MetaChat is an informal place for MeFites to touch base and post, discuss and
chatter about topics that may not belong on MetaFilter. Questions? Check the FAQ. Please note: This is important.
I can definitely hear differences in accents, but not as well as those in the UK, that's for sure. I can't break down hardcore regional differences, but criminy, isn't Billy Connolly Scottish? I'm pretty sure I can hear most of the major class differences, but I'm not sure I could pick out a SUPER high class versus PRETTY high class accent, you know?
This though, is crap:
"The only difference foreigners can detect is that some of us speak a bit faster than others. "
Assuming, that as a Canadian, I qualify as a "foreigner" this guy's wrong.
There's a story, certainly apocryphal, about Brian Sewell where a journalist is said to have phoned his home to speak to him, and his mother answered, in a coarse cockney accent "Naaah, e's gorn ahhht".
Sewell has the plummiest accent I've ever heard. The TV journalist, John Humphrys, said of him: "he is the only man I have ever met who makes the Queen sound common."
Oh, I think we can absolutely tell the difference if we've had enough exposure. They don't all sound exactly alike at all, but at first all of them share the characteristic of sounding 'different,' so you have to hear a few different people speak at length before you notice the many differences.
Where I still fall down is knowing which accent signals which area or background. At first it all sounds different It took me many years working with various UKers at summer camps before I could reliably hear finer shadings of difference, but I'm not bad at it now, and occasionally enjoy playing the "where do I sound like I'm from" game with Brits with better accuracy than average, I guess. Knowing nothing about either of those people, Sewell sounds definitely more Birmingham-ish, RP-ish, and Sewell sounds Northern/Manchesterish. But that's the best I can do without having traveled there to find out. And I think the final and hardest thing to get is what a particular accent 'signals' socially, which seems to be a bigger deal in the UK than here. It's also true here that accents give clues to upbringing and class, but in general they are viewed more positively - accents aren't as big a determinant of opportunity/success as I've heard they are in the UK. Sometimes actresses and broadcasters take diction classes, but at the same time, an (understandable) regional accent is as often considered distinctive and positive than a detriment.
I'm not sure they sound as different as Georgian and Canadian accents, at least not if they are pronounced. Keep in mind that there are plenty of Americans who can tell Georgian from Texan from Virginian from South Carolinian, which I doubt is very perceptible listeners in the UK.
Keep in mind that there are plenty of Americans who can tell Georgian from Texan from Virginian from South Carolinian, which I doubt is very perceptible listeners in the UK.
Before I lived here I couldn't even discern a Boston accent.
If I listened to two clips side-by-side I could tell the difference but I wouldn't know what they mean. First, I wouldn't be able to place the accent regionally the way that I can place a Boston, Philly or Pittsburgh accent. Second, I wouldn't know how that accent was viewed in terms of social rank.
I couldn't tell you what the accents were, but all British accents do not sound alike to me. Like Miko points out, American English comes in all sorts of accents, too. Like gomichild says, we regularly get exposed to all sorts of native English-speaking accents and I would add those from Canada and Australia and New Zealand too. So they all sound a little different, even if I can't necessarily tell which one is from where.
I had a friend once, here in Chicago, who was a British immigrant (Sorry, I don't recall from where specifically). I'm a military child--which supposedly produces its own particular American English accent, which I was once told was considered to be "neutral unaccented American vernacular" or something like that. I recall that it was called "neutral" and "unaccented". Anywho. My British friend, who had lived only in the Midwestern US, told me I had an odd American accent and asked me where it was from. I answered, "how funny. I speak neutral unaccented English." He laughed at me and said "No, the BBC speaks neutral unaccented English. What you speak is some sort of bizarre American."
Yeah, Billy Connolly is Scottish, not British, so he's got some wires crossed there.
And yes, I can tell the difference between English accents, even before I moved here. Now, though, I can pretty much listen to someone speak and tell where they come from, just like if I hear a Georgian or Bostonian accent, I could name the region.
Unfortunately he's deranged; everybody on the European continent is able to discern the class element between an Old Etonian accent from a cockney accent.
My US GF maintains that in the US there are no real class distinctions in accent, only regional ones. As a european I find that hard to believe.
Can you US mechas give me an example of a US upper class accent speaker?
Sorry, I'm with your GF, jouke. An upper class woman from Georgia may have a better vocabulary than a trailer park denizen, but their accent is going to be the same.
Really upper crust, crustier than crusty, high arch old clipped American Southern accents sure do sound different from a dirtfarm drawl from the same locale, but it's a matter of familiarity. There are very few people in America still that aristocratic. The Boston Brahmin accent is remarkably different from Southie or even the in-betweens. It's just that really only about two or three hundred people are that isolatedly generationally wealthy in Boston; even the Kennnedys' mangled diction is would-be pretense, just shadows of real Brahmin-speak. They're just bootleggers in fancy dress. I read an article or saw a show on this within the past year; I'll see if I can dredge it up... but yeah, old money signals make the crustiferously wealthy sound like a buncha freaks. Completely different from the hoi polloi.
