Ricky wrote: See that's what I mean. You Brits and also the Dutch it seems have accents down to a science. You cannot only tell which part of the country one comes from by their accent but maybe the city also! Does a posh accent refer to an upper crust or aristocratic sounding accent? ps. on further reflection we in the US are just as accent aware. In New Orleans, where I work one can tell from the accent not only what city one comes from but sometimes the neighborhood! As in the acdent of the lower ninth (prounonced nient..that is no "th" sound) ward. Which incidentally has been almost entierly destroyed as it was under 10 ft of water. In New your one can distinquish a Jersey accent from a Brooklyn or Queens accent and Bostonian accents are unmistakable when heard, Which American accent do foreign speakers find pleasing to the ear and which objectionable? I work with a Romanian man who loves the sound of southern accents especially in women.
this is takeing accent recognisation to an extreme but some people in bristol can tell which part of the city someone comes from due to a slight(very minute) change in the accent
The only accents I've ever found annoying are those that seem to be the distortions one makes in a language if one is too lazy to try to actually use it fully. That is to say, Amsterdam Dutch and Southern American. It makes people seem stupid even if they're not. A real shame. I'm afraid that is also the only accent I am really aware of in American English. I tend to like the sound of Scottish English but I've never heard it in any women I know...
Believe me, I feel much the same. Sometimes, I think I could understand you English buggers more than I could someone with a heavy Southern accent. Often, I find myself even needing a translator!
Roel wrote: There are dozens of "southern accents". Very few of them sound the way they are portrayed in movies. Most actors, lacking a good ear, overdo the accent, laying it on too thick. As with all regional accents and colloguialisms the speech patterns are learned from a young age. It has nothing to do with being too lazy to prononce all the syllables or sounds. The way that it is learned when young sounds correct to those who speak it. That is true of all accents.The way that some Brits drop the "h" at the beginning of a word for instance...that isn't because they are too lazy to pronounce the h...that is the way they learned to speak. Keep in mind we are speaking of accents here not actual poor grammar which is a different issue entirely.
Well, a truely posh accent is RP - like wot the Queen speaks. In the context of a 'posh Lutonian' - it is just that the Lu'onian (Lutonians never properly pronounce a 't' in the middle of a word! ) accent is less pronounced. Objectionable: New York Women - they are just so harsh and shrill and squawky. I do agree with your Romanian friend - a soft Southern accent is very comforting to listen to (I knew a few Southerners at Uni - lovely girls). A heavy southern accent, however, is just confusing! (Actually, in that respect, Southern US accents are very like Scottish/Irish accents. Except the Belfast accent, which is always quite harsh...)
My accent confuses a lot of people because my mother's family are all North Easterners, my Grandmother on my father's side was Glaswegian and my Grandfather a Londoner. I lived on British forces bases most of my life which meant I picked up the "Forces Accent", a mix of everything. To some I have known in the North East I sound Cockney (East London), to Southerners I pronounce things in peculiar ways and a few consider my accent distinctly Northern. Occasionally some words get pronounced with a distinct regional dialect (One of my friends at school was originally from Liverpool, so there's the odd Scouse sound occasionally, although thankfully not for a while, I may have out-grown that one! ) The only American accent I find really off-putting is the Bronx accent (Think Julie off Friends), there's something about that accent that just makes me want to strangle the person speaking!
As an aside, not referring to accents but to languages, my friend who speaks Romanian, Hungarian and a little French and German related to me that to his ear the Russian language sounds terrible, harsh and guttural, he also didn't like the nasally aspects or the mouth and throat sounds of French, thought German was a little too hard also. He stated that English had the most pleasing sound to his ear of any language, especially the American version which he thought sounded smoother than other English speakers. Aside from understanding the language what does the cadence and rhythm of other languages sound like to you native non English speakers. As ever, just curiousity on my part.
My first tongue is, and always will be, German, but I do like American English, although English English does have the air of intellectual superiority. Russian is indeed a very harsh language. I have said many very nice things to people in Russian, and they thought I was insulting them!
You are obviously thinking of a Hugh Grant type accent not a Vinnie Jones one. :lol: My friends think I have a quite posh accent. I just think I speak correctly. I say things like "I am not..." rather than "I aint" and I will speak in complete sentences and not use contractions e.g "Do not" as opposed to "Don't".
Hmm, not helped when the spelling of 'thick' goes wrong either. :lol: Is a Bristol accent similar to a Welsh one??
Oh no completely different, even though Bristol is very close to the Welsh border. Newport accents differ greatly from Cardiff accents if you are familiar with them. Oooh it's all a bit Henry Higgins all this, you know where he places Eliza within a few streets of where she lives in the book Pygmalian...I went all literary then!!! I had better go and have a lie down now!!!
I think it may be the fact that this is not my mother tongue that makes me fail to identify the nuances of Southern accents. However, it is not just movie actors I've heard who had "Southern" accents, also real people like President Bush, and various others, and they all sound incredibly dense to me. I'm sure it's not their fault and I'm not blaming them or claiming the entire American South is retarded, it is just that to my ear they have an unfortunate accent. About the general sound of other languages: I vastly prefer English English over American English because, like Zhukov said, it has an air of intellectual superiority for some reason, and it sounds much more original. As the cliche goes, Americans all sound the same, but you have ten accents for ten Englishmen; hence the Englishmen sound more genuine. Even Vinnie Jones: "I think the word you're looking for, gentlemen, is 'thank you'." It is common here in the Netherlands to like any accent that is not American English - I have heard people get applauded not because they had good things to say, but because they said them in English with an Australian accent! :roll: As for other languages, the most pleasing to the ear will always be German with a Berlin accent. Awesome.
NO, deffinately not! and as you can see the accent also affects my spelling lol, as an old poem for my birth place is Pill born and Bred, strong in the arm thick in the head
In the US most all Scandinavian accents are assumed to be Swedish. In the past most anyone of Scandanavian heritage ended up with the nickname Swede. This was true of the semi-famous Naval officer Swede Momsen (inventor of the Momsen lung rebreather, pioneer in submarine rescue vehicles etc). He was actually of German and Danish ancestry. IMO he has never received the recognition he deserved but that's another story.
i have got to admit there is nothing more off putting than a beautiful woman with a bristolian or plymouthain accent...when i lived in miami i went out with a cuban girl called maria.she had the sexiest accent ever....closely followed by my ex fiancee Jane who was a scouser..she had a beautiful soft accent. i sound like a cross between del boy and alf garnett (uk target audience only!)..always goes down a treat in the states..know wot i mean? me old fruit?
Well, there's the problem! Speak properly, and everyone thinks you're either stuck-up, or an intellectual!
