Accents

[Mercedes Benzene]

What exactly are accents? What causes different accents to emerge (and remain) in certain areas?

The United States is home to more accents than probably any other single country. Included: "northern", "southern", "creole", "new england", "mid-west", and every variation inbetween.

 

It's funny. I don't know exactly how I would classify my accent, living in the mid-east states. When I go south, even by just one state, I can notice a shockingly distinct southern accent. And if I go north, I get a New England accent. The really weird thing is that when I do go north, people comment on my "southern accent", even though I've always considered the way I speak to be "neutral". See

 

Another thing worth mentioning/discussing are the regions in the US (which I've just learned of) that speak in extremely unique styles.

-There are islands off the coast of the Carolinas where people speak a unique style of English that I have a very difficult time understanding. This is Gullah.

-Even more astoundingly, there's an island in the Chesapeake Bay not far from where I live, where the people have apparently been so isolated that they still speak in Elizabethan Era English. :hihi: (See Tangier Island)

 

Please feel free to discuss accents and these other vernacular peculiarities! Is there any information that you'd like to share with regards to accents in your region/country??

[Racoon]

Great topic.

I can't recognize my own accent, although I've been told I have one. I also can't detect an accent from most people around this area . It seems everone else has accents?

 

Its very peculiar and interesting when you try to boil it down.

 

Its funny how not only that babies and children learn the words and meanings, but also develop a regional accent.

 

How is it that people don't recognize their accent when speaking while others perceive it an accent from somewhere else ??

 

How do they develop? What distinguishes the uniqueness of accents?

[Monomer]

Accents are the way words are pronounced.

 

I've noticed different accents here in Australia between us central people and those in the eastern states. And also the New Zealanders have another accent.

 

According to this article, accents develop because of the way the word sounds are produced and perceived. People also talk in a way to make themselves sound like the type of person they want to appear as.

 

Different ethnic backgrounds also influence the formation of accents.

Accent (linguistics) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

I also think that the level of education would influence the way people speak and could contribute to the development of accents. More educated people would tend to speak clearly and deliberately, enunciating each word.

[InfiniteNow]

How funny you bring this up. Just about 3 hours ago at the end of a meeting my boss asked one of the other meeting attendees if he was from Massachusetts, but before he answered, she said, "Closer to New Hampshire though... in the northeastern part of the state?" She could tell from his accent where he was from, and this triggered a long conversation about where we were raised, what brought us to our current locations, that sort of thing. It really brought us together on this project much more closely. Syncronistic that I login here to find you asking about accents.

 

 

We didn't during that exchange discuss the "whys" of accents and regional dialects, but to answer your question, it's social. It's cohesiveness. It even happens in the animal kingdom. One can think of packs of wolves hunting, and developing improved methods of communication. They tend to hunt more efficiently if the pack knows it's own dialect or type of "speech." They can also more easily pick up on strange calls from non-pack members, hence aiding in the defense of their territory from invaders

 

Humans are essentially animals, coming from the same root as all other life. We do the same thing as the wolves. We build cohesiveness via common speech patterns and styles. We "synch" up with those around us, like plugging your PDA into your laptop. It also happens iwith birds, and even some of our counterparts in the ocean.

 

frontline: a whale of a business: man & marine mammals: the sonic creature

A talent for mimicry is probably important for their survival in the wild. Like the young of many birds and primates who mimic their parents, shaping their "accents" to fit the groups' norm, orca calves probably mimic their pod-mates to perpetuate a set of signals unique to their social group, by which they could recognize one another at a distance.

 

Y'all tikkit issea, aww ite. :confused:

[Buffy]

Don't forget your idioms too. We have a thread lying about on that one: how folks in the Eastern US go to the "shore" and we California Blondes go to the "beach", etc.

 

To expand on what Now just said: it does suck you in. I have a friend who grew up in Manhattan and had a wicked NYC accent (hey the 5 boroughs all sound different too, and its the same city!), but when she was in her late 20s she moved to London, and although its a weird mashup, she sounds mostly London-English (the educated, I-went-to-University one, not the South Bank Cockney). Those accents show class and neighborhood even!

 

Tomahto,

Buffy

[freeztar]

I live in the deep South and I can attest to several different accents around the South.

 

Them folks from north Georgia sound different then them Alabamians.

 

And then there's all kinds of sub accents that are very subtle.

 

Somehow, I grew up in Georgia and didn't get any kind of accent (suburbia here is mostly free of redneck-ism).

When I moved to the west coast for uni, I would tell people I was from Georgia and everybody doubted me. I even had to show my Georgia ID to some people because they didn't believe me and always the first thing they would ask would be, "But, you don't have a southern accent?". And I say, "I do in Georgia". :eek_big:

 

:confused:

 

Do You Speak American . Sea to Shining Sea . American Varieties . New York City | PBS

[maikeru]

I have mostly a "General American/Midwestern" accent of the US.

