6 ms·

Whenever I'm traveling in areas where people speak with an accent (either english or my native language), I can't stop myself from imitating it. Really badly. A

Whenever I'm traveling in areas where people speak with an accent (either english or my native language), I can't stop myself from imitating it. Really badly. After a week or so I'm terribly annoyed by the sound of my own voice. It has even happened when someone was visiting, and acting in some sort of leadership role with a lot of speaking time. So I could imagine a single Hollywood director could possibly start a trend (if everybody'a speech center were as spineless as mine).

Osmium 10y ago
> Whenever I'm traveling in areas where people speak with an accent Nit-pick, but everyone speaks with an accent :) (I'm not sure if you meant it that way, but I have met people who genuinely think that they don't have an accent and are 'unaccented', and it's just other people who do...)
- TillE 10y ago
  But there's a neutral General American which a majority(?) of Americans speak, with very minor variations. Most accents that deviate strongly from it are slowly dying out. This is in stark contrast to the UK, or just England, where you have an incredible amount of linguistic diversity in a very small geographical area. RP is theoretically "standard", but in reality it's a niche upper class thing.
  - Osmium 10y ago
    > But there's a neutral General American which a majority(?) of Americans speak, with very minor variations. So this was actually the kind of thing I was hoping to address with my comment. The idea that there's a "neutral" accent is, linguistically speaking, nonsense. That said, there probably isn't too much harm in it, in that if you're an American talking to other Americans there's probably not much ambiguity. The problem is more that it could create the mistaken idea that, say, "General American" is somehow "normal" and therefore anybody speaking with a different accent becomes "the other", for whatever that may mean. It becomes a reference point to judge other accents against, when that's not necessarily helpful. And there's a lot of accent prejudice out there... ask anyone who's gone for a job interview, for example, who's been very well-qualified but has an accent that the interviewer didn't expect (this can be due to regional or social backgrounds, or even gender – e.g. so-called "valley girl speak"/high rising terminal). Just something worth thinking about, that's all. I know I've dismissed someone before off-hand based on how they sound, which is not a good thing, and something I'd like to be more aware of myself.
    - psyc 10y ago
      There's too much appeal to consequences here. I'd rather see someone make an argument for why a set of pronunciations can't be canonical. I certainly know exactly which pronunciations are the "neutral" ones, even the ones I don't use myself. So how did those pronunciations receive their status? What does it mean for us to hear them as "unaccented", and why exactly is that misguided?
      - WorldMaker 10y ago
        The armchair linguistics as I know it: Accents (and languages in general) are typically social, tribal. We use them as one of the markers of "our tribe" versus "not our tribe". Things that sound neutral/unaccented to us are things that sound like they come from "around us", from within our tribe. Things that sound foreign are clearly not from our tribe. The misguided part here is that thinking because it sounds neutral/unaccented to you means it is the "right" one. That path potentially leads to xenophobia and tribalism.
        psyc 10y ago
        I grew up in a region with a strong, distinctive regional accent and dialect. Every member of my family, teachers, friends, literally everyone all spoke with that accent. But even from a very young age (like 3-4) I knew it was an accent. I didn't pick it up. I understood what canonical pronunciation was, and opted for that. So, what, I just decided that newscasters were my tribe for some reason? I'm just very suspicious of the idea that its completely relative, and just depends on what you're used to hearing. If you were being taught a foreign language by a native speaker, I think you'd be much less likely to doubt them when they told you "this is how it is pronounced." And you ended with another appeal to consequences.
        foldr 10y ago
        The problem with this view is that there are instances where the 'canonical' pronunciation in one group is the 'noncanonical' pronunciation in another, and vice versa. For example, in British English, 'r' deletion is part of the 'canonical' pronunciation and it's only nonstandard dialects that are rhotic. In American English it's the other way round. So in general, it can't be that features of the pronunciation itself somehow determine whether or not it is canonical. I doubt you really know what accent you spoke with when you were three or four. As to why you picked up an accent somewhere close to SAE, it's most likely for reasons of prestige.
