Someone from an English-speaking country other than the U.S. will generally be able to recognize that a speaker is from the U.S. They will not think that the New Jersey accent is not at all like the Arkansas accent. This is like saying that Americans listening to various accents in England will think that the accent in one region is not at all like the accent in another region. They will say that the two accents are from England, but they are different in some ways.
Show me some statistics (not a Google overview) that show that Canadian-born people are more likely to become national news anchors in the U.S. than U.S.-born people are. It’s common that Canadians who’ve become successful at their jobs consider moving to the U.S. for a better job. Actors do this, for example. A country with a population of 340.1 million is more likely to have a better paying job than one with a population of 40.1 million.
As an American who has been to England, i think that some accents in England are not at all like the accent from another region. Some English accents sound like English, with an English accent. And others are nearly impenetrable.
Well, I’m not from the US, and that’s exactly what I think.
I’m not from England, either, and I can certainly recognize that the accent of King Charles and formerly of Queen Elizabeth are vastly different from the Cockney accent, not just “different in some ways”.
I never said that. Nor did I make any specific quantitative statement other than to say that “numerous US television anchors are Canadian imports”. That one I can back up.
I am not sure if that is true, but I am pretty sure that Canadians work in the American broadcast industry all out of proportion to the population difference.
Up to a point, yes. But there are correct and incorrect pronunciations, and it’s not just self-appointed pedants that decide them.
To start at teh easy end of the scale: names. If Aji tells me that her name is pronounced to rhyme with bhaji and not as A.J. then she is not being pedantic to do so. Ditto place names - it’s Lester not Lie-cester as a simple fact of what the place is called.
OK, fine, people have ownership over their names, and the names of their home towns, in a way that they don’t have over general language. But then you have words that are commonly mispronounced because they read differently seen in print: awry, chaos, misled, hyperbole. It isn’t, I think, pedantry to correct someone who gets these wrong (I was that person! I am glad to have been corrected!) simply because it is wrong. “Orry” isn’t an alternative pronunciation of “awry”, it’s a perfectly reasonable mistake.
On the other hand, “fillum” is a perfectly acceptable pronunciation of film, for example. Partly because of simple numbers but also because it’s consistent with the regional dialect - e.g. the pronunciation matches similar words like “girrul”.
Sure but it’s also important to remember that language isn’t static and the pronunciation of words is subject to natural change, and that change manifests at the lowest level, by people just doing it differently.
The town of Bury (Greater Manchester or Lancs, depending who you ask) cannot agree, between themselves, how the name of their town is spoken.
Ha! In elementary school once we had a spelling be in class, and for whatever reason, the teacher appointed a student to read a list of words. One of them was “awry,” which the reader pronounced as “aw-ry.” The *student tasked with spelling it was befuddled and didn’t have a clue. The teacher later corrected the reader, at which point the student spelled correctly.
Yes, like so many human things its incredibly fuzzy and there is definitely a point where on the one hand if you’re the only person saying it that way you’re just wrong and communicating poorly, and on the other where so many people are using an evolved pronunciation that they become correct because when they say it everyone understands what they mean without hesitation or reserve.
There’s obviously some middle point (fairly broad) where using a particular pronunciation might make listeners double-take to some degree, or peg the speaker as being from a particular region/class/community (with whatever judgement that might entail). But judgement goes the other way too, with the person using the original pronunciation sliding from unremarkable to speaking “properly” to slightly old-fashioned to dated and irrelevant.
As there isn’t a national committee for these things, it is as you say evolutionary. And as with evolution, not every change will become permanent - “hyperbowl” doesn’t seem to have made the jump, but “mischeivous” I think has or at least is well on the way. One factor is that people do get corrected, but another one might be the extent to which people hear a standard pronunciation - teh rise of mainstream media did a huge amount to set standards of pronunciation, and its current demise may well see an increase in divergent pronunciations.
For some reason “neesh” sounds okay to me, but “foy-yay” sounds grating. I learned in French too. I guess around here both nitch and neesh are common enough, but foy-yer is by far the preferred pronunciation.