 

General American - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

One thing I've noticed about my own is that I won't always pronounce my ts clearly (sometimes they sound more like ds) or sometimes I'll drop it in certain words like "mountain" becomes "moun'un"/"moun'ain" or "certain" becomes "cer'in." I think this is regional for the Wasatch, and I've picked it up. I sometimes use more archaic or obscure words because of my familiarity with the KJV Bible and Shakespeare (I'm a Shakespeare aficionado). KJV Bible was part of my upbringing. And I tend to shorten "-ing" sounds to "-in'". E.g., "fighting" becomes "fightin'." I don't think, though, that I have a typical "Utahnics" accent or strange use of prepositions as often characterizes people from smaller cities or towns around here (e.g., "My children go up to the university."). Overall, more in line with what I see on TV and the news.

 

Utah English - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

I'm also a bit familiar with British accents because of years and years of watching British comedies. :confused:

[Monomer]

I have a General Australian English accent.

 

Varieties of Australian English - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

 

Other countries are probably more familiar with the Broad Australian English accent, thanks to the Crocodile Dundee movies, Steve Urwin and Missy Higgins. People from country Australia tend to have this accent, which is how I can tell they're not city folk.

 

Those on the east cost of Australia tend to draw out some vowel sounds, mostly those with a double "o", and those two "o"s sound more like the vowels in "shoe": "school" sounds like "schoooel", "pool" sounds like "poooooel".

 

Ja-qu and Michaelangelica may beg to differ, but that's what it sounds like to those of us in SA!

[Fatstep]

I think it's odd that people from virginia generally have a deeper southern accent than people from NC and SC such as myself.

[eric l]

I am not a linguist, that is : I have no formal training in the field. But I am deeply interested in languages (as a tool) and linguistics. So here are some observations.

 

Children pick up accents very easily. A friend of mine has two children, aged 9 and 6. At home they speak a language that is close to standard, but spiced with some "local" words and sounds picked up on the school playground. When they are with their mother's parents (who live in the area where I was a child), they speak with that accent (it takes me about a day to speak with that accent again). My friend tells me that, when they stay with his parents, they speak with the accent of that place.

 

As you get older, pciking up a new accent is difficult (unless you make a real job of it, like actors sometimes have to do). I never acquired the accent of the town where I live now for about 30 years - I am 60 now. But this, I think, is partly due to 3 things :

1. a lot of my communication is in writing
   
2. a lot of my communication is in "foreign" languages
   
3. I always worked in teams with people from different areas, few people spoke with "undiluted" accents on the job floor
   

I do not know how accents started, in fact I think that they are older than the standard languages, which, in my opinion, are partly due to the printing press.

But I do know that locals accents are under heavy pressure, not only from the standard language but also from "dominating accents" (like the accent of a town dominating the accents of the surrounding countryside).

An I sure would like to compare my findings with others

[livingproof]

What exactly are accents? What causes different accents to emerge (and remain) in certain areas?

The United States is home to more accents than probably any other single country. Included: "northern", "southern", "creole", "new england", "mid-west", and every variation inbetween.

 

 

Just wanted to replay as a linguist interested in accents (doing transcriptions). I understand that accents "emerged" when different language populations settled in the US. The national language was English. With formal and mandatory education, accents stood out starkly in classrooms where instructors used a standard dialect and were educated in institutions apart from their original language communities. The root languages of US citizens are diverse. Creole - French/Caribbean; Southern - Middle English and Scottish; North - Scandinavian/Canadian; Northeast - Germanic (Dutch). New York being the most diverse language distribution in the US that I can think of is particularly interesting since New York in particular has a standard dialect of its own with well-developed registers and local dialects that emerged and seems to express no matter what the root language of a New Yorker is.

Linguistically, a neutral accent is just as marked for affect as a dialectical variation. It is not my specialty, but I've found that dialects based on a modern English root language do not show as drastic a variation in dialect as non-English or older English root languages. Perhaps this is due to the relative newness of modern English and its break from RP-speaking communities. The American English spoken today sort of "flattens out" the closer to the continental divide the speech communities are located. Standard education plays a major role in the distribution of dialectic variation (compare "Hochdeutsch" to local and regional dialects in German).

[Jay-qu]

Quite different here is Australia - We classify our accents on a sliding scale. Done one end it what is called a cultivated accent and down the other is the oker accent. Most people lie in the middle with whats called a general accent this is fairly consistant all over Australia - probably because we are a young country.

 

It is odd though, that everyone seems to think they speak 'normal' and other people are the ones with an accent. But it is interesting that when Im playing on xbox live people instantly recognise me as Australian - after someone has pointed that out and Im talking with people from 3+ different countries (each with their own accent) I become somewhat concious of my accent and can notice my own accent, to some degree..

[Qfwfq]

Accents are just the purely phonetic side of linguistic differences. Apart from this the cause is exactly the same, and I find it quite obvious, children learn to speak the same way as those they learn from.

 

As for the situation over here (in Italy) there's a great linguistic variety despite the fact that modern times have been decreasing it. The range goes from differences in accent and cadence to strongly differing dialects and a few speaches that are certainly not dialects of Italian. It can be hard to draw the line, many of them are considered Italian dialects but are actually quite unintelligible to Italians from other places.