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.
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
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.
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”.
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.
No. Wild card is you learned English in a foreign non English native country and your accent is an absolute mess. You say Autumn but Taxi, color but wa(t)er, and maybe you call you cell phone your “Handy”.
I’d rather dub the US variant a wildcard, based on it being the result of mixing English and all the other languages of settlers. Also, the US and its variations are very common and shadow the other variants which is somewhat sad.
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”.
I have a Brazilian friend who every now and again will say a word with a perfect Irish accent because that’s how she learned it. Catches you off guard every now and then lol
Don’t be discouraged, it doesn’t come naturally and there is good reason to do so. The Scots are generally awesome people and the world needs more fer’s, aye’s and nae’s in general.
Jus’ expose yerself tae sum more Sco’ish and ye’ll be jus’ fine, lad.
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