I disagree with Specklet and think there are class distinctions in US accents that extend beyond vocabulary. I'm not sure I can describe them, but I would say that volume, word endings, and smooshing-together of words are the major class distinctions in US accents. Softer voices, with more distinct terminal consonants, connote more education and thus better class in US accents, I think.
jouke, there definitely are real class distinctions in accent in the US. Most professional class Americans have either a non-regional newscaster/"Brady Bunch" accent or a very toned-down regional accent while blue-color workers tend to have much stronger regional accents. Here in Pittsburgh I've even heard of people taking speech classes to try to tone down their accent so that they can sound more professional.
Then there's the northern-Ohio Bell-telephone-lady neutral accent of the American educated class, which transcends many of the barriers our history has built us. I speak it, but I also know how to sound like I'm from, say, Dundalk or Essex or Southwest Baltimore or even Maryland's Easten Shore where the accent gets harder and the teeth grit more. My mom, from Birmingham, AL by way of Englewood, NJ; Denver, CO; and San Antonio, TX speaks it, just the same as my dad, from Oak Park, IL -- and it's not like they picked up that flutey Minnesota hoot in Northfield, they just shed any local accents they had when they were in college, just like most do. It's an interesting phenomenon.
But yeah, I'm pretty good at picking out what state (and even a couple provinces, eh) people come from if they haven't been taught to hide it, and whether they grew up hereditarily wealthy or not. I wonder if the general accent-neutralization of American colleges has decimated the upper-crustian accents: going to college is still a status symbol, but seems to have a democratizing effect on accents. Thanks to the GI Bill and the advent of the student loan, college professors no longer sport fake English accents and the plutocrats go to class with everyone else now. That theory probably holds water like a sieve, don't quote me; many colleges exist only to protect that hierarchy, they'll never let in the riffraff, even if they have to forfeit millions in government aid, they'll just make that off endowments from Old Money.
No. Not in the least. I don't have the same finely-tuned ear for accents that British people use in daily life, but I can still pick out, say, a Northern accent as opposed to a Southern accent.
I disagree, Specklet. College attendees, south or north, black or white, tend to enunciate more clearly. How various combinations of vowels and consonants are slurred, added, switched or dropped altogether is a major component of an accent.
As for british accents, I began distinquishing them after seeing My Fair Lady, and Monty Python was quite educational on the matter.
I'm with jason's_planet. I've got good friends from Manchester, Leeds and Tottenham and I can tell the difference. One of my friends has a mum who's a geordie, and good god she's hard for me to understand! But I can certainly pick out the different regions, aurally.
I forgot to mention that my ex could do both southern belle and trailer trash accents, and her Valdosta accent would drop you on the floor laughing even if you had never been there.
My ex-grandmother-in-law had one of those old timey aristocratic southern accents Hugh talks about. Very rare now, yes.
I definitely hear the different British accents, but can identify almost none of them with regions. The Brian Sewell posh, though, cracks me up. It always strikes me as... too. exhausted. to. talk. veddy. drowsy. now. zzzzzzz.
Oh, and we think you're all idiots for adding unnecessary and wasteful letters (colooor? fay-voooor-it? doughnut? Though I agree that 'thru' is moronic), and for reversing letters (cen-tree? mee-treh?) and for generally pronouncing stuff just plain wrong. Just speak normal (though Tim Curry is excepted from this in cases where he says "roiuind" "poiuind" etc. because it's funny).
taz: My high school was in Pennsylvania and I was the sheriff in Finian's Rainbow. My cousins were born in South Carolina and I could imitate them quite well, so I got to teach everyone else that accent. One of the girls had irish grandparents, so she taught that to the 3 characters that needed it.
However, since my role was a character of authority, I pulled a switch for the actual production and did an LBJ accent. For some strange reason, I also got the line "Come and get your beer and dexedrine." in one of the songs, and the sheer incongruity of a Texas-drawling sheriff pushing drugs just brought down the house.
(This isn't as significant as your story but I thought I'd share.)
I was born in Scotland but came to Canada at a very young age. I've met enough Scots and seen enough English TV that I can differentiate a Glasgow, Edinburgh, or Highland accent, and can tell London from Yorkshire or Manchester. There are more regional differences that that, however, and whenever my father meets someone from our home town of Edinburgh, he can almost tell what street they lived on.
As for North America, the only accents I can pinpoint are Boston, New York, General Southern, and California/West Coast.
Ardiril, in my South Carolina high school's Senior show, I played the part of "Miss Southern Belle" to great acclaim... me, a girl born in Wisconsin.
In college, I was in a French pronunciation class (where we were supposed to learn all the various French accents and their class/region significations), and our final assignment was to stage a play, in French. I got assigned the role of an American Southern Belle in France, so I draaaaaaaaawled out all that French like there was no tomorrow.
The students thought it was hilarious. The professor, who was from France, had to keep double-checking with them to make sure that I was comprehensible to an American audience, because she could not understand a single word I said.
photo by splunge
photo by TheophileEscargot
photo by Kronos_to_Earth
photo by ethylene
