Hot answers tagged accent
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As a native speaker of Midwestern American English, I don't hear my accent as an "accent", naturally, but I know it's there. Any English speaker will recognize that I'm American as soon as I open my mouth and start talking English (I occasionally do better in other languages), and they'll probably recognize my accent as "Midwestern", if they've ever heard of ...
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Hwoa! Hwat’s with the hwistling hwisky?
> In which English accents do they put an h before every word that starts with wh?
That isn’t what’s going on — you only think you hear an h, because your phoneme set doesn’t include this sound, but its use is pretty common in various accents. Which accents? Lots. Scottish. Irish. Several counties in the north ...
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The Northeast.
This US dialect splatter chart shows that just over 75% of Americans pronounce aunt and ant (the bug) the same. It’s broken down further, but the ~ohnt pronunciation is primarily from the Northeast.
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Palatal vowels (i), semivowels (y), and liquids (r) often influence the sound of preceding consonants, a process called palatalization. This is most obvious with dental consonants like t and s, which typically become tch and sh. For example, train often sounds like tchrain.
Palatalization is consistent for some English forms, like the shun sound of the ...
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The character Aldo Raine is from Maynardville, Tennessee and is a hillbilly who enjoys bootlegging moonshine. While I'm unsure about the accuracy of Pitt's accent for the time period, it certainly sounds (possibly intentionally) overdone to my ears.
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This may not be the answer; however, I just wanted to add this.
I have always thought why the digraph <au> in aunt has a TRAP vowel variant, whereas the same digraph receives LOT/THOUGHT vowels in other set of words. After reading Christopher Upward's The History of English Spelling, I have found an answer.
Spelling change and pronunciation change
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The uses of diacritic marks in modern English are quite limited, and diacritic marks can always be omitted without being incorrect. This applies equally to A and any other letter.
Recent foreign borrowings: e.g. rôle, coup d'état, façade, etc. but role, coup d'etat, and facade are also all correct.
Stage and poetry prosody: e.g. learnèd indicating a ...
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I know this is very late, but I would warn you that almost nobody in the United States speaks like that nor has spoken like that since before World War II. Generally speaking that accent mimicked many of the ways of speech of the upper classes in New York and Boston (listen to a recording of Franklin Delano Roosevelt: it is very similar.) The dialect that ...
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Australian English is the standard language spoken in Australia. Its accents differ from various locations in all states and territories and show a regional and social diversity.
This is no different from accents in US, England etc.
Many immigrants established themselves in various locations, influencing the accent of the English spoken.
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Pronunciations of shortened forms and derived forms don't depend on those of originals. For instance, pronounce ~ pronunciation, professor ~ prof, library ~ lib, microphone ~ mic.
Trisyllabic laxing and precluster shortening should have shortened the first vowel in library; but it has not happened. That has to do with these: trisyllabic laxing does not ...
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You're absolutely right, there is a subtle sh sound. I've just tried it myself and I can detect different positions of my mouth and tongue as I say str words, compared to words beginning simply with s (excluding sugar and sure of course) and other s and consonant clusters. I have no knowledge as to whether this is more marked in different regions, but I ...
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As OED says, tyke originally came from Old Norse tík - female dog, bitch. It's not exclusively reserved for Geordies (or people from Newcastle), but as OED also points out, it often does have that sense - "perhaps originally opprobrious; but now accepted and owned [by them]".
I recall that my grandmother, who never lived anywhere but Sussex for all her 99 ...
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I've found two groups of people who pronounce aunt that way. First, many New Englanders (people from the Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine) do so. Also, many African-Americans from the East Coast also pronounce aunt that way, whether or not they are from New England.
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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:
...
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Of the main branches of the English language, Canadian English is the closest relative to American English, which, given history, makes a lot of sense: In 1607 brave men got off the boat in what is now Virginia to form the first permanent colony in North America for England and not long after that there were forays into New England and the Maritimes. Thus ...
