The Irish have a “Lilt” also
…as in “in the lilt of Irish laughter you can hear the angels sing”
Try Ashley Jensen playing Christina McKinney in Ugly Betty.
Every time she speaks it jars as I just hear a very local accent in a wrong place.
|I once nursed an elderly Aberdonian who was nearly ninety and had been deaf for over sixty years. Her un-ameliorated Aberdeen accent and dialect was as impenetrable as many foreign languages!
This is called a glottal stop
It started off as a London affectation, but now covers most of southern and eastern England up into the Midlands and down into Somerset and Devon. Cornish Englis has always had a faint glottal stop- it used to be a sure fire way to distinguish Devon from Cornish English, but now no more!
Actually I believe Ohio is considered the non-accent. Even IF the stranger doesn’t mention he’s from ‘cali’ within 5 seconds of talking (which has never happened), I’d be able to tell quickly.
eye luv mi Coom-bine 'ahrvester!
I dispute that it’s solely of London origin. As you indicate, there’s also indigenous glottal stops (oh, the irony of the Ts in the middle of that word ‘glottal’) in other regional accents. I should know 
Disna nit ken it’s “'aaaaaaaaaarvister”
Innit
Glo’al stops are all over the place, but one of the weirder regional variations is the Bristol “l”. It’s really hard for a Bristolian to pronounce a word ending in a weak vowel - they don’t seem able to stop without the lingual creeping in. Thus I’ve heard a lorry driver explaining on TV that he carries a fire extinguisher “for engine fires, et ceteral”, and a Bristolian who knew his geography could tell you that Miami is in Floridal. The bass line in a brass band would be carried by a tubal (I suppose you might hear a Wagner tubal played at the operal). The average income might be £23,500 per capital. And so on.
And Bristol itself was originally called Brigstowe. They just can’t help it
Frylock writes:
> The origin (and continued place of habitation) of the “accentless” accent is
> around Ohio.
Sitnam writes:
> Actually I believe Ohio is considered the non-accent.
The interesting thing is that the Wikipedia link that Frylock gives claims that the accent is found most closely in an oval stretching from eastern Nebraska to northwest Illinois. This entry in Wikipedia:
claims that it can be heard in California.
As I said in my previous post, I think that the closest you’ll find to it is in rural northwest Ohio. I emphasize it’s only the rural part of northwest Ohio, because Toledo and its suburbs are part of the Northern Cities vowel shift:
Of course, I may be prejudiced because I grew up there. Indeed, I sometimes make the joke that linguistic surveyors came around to my parent’s farm in northwest Ohio and planted a marker on it that declared “On the exact spot is spoken standard American English.” But, seriously, I’m not even sure that standard American English is spoken anywhere exactly. It may be purely a composite.
In the sixties and seventies, Bristolians drove Cortinals 
Another variation of this exists around here. Kettle is pronounced “keckle”, little “lickle” etc.
And named their daughters Normal and Evil*…
I used to work on local radio there “I’m calling from the Bedminster areal”…
*Norma and Eva
This is also common in West Indian patois.
I was in Scotland 20 years ago – I had no problems in Edinburgh and Glasgow, but I found the folks in Inverness VERY hard to understand. Some people may as well hahve been speaking Norwegian. Note that I was born and raised in New Jersey and cast no frickin’ stones on the purity of anybody’s English.
Oh, and the idea that people from Ohio or Nebraska have “no accent” is silly. There is no standard American accent, and the “neutral” accent affected by TV newscasters is, like the “mid-Atlantic” accent my mother got when she studied speech in 1955, a learned one.
You ever been to New Hampshire?
My first stay in the US was there. It took myself and my fellow Europeans (six of which were Brits) to figure out what the problem was. We said twenty. The locals said twinny.
I’m from Texas, and I say “twinny” too. We also say “pen” and “pin” the same 'round 'bout these here parts.
-FrL-
California, like Florida, grew so fast in the last half of the 20th century that any California accent is surely transplanted. “Los Angelinos,” says the song, “all come from somewhere.”
In a Florida hardware store, I told the manager, “I’m not from around here. I guess you could hear that in my voice.” He laughed. “Everybody’s from out of state, here, son. Hardly anybody was born here.” :smack:
So which one is Scotty on Star Trek?
