Let’s be real here, we usually just stick all of them in a blender and pour ourselves one glass of perfectly mixed accent juice
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
Why choose when you can just randomly mix them
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.
In order of appearance: wildcard, simplified, traditional.
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”.
Haha you’ll never take my French accent away!
By trying to get rid of it I accidentally took the German accent, not sure how that works
Eh I’m not even trying, I try to articulate more but it’s hard, also everyone tells me it’s great so 🤷
I don’t think you choose, it’s just kinda what you grow up around
OMG our usernames can be emojis??
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.
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.
Oi cunt!
The bogan talk fits my gopnik soul like cat’s pyjamas
American, have considered immigrating just for the ability to use this phrase on the reg.
I chose Russia (despite being born in Germany and not of Russian heritage). It just sounds more badass than a German accent.
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.
Wait how does that work?
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.
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: https://peabodyawards.com/nytimesdialectquiz/
Another random one from buzzfeed: https://www.buzzfeed.com/andrewziegler/dialect-quiz
And babbel: https://www.babbel.com/en/magazine/american-accent-quiz
Or just search for dialect quiz.
The Buzzfeed one got where I’ve lived most of my life. Wasn’t sure where it would say since I moved around a lot as a kid.
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.
I’ve got 'em all plus the indian scammer one >:D
Here in finland we also have our very own thing: rally english
Definitely not the Australian . my jaw will break and my vocal cords will wear out at an early age.
