Is there a term or short description for an accent you “can't place”?

Question

Some examples of this might be Standard American English (though this may still be tied to geography) or, more likely, Received Pronunciation. The speaker's language doesn't have to be English, of course.

Basically, the speaker's accent isn't discernible or particular to some region. It may be that the speaker has a unique way of talking or a blend of accents such that a listener can't place the speaker's origins. I don't think "accent-less" would be valid, since technically there's no such thing as having no accent. I'm also trying to describe the (artificial? synthetic?) accent of some text-to-speech programs.¹

_{1: Can a TTS program truly have an accent in the first place? (I know you can assign an American or Australian "accent" in some cases, but I'm referring to the crude, "robotic"-sounding speech typical of early TTS.)}

Answer 1

FrustratedWithFormsD's suggested indiscernible implies you're not aware of any accent at all. Which is increasingly common today. Just as genetically we're all becoming coffee-coloured people in this modern world of global communications and travel, so differences in regional accents tend to be "ironed out".

But OP wants a word to describe speech which is clearly recognisable as having some kind of accent - just not a "placeable" one. Perhaps because someone's speech combines two or more relatively strong accents in a way that makes it difficult for others to identify the components.

I'd call that a nondescript accent, as apparently would many others in that link.

Answer 2

Per this site:

A neutral accent is a way of speaking a language without regionalism.

A neutral accent seems to be the most common way of referring to an accent that you "can't place" since it's free of regional or mother tongue influences.

This article in The Telegraph, for example, touts "neutral accents the best if you want to get ahead," and notes:

The “best” accents selected from a list were those belonging to Peter Jones (Dragon’s Den) and Clare Balding (Sports Presenter) – whose accents are both hard to place.

You could also refer to it as a generic accent, although neutral accent turns up more relevant hits on Google by far.

Answer 3

You could call it indiscernible (taken from your question). Other choices could be ambiguous, or hard-to-place.

Answer 4

The answer depends on whether 'you can't place it' means you the speaker or a generic listener, implying that nobody can identify the accent. The former is probably just unfamiliarity; there are plenty of British people who class everything from Canadian to Deep south as 'an American accent', just as there are Americans who talk of 'a European accent'. And that you refer to an accent at all means the speaker doesn't speak the way you do.

The latter is more problematic (and causes more problems). While Henry Higgins was fictional, there are plenty of people who can (or think they can) identify regionalisms in absolutely any accent; having one vowel sound from the North and another from the South doesn't make an accent nondescript, just mixed. But your question seems to be international in scope, and I simply don't believe there is anyone speaking English who cannot be identified (by somebody familiar with the region) as coming from one particular country.

Answer 5

Homogenized (made homogenous, blended) is used to refer to having little or no discernible accent, in some articles (1, 2, 3) about language and regional accents.