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As @JohnLawler points out, it would take an extensive sociolinguistic study to arrive at something definitive. Based on various bits of research provided in the comments, this accent appears often in speakers from California who perform a "velar pinch." I'm marking this answered because I think until a deeper study is done, this is what we have:
...
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T-glottalization is one of the features of the accent known as Estuary English. It was found first on the banks of the Thames at various points east of London. It has now spread more widely, so it’s not surprising to find it in the West Country as well. For more on the accent, see here.
EDIT:
David Crystal, writing in 1995, said
. . . the spread of ...
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Speech was a lot more varied than what was shown in the movies of the thirties and forties, particularly since those films romanticized the lives of the rich. The average citizen on the street sounded quite a bit different. My grandparents were born in 1919 and 1925, so they would have been young in the mid forties. They were from Brooklyn and came from ...
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There is a duplicate question. There really hasn't been much study of this phenomenon, but other people have noticed it, and it seems like it should be a feature of Californian and southwestern U.S. accents. One thing this duplicate question doesn't answer is how this process developed. I suspect it was a two-step process.
People started using /iː/ as an ...
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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 ...
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In my opinion, the words Wat, daen, daen oot would suggest a Scottish accent.
The sentence Oi taught i heard Sengen sounds very Irish because of the lack of "h" proceeding "t".
I actually think the accent being portrayed is a West Country accent.
The words dain't, Marster and loik most definitive do not sound Irish and don't really sound Scottish (try ...
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When there is a conflict between how you would expect an abbreviation to be pronounced judging from its spelling alone, and how you would expect judging from the sounds of the larger word, then it can go either way. Or in another direction entirely.
If we considered such abbreviations to be words in their own right then we wouldn't be surprised at this. ...
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Yeah, the link to Goose Gossage's speech above is pretty accurate. The accent is a mix of Southern/Western and a bit of California Valley, similar to the younger skater/boarder types.
In Denver and along the Front Range there's also a mix of Mexican-American accent and Southern/Western drawl. It's a slurred speech with shortening of the words. Not ...
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We call it a /lib/ folder for the same reason we call the "/etc" folder /et see/ and not "et cetera". Or the same reason we pronounce "var" as /vahr/ not /vaer/ or "bin" as /bin/ and not /bine/ and proc is not /pross/.
First, it's easier to say, but more importantly, these abbreviations are no longer abbreviations. They have become words on their own ...
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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 ...
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Well, if we are going by famous people the best matches for a New Orleans accent would actually be Emeril Lagasse or Winton Marsalis. They definitely speak New Orleans’s accent and yes, that dialect does have things in common with a NYC accent, such as replacing th at the beginning of a word with the letter d. ( "These," "Them," and "Those" become "Dese," ...
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Moreso than most any other country of the similar extent (maybe excepting Australia), the great majority of people in the US speak with the same accent. Only a trained language specialist (a student of accents like an actor or voice coach, not necessarily a linguist) would be able to take a random person and tell if they were different from the norm, much ...
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The predominantly African-American quarters of most major US cities have sort of a joint continient-wide dialect, which linguists refer to as African-American Vernacular English. It does vary a bit from city to city, but not by a huge degree.
From personal experience, I do know that at least as late as the mid-1980's it was spoken in working-class sections ...
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This is similar to a question that I asked my father 15 years ago. (I was born in the early '50s, he in the mid '20s.) "The speech of Lowell Thomas on recordings sounds very different from our present day speech. Have things changed that much, and did people really speak as he did?"
My father's answer was that indeed people did speak (or try to speak) in ...
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There's a small, English city called Peterborough that's considered to have a neutral accent. It became the UK's Call Centre Capital because businesses felt that people would prefer a neutral accent and that Peterborough had one.
I'm not sure how they decided what a neutral accent sounded like, or why they thought people would prefer it, but that was what ...
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