The British Accent - A lesson on ignorance.
- Thread starter Cmwissy
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I tend to pick up accents unintentionally. It is very odd I have had days where I sound more English than is healthy and days when people ask me where I'm from...
Well actually the truth is that there's several British accents.Cmwissy said:
There's several American accents too. A New Yorker sounds different from someone in the "deep south" of America.
Same goes with any country that has a reasonable sized land mass and groups of people scattered in different parts of it.
Lol, you could be a nuclear physicist, an expert in your field, but if you have a scouse accent all your credibility goes out the window because you sound like a berk.Xcelsior said:
Most people have a bad ear for accents, as long as they're not from that country. I couldn't tell the German accents apart to save my life, for example. Accents mingle with each other and form whole new ones as time goes on, for example, I live in Yorkshire, so have a Yorkshire accent, but, being from Doncaster, my accent is very different (at least in vowel sounds) to an accent of Sheffield, where I now live, a few miles down the road. The Sheffield accent is in turn totally different from a York accent, which is a 20-minute train ride away...
It helps to be broad and say 'British' because there are too many accents to pin down, and you risk offending people when you get it wrong, as any Southerner who has mistaken me for a Mancunian will know.
It helps to be broad and say 'British' because there are too many accents to pin down, and you risk offending people when you get it wrong, as any Southerner who has mistaken me for a Mancunian will know.
I lived in the UK for two years as a kid and can attest to this. When my family worked there they could spot differences in two accents that lived 30 miles apart.
Since coming back to the states my accent fluctuates depending whom I'm with. If I'm with Brits I sometimes am mistaken for South African or Aussie.
My friends have commented that my speech is sometimes very "proper". Recently a child asked if I was originally from the UK.
Since coming back to the states my accent fluctuates depending whom I'm with. If I'm with Brits I sometimes am mistaken for South African or Aussie.
My friends have commented that my speech is sometimes very "proper". Recently a child asked if I was originally from the UK.
I was referring mainly to a foreign person who may not have had enough exposure to each individual accent to be aware. Obviously, a British person can identify those accents, but anything more specific than tha tis tricky. My point was, when enquiring about an accent, keep it broad and play it safe.Cmwissy said:
The reason why I made that distinction in wordplay is not to be a smartass, but to try and make it clear to you that if you're suggesting people should not use the term "British accent" just because there isn't a definitive one, that I think that's a little impractical. I think for foreigners, it's better to use a catch-all because you don't want to risk offending anyone. You English folks know what from what but a visitor won't be able to pick the subtle differences. I know what an upper-class and a lower-class British accent sounds like but I sure don't know my Somersets from my whatevers. I'm not American, I'm Australian. I bet you couldn't pick a Darwin accent from an Adelaide one, but there's one hell of a difference there. If you were visiting here you'd be better off using the umbrella term "Aussie accent" to not risk messing up and getting a stubbie to the head.Cmwissy said:
On the other hand if your point is just to educate people alone, then that's fine and dandy but were there really any people reading this thread who didn't already know that England/Britain/whatever had more than one accent? Is ignorance of this fact really that widespread? (This is a serious question not a rhetorical one.)
There's more than one Britsih accent and let's leave it at that. Otherwise we're just going to confuse the tourists.
Bristolian is a touch different from Somerset though.Tiny116 said:
Go to a school in north bristol and it'll be a very different sound you hear compared with one from the south. Hearing a thick somerset accent coming from some of the kids there is bloody amusing, especially for me as someone born and bred in the sunny Isle of Purbeck.
Somerset is not 2 hours and some minutes from my front door, because I live in Ohio, but Indiana is some 50 mins to an hour away, and the same is true. New expressions, new phrases, new accent.Cmwissy said:
Isn't life grand with it's diversity?
...And yes, living in Ohio is exactly as lame as it sounds...
Edit:
Too late!... And you know how bad we North American's are with new things...AwesomeNinjaPowers said:
Boys... get the bombs... (lol I kid, I kid.)