  - hx87 10y ago
    General American is still an accent, albeit a neutral one, and it's hard to find people who still speak it on a daily basis outside the Pacific Northwest. Even in the region where it was allegedly first spoken (Iowa), the average person today speaks with an Inland Northern accent, or central Canadian further north.
  - WorldMaker 10y ago
    I think a better name than "General American" is possibly the American Television Received Accent in that I think the key to the homogenization of a lot of the American English accent landscape is unintentionally a result of mass media consumption (primarily American TV) over a handful of generations now. Personally, though I tend to think of it as the "American Chameleon" accent as I, like the poster above, find that it trends to adapting to regional variances (often without a conscious intent to do so). I have a hunch that this is a feature of the "accent" rather than a weakness in the speaker, but this is merely lay speculation. It's weird to think of a defining characteristic of an accent being its flexibility rather than rigidity to preferred forms, but I think that helps account for why this "General American" accent is so common in America at this point, because it seems to be sort of an American "Borg" accent: your regional distinctions will be assimilated.
- ArkyBeagle 10y ago
  I have been told that the least accent is the flat Nebraska pronunciation of say, Johnny Carson. I believe it's called General American. It's at least semi-mythic - but some variation of it is used frequently in broadcast.
mc32 10y ago
I think it was John Cleese once, who was speaking of a fellow actor who could do great impressions of others and do many accents --he said, "He never had his own voice". Not sure if Cleese had a point, but it's an interesting take on his fellow actor and that he finds "having one's own voice" important, to some extent.
- BellsOnSunday 10y ago
  I don't know who John Cleese was talking about but the great comic actor Ronnie Barker (of The Two Ronnies, for you Americans) was like that. Always playing a Cockney barrow boy, Welsh housewife, upper class patrician, so when you heard him on a chat show actually being "himself" it seemed very weird. He was a notoriously private person so those masks might have been part of that. It worked for him anyway, and he must have made at least as many people laugh as did Cleese.
- teddyh 10y ago
  He was probably referring to Peter Sellers.
  - mc32 10y ago
    Yep, you're quite right. Thanks. Here it is. http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=371179347 http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?story... At 00:20:40 "CLEESE: Yes, I do. And it just showed why he was such a wonderful impersonator. But it showed that in a very strange way because he'd overslept. And his chauffer Bert said, sorry, boys, Peter's overslept. I'll make you coffee. He'll be out in a bit. And we just sat there sipping coffee. And when Peter came out, he was still in his dressing gown or his robe. And he was apologizing for having overslept, but apologizing in a voice that was not his own. And suddenly, he switched into a rather sort of plumy upper-class voice and was talking to us like this as he walked towards us. And at a moment, he was talking a bit like that. And then he went into another voice, sat on the sofa and 10 seconds later, he was talking to us in his own voice. And see, we were the first persons that he'd spoken to that morning. He'd only just been up a few minutes. And we realized when Graham and I - Graham Chapman and I - sort of compared notes afterwards, we realized that Peter Sellers in the morning had to find his own voice. DAVIES: So he wasn't trying to impress you. It's like somebody tuning in... CLEESE: No, no... DAVIES: ...A radio dial and finding the station. CLEESE: There was a lack of real personality at his core. And the people who were very good impressionists are often rather like that. Similarly, people who write very good parodies but don't write such great original comedy, those people often lack a certain emotional life. They're very clever, their observation is good, but emotion doesn't inform their work in any way. So their work tends to be brilliantly observed, but not very - what's the word? - not very powerful. They don't tend to be terribly funny. They tend to be terribly clever. So this kind of personality type - a person who has a weak sense of their own identity - they're frightfully good at copying other people, whether it's other writers or other performers. But we realized that Peter literally had to find his own voice in the morning. And to that extent, he was a sort of personality that he'd had to manufacture himself from different parts. And I - one of the Pythons was ever so slightly like that. And we could always tell when he had been spending time with one of his Beatles friends because he would have a slight Liverpool accent for the next 24 hours."

