I got mine originally from TV, as in my country everything is subtitled, so that means I ended up with an americanized accent (it isn’t really an “american” accent because there is no such things as an american accents but rather several).
It was of course poluted by my own native language (portuguese, from Lisbon) accent.
Then I went and lived in The Netherlands for almost a decade so my accent started adding dutch “effects” (like a “yes” that sounds more like “ya”, similar to the dutch “ja”).
And after that I lived for over a decade in England, so my accent moved a lot towards the English RP accent. In fact I can either do my lazy accent (which is the mix of accents I have) or pull it towards a pretty decent English RP accent if needed for clarity.
By this point I can actually do several English Language accents, though mostly only enough to deceive foreigners rather than locals - so, say, a Scottish accent that will deceive Americans but Brits can spot it as not really being any of the various Scottish accents - including the accents of foreign language speakers in English (i.e. how a french or italian will sounds speaking english or even the full-force portuguese accent when speaking english, which I don’t naturally have anymore).
That said, IMHO it is very hard for somebody who grew up in a foreign country speaking a foreign language to fine tune their accent so that it sounds perfect to the ears of a local, and this is valid for all languages, not just English.
I once did one of those quizzes that figures out where your American accent is from and I got mostly LA and midwest. Makes sense since I learned from watching TV shows.
Dialect tests. Think about how someone from boston might say “park” like “pahk” vs other parts of the country, or if someone uses “y’all” where they might be from. The way people pronounce o,a, ai, ough, augh type of sounds is very telling. Also phrases are very regional. There are many studies that compile that data. One famous dataset is used in a Times article that is behind a paywall, here are some people talking about it: peabodyawards.com/nytimesdialectquiz/
There’s many regional differences in American English.
First, pronunciation is always changing, and changes tend to happen regionally.
For example, there’s the Mary-merry-marry merger. A bit over half of American speakers pronounce all three of those words identically, as mɛri. About 17% of Americans have a full three-way contrast. In NYC, for example, they’d say meɹi, mæɹi, and mɛɹi. And other people merged two of the three.
The pen-pin merger is a famous feature of southern American dialects.
Some words have regional pronunciations - crayon can have one or two syllables, for example.
And then there’s regional words, like pop vs soda, bucket vs pail, firefly vs lightning bug, you vs y’all vs yinz vs youse vs you lot vs you all vs you guys etc.
By asking about all of those sorts of things, you can figure out where someone’s from.
They’re talking about native English speakers. Did you really not get that? There are also a lot of Chinese people, try yelling that out of context, also.
English is one of the official languages in India.
Even if only 1/10 of Indians grew up speaking it alongside Hindi or one of the other official languages (it’s a pretty big and varied country), it still adds up to 140 million people, so the previous poster has a valid point.
It’s just as bad in spanish. I’m an american with a colombian paisa accent in spanish and it messes with the mexicans. They love it since it’s not what they usually hear.
Whenever someone who speaks Spanish asks me if I speak it, I always respond, “Oon pokeeto, paro solaminty en oon assento Gringo.” Gets either a laugh or a groan every time. 😈
British should be eevee if anything. There are double the British accents compared to American ones. Cockney, London, Welsh, Scottish, Northern Ireland are extremely distinct let alone the hundreds of other distinct regional accents.
Same for the us, though. NY, Boston, Midwestern, New England, Minnesota, Atlantic, Southern, Texan, Pacific Nw, Californian. And various specific regional like queens, Brooklyn, Philly. It goes on and on. The US is not the monolith it’s often described as.
Tbf they only sound “extremely distinct” to British people. A lot of those accents are hard to distinguish for non-native speakers or people outside the UK.
Tell that to someone from Bawston lol, the US has way more than 2 accents for sure. UK does have a lot though, not sure who actually has more. Let’s find a linguist!
A Boston accent is different from a New York accent, is different from a Missouri accent, is different from a Mississippi accent, is different from a Florida accent, is different from a Texas accent, is different from an Oklahoma accent, etc. Even within states, it fully depends on how rural you live, whether you went to college… hell, even your tax bracket in some cases.
I say this as an Australian that grew up in America: the sheer size of the place is enough to have something like fifty regional accents per state. Like everything with the US: it’s fucking insane.
Lmao to me Britain has two accents, Scottish and English. The rest sound the same. Y’all think your accents are so special to the point where it gets cringe sometimes.
Now comes the hard part of defining all the Eeveelutions.
I feel like there are a few very distinct regional accents, but I’m having trouble coming up with the right distinction from the top of my head.
There’s New England, the south in general, New York, Chicago which immediately trigger my brain to think of a very specific accent. Surely there is more to it though?
Maybe for the regions that only speak one language. East Texas alone mixes English, Spanish, French and German dialects. It’s like a sitcom of bad accents down there.
I have read British and American books galore (i.e. thousands), and I’ve listened to English (BBC, BFBS) and American (AFN, Movies) audio sources. My vocabulary and accent is a wild mix of both, so the British consider me American, and the American think I’m British.
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