. When it does happen, it becomes news, like how American kids watching Peppa Pig started picking up their accents.
Notice the explanation in the article: they suspect children see Peppa Pig as a friend.
Hutterites tend to have a German-ish accent, as they mostly speak Plattdeutsch amongst themselves and use High German in their church services, as God intended.
