This! My English accent is so all over the place, I can’t even spot the differences if I hear them. I can’t tell, If someone is British, American, Australian etc because I mix them up so much myself
I’m quite found of accents myself, like that SS officer in the bar scene from Inglorious Basterds lol, would love to have a conversation and dissect it
I’ve had a scottish-texan accent for half a year once, and now I have an american accent sometimes while speaking german, my mother language, shit’s wild
Scottish-Texan? I can’t even comprehend what that would sound like. Congratulations, you’ve been speaking an eldritch tongue. Try not to summon Cthulhu.
I have a buddy who learned English as a second language early in life and he has a fluent Irish accent. I’ve never been able to wrap my head around that one.
I once took a short trip through the south of Germany near Nuremberg … we were just on a random trip not knowing what we were doing in a rental car. We stopped at a gas station to get gas and got some help from an attendant, a young German teenager who spoke some English.
He talked to us in the weirdest accent I ever heard … a combination of English with a German accent and a touch of southern Texan or southern American. He had grown up learning English from army personnel from the American US base nearby.
I’m Canadian in Ontario and the first five years of my life, all I spoke or heard was my cultural language Ojibway-Cree. I went to school where I learned English but continued to only mostly speak my language.
Then I spent an awkward period as a teenager speaking English with a Native accent … a classic TV stereotypical Native accent and it was horrible. It took me about a decade to get over that phase, now I speak English as boringly as any Canadian. Not bad eh?
I lived in South Korea for a while and I met a South Korean young lady who had learned English from an Australian teacher. This Korean girl had the most beautiful Australian accent with a hint of Korean. She was very talkative, Asian people get excited when they meet english-speakers so they can practice speaking English with us. So she talked a lot. It was a beautiful culture medley.
Ironically, US English is in many ways more traditional than UK English. The US uses many words and phrases that used to be common to both continents but later changed in the UK.
US did try to de-French most spellings with mixed success.
Yeah, but there’s still the tendency to simplify things (e.g. “color” vs “colour”) and the ever shortening of phrases as if it’s difficult to say the whole thing (“macaroni and cheese”).
Changing spellings to match pronunciation should happen more often, to ne honest. And I don’t think UK or Australian English get to throw any stones about shortening words and phrases, the US isn’t calling anything “spag bol”.
As an American I feel like either US or UK could be considered the “normal” one, UK or AUS the “fancy” one, and US and AUS the “wildcard” (from the UK perspective).
I’m English and my perspective is UK is both normal and fancy.
Aussie is wildcard.
US is just there because OP felt it needed to be involved for some reason.
Fancy maybe wouldn’t be the best word, perhaps exotic, but I know there’s plenty of us who, depending on the Aussie, might not be able to tell the accent from a British one and just go “ooh, accent, fancy”.
Interesting. German schools teach British English. It’s with time that I was more and more influenced by American English but first and foremost I have a strong German accent
I think it was British pronunciation considering that (at least when I was still in school) we also learned to write British English instead of American English.
Later on in high school they said you could write either, but you had to stick to one or it would count as a mistake.
Around that same time. Searching online I didn’t find anything saying it’s either one but rather both with both being acceptable (but not mixing as mentioned). Seems to depend on the teacher with lot of the older (possibly now retired) teachers being more familiar and teaching British English, sometimes as the only “correct” one and younger (not particularly young now) generation of teachers being more familiar with American English and teaching primarily that.
So, depends. Both are taught, there’s no unified policy for preference of one over another that I could find.
Okay cool.
There's a chance that I had a British English teacher back in the secondary school...I don't recall much, let alone speaking British myself.
At one point I had one of those teachers that thought British English was the only correct one. She was a real superfan of the British royal family and took sickdays or just made us watch with her if there was some televised event hah.
No no, I speak a combination of the three. Although American English dominates my accent. That’s what you get when you grow up watching English-speaking media. You pick up their accents and you make one of your own.
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