Osmium 10y ago

> Whenever I'm traveling in areas where people speak with an accent Nit-pick, but everyone speaks with an accent :) (I'm not sure if you meant it that way, but I have met people who genuinely think that they don't have an accent and are 'unaccented', and it's just other people who do...)

TillE 10y ago
But there's a neutral General American which a majority(?) of Americans speak, with very minor variations. Most accents that deviate strongly from it are slowly dying out. This is in stark contrast to the UK, or just England, where you have an incredible amount of linguistic diversity in a very small geographical area. RP is theoretically "standard", but in reality it's a niche upper class thing.
- Osmium 10y ago
  > But there's a neutral General American which a majority(?) of Americans speak, with very minor variations. So this was actually the kind of thing I was hoping to address with my comment. The idea that there's a "neutral" accent is, linguistically speaking, nonsense. That said, there probably isn't too much harm in it, in that if you're an American talking to other Americans there's probably not much ambiguity. The problem is more that it could create the mistaken idea that, say, "General American" is somehow "normal" and therefore anybody speaking with a different accent becomes "the other", for whatever that may mean. It becomes a reference point to judge other accents against, when that's not necessarily helpful. And there's a lot of accent prejudice out there... ask anyone who's gone for a job interview, for example, who's been very well-qualified but has an accent that the interviewer didn't expect (this can be due to regional or social backgrounds, or even gender – e.g. so-called "valley girl speak"/high rising terminal). Just something worth thinking about, that's all. I know I've dismissed someone before off-hand based on how they sound, which is not a good thing, and something I'd like to be more aware of myself.
  - psyc 10y ago
    There's too much appeal to consequences here. I'd rather see someone make an argument for why a set of pronunciations can't be canonical. I certainly know exactly which pronunciations are the "neutral" ones, even the ones I don't use myself. So how did those pronunciations receive their status? What does it mean for us to hear them as "unaccented", and why exactly is that misguided?
    - WorldMaker 10y ago
      The armchair linguistics as I know it: Accents (and languages in general) are typically social, tribal. We use them as one of the markers of "our tribe" versus "not our tribe". Things that sound neutral/unaccented to us are things that sound like they come from "around us", from within our tribe. Things that sound foreign are clearly not from our tribe. The misguided part here is that thinking because it sounds neutral/unaccented to you means it is the "right" one. That path potentially leads to xenophobia and tribalism.
      - psyc 10y ago
        I grew up in a region with a strong, distinctive regional accent and dialect. Every member of my family, teachers, friends, literally everyone all spoke with that accent. But even from a very young age (like 3-4) I knew it was an accent. I didn't pick it up. I understood what canonical pronunciation was, and opted for that. So, what, I just decided that newscasters were my tribe for some reason? I'm just very suspicious of the idea that its completely relative, and just depends on what you're used to hearing. If you were being taught a foreign language by a native speaker, I think you'd be much less likely to doubt them when they told you "this is how it is pronounced." And you ended with another appeal to consequences.
        foldr 10y ago
        The problem with this view is that there are instances where the 'canonical' pronunciation in one group is the 'noncanonical' pronunciation in another, and vice versa. For example, in British English, 'r' deletion is part of the 'canonical' pronunciation and it's only nonstandard dialects that are rhotic. In American English it's the other way round. So in general, it can't be that features of the pronunciation itself somehow determine whether or not it is canonical. I doubt you really know what accent you spoke with when you were three or four. As to why you picked up an accent somewhere close to SAE, it's most likely for reasons of prestige.
- hx87 10y ago
  General American is still an accent, albeit a neutral one, and it's hard to find people who still speak it on a daily basis outside the Pacific Northwest. Even in the region where it was allegedly first spoken (Iowa), the average person today speaks with an Inland Northern accent, or central Canadian further north.
- WorldMaker 10y ago
  I think a better name than "General American" is possibly the American Television Received Accent in that I think the key to the homogenization of a lot of the American English accent landscape is unintentionally a result of mass media consumption (primarily American TV) over a handful of generations now. Personally, though I tend to think of it as the "American Chameleon" accent as I, like the poster above, find that it trends to adapting to regional variances (often without a conscious intent to do so). I have a hunch that this is a feature of the "accent" rather than a weakness in the speaker, but this is merely lay speculation. It's weird to think of a defining characteristic of an accent being its flexibility rather than rigidity to preferred forms, but I think that helps account for why this "General American" accent is so common in America at this point, because it seems to be sort of an American "Borg" accent: your regional distinctions will be assimilated.
ArkyBeagle 10y ago
I have been told that the least accent is the flat Nebraska pronunciation of say, Johnny Carson. I believe it's called General American. It's at least semi-mythic - but some variation of it is used frequently in broadcast.

mc32 10y ago

I think it was John Cleese once, who was speaking of a fellow actor who could do great impressions of others and do many accents --he said, "He never had his own voice". Not sure if Cleese had a point, but it's an interesting take on his fellow actor and that he finds "having one's own voice" important, to some extent.

BellsOnSunday 10y ago
I don't know who John Cleese was talking about but the great comic actor Ronnie Barker (of The Two Ronnies, for you Americans) was like that. Always playing a Cockney barrow boy, Welsh housewife, upper class patrician, so when you heard him on a chat show actually being "himself" it seemed very weird. He was a notoriously private person so those masks might have been part of that. It worked for him anyway, and he must have made at least as many people laugh as did Cleese.
teddyh 10y ago
He was probably referring to Peter Sellers.
- mc32 10y ago
  Yep, you're quite right. Thanks. Here it is. http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=371179347 http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?story... At 00:20:40 "CLEESE: Yes, I do. And it just showed why he was such a wonderful impersonator. But it showed that in a very strange way because he'd overslept. And his chauffer Bert said, sorry, boys, Peter's overslept. I'll make you coffee. He'll be out in a bit. And we just sat there sipping coffee. And when Peter came out, he was still in his dressing gown or his robe. And he was apologizing for having overslept, but apologizing in a voice that was not his own. And suddenly, he switched into a rather sort of plumy upper-class voice and was talking to us like this as he walked towards us. And at a moment, he was talking a bit like that. And then he went into another voice, sat on the sofa and 10 seconds later, he was talking to us in his own voice. And see, we were the first persons that he'd spoken to that morning. He'd only just been up a few minutes. And we realized when Graham and I - Graham Chapman and I - sort of compared notes afterwards, we realized that Peter Sellers in the morning had to find his own voice. DAVIES: So he wasn't trying to impress you. It's like somebody tuning in... CLEESE: No, no... DAVIES: ...A radio dial and finding the station. CLEESE: There was a lack of real personality at his core. And the people who were very good impressionists are often rather like that. Similarly, people who write very good parodies but don't write such great original comedy, those people often lack a certain emotional life. They're very clever, their observation is good, but emotion doesn't inform their work in any way. So their work tends to be brilliantly observed, but not very - what's the word? - not very powerful. They don't tend to be terribly funny. They tend to be terribly clever. So this kind of personality type - a person who has a weak sense of their own identity - they're frightfully good at copying other people, whether it's other writers or other performers. But we realized that Peter literally had to find his own voice in the morning. And to that extent, he was a sort of personality that he'd had to manufacture himself from different parts. And I - one of the Pythons was ever so slightly like that. And we could always tell when he had been spending time with one of his Beatles friends because he would have a slight Liverpool accent for the next 24 hours."