10 ms·

Everyone Has an Accent

81 points by kilovoltaire 8y ago

kilovoltaire 8y ago
> Worldwide, nonnative speakers of English outnumber natives by a ratio of three to one. I was vaguely aware of this, but hadn't really thought about the numbers.
- delinka 8y ago
  For reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_native_speakers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of... In the event it's not obvious, English is 3rd in terms of native speakers, but you'll need to calculate all the others to compare with all non-native speakers of English.
  - jake-low 8y ago
    Of the languages on this list, here are the subset where non-native (L2) speakers outnumber native (L1) speakers by a factor of two or more: - English (378m L1, 744m L2) - French (77m L1, 208m L2) - Malay (77m L1, 204m L2) - Swahili (16m L1, 82m L2) - Thai (21m L1, 40m L2) Technically Thai isn't quite 2x, but the error bars on these numbers are generally big. Some languages have an opposite distribution, where nearly all of the language's speakers are L1 speakers. Bengali, Japanese, Portuguese, and Wu/Shanghainese are in this category, as well as perhaps Spanish (only ~14% of speakers are L2, which surprised me). Many others fall somewhere in between. This would make an interesting data visualization.
    - geomark 8y ago
      Thailand's population is around 68 million. So they are saying that only about a third of Thais are L1 speakers of Thai? That seems quite strange.
      - jake-low 8y ago
        About 20 million people in northeastern Thailand speak Isan, a dialect of Lao. There's also a long tail of languages spoken in minority communities. Thai is widely spoken in Bangkok but the rural areas are much more of a patchwork in terms of languages used. As I said though, these numbers have large error bars so it's hard to be very certain of what the actual distribution looks like today.
- chiph 8y ago
  Well, there's India. Which sort of blows up the curve, what with their billion-plus population.
  - incompatible 8y ago
    Only a minority speak English.
    - flashman 8y ago
      A 12% minority of one billion[1] is still greater than the combined populations of the UK, Canada, Australia and South Africa. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-speaking_population https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-s...
Panjam 8y ago
As a child I had a strong South African accent, although I could not hear it. I remember visiting some relatives in the north of England and being very surprised by their accents - and saying to my mother, "thank goodness we don't have accents!". I now have an American accent and equally don't hear my accent when I talk, and laughed at a recording I recently heard of my childhood accent.
- igitur 8y ago
  I'm 40 years old and still have a very strong Afrikaans accent. I've made peace with it and actually embrace my accent. Although my English grammar is good and my vocabulary above average I definitely perceive different reactions when I have a discussion with an English South African vs written communication. It frustrates me, and since I realised it I also picked up on how many white people mock black South Africans' English accents. The prejudice will hopefully stop one day.
- Taniwha 8y ago
  I grew up in NZ, lived in Silicon Valley for 20 years starting in my mid 20s, have been back in NZ for 15 years now - I variously have an American/Australian/English/Kiwi accent depending on where I'm being listened to and the general exposure of the person doing the listening to the rest of the world. In fact there's no where on the planet where I don't have an accent, and I'm old enough that this will always be true. I am well and truly screwed.
  - lb1lf 8y ago
    I happen to have a slight Scottish accent, despite never having lived there (or in any other country where English is the dominant language, for that matter.) Reason is simply that when I was a kid, the house next door - the only house next door, this being rural Norway - was purchased by a family from Aberdeen, who'd decided to move to Norway to try something new. If I wanted to play with their kids, I'd better learn some English fast - and the only speakers around were the Scottish kids next door. Incidentally, I now go to Aberdeen for work on a regular basis, and the locals never fail to ask how long I've been living there, seeing as I've started to pick up their accent and all...
tlb 8y ago
The article focuses on how standard an accent is, but to me the main factor is whether it's familiar enough to the listener for nuanced conversation to be understood. All English speakers are familiar with the Western US accent and British RP. But faced with an accent they haven't heard before, they miss nuances. By 'nuances', I'm not talking about literary subtleties. For instance, when you ask if someone can do something and they say "Okaaaaaay...", there's a lot of content in the inflection of the aaaaaay that tells you how likely it is to happen. That content is different for different accents. Since it's a hopeless cause that everyone will learn to speak with the same accent, people working in global businesses should learn to understand the major world accents. It seems like an order of magnitude less work to understand an accent than to speak it. In the tech world, it's pretty useful to be able to understand Hindi, Mandarin, French, German, Spanish, Russian, Australian, Singapore, Israeli, and Filipino accents.
dbelchamber 8y ago
This is definitely useful to keep in mind, but I think one point that might not be represented adequately is the utility of a standard. I understand that there are difficulties for people speaking in a nonnative accent, but there is also actual value in being close to standard and having less accents considered standard. When many people are specializing in many things, having a standard way of speaking allows us to more quickly understand one another and skip the basics. The judgement that I personally make when I hear a non-standard accent is not that they are lower in status; it's simply that it will take more work on my end to understand them, and thus I'm less inclined to deal with them in particular because of the language barrier and my being lazy.
- DonaldPShimoda 8y ago
  > The judgement that I personally make when I hear a non-standard accent is not that they are lower in status; it's simply that it will take more work on my end to understand them, and thus I'm less inclined to deal with them in particular because of the language barrier and my being lazy. Not everybody understands this. There are plenty of people in the US who think Southerners are stupid just because of their accent, or who look poorly upon speakers of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) simply because of the perceived difference in class, regardless of actual education or intellectual capability. It's terribly unfortunate, but pop culture often leans into the stereotypes, reinforcing the perception of a class distinction. Additionally, I think your decision to still avoid non-native speakers is somewhat disappointing. How are they (non-native speakers) supposed to get better if nobody will interact with them? A native accent comes from a combination of things (fluency, confidence, and exposure to the accent itself). Choosing not to interact with them prevents them from being exposed, and it also lessens their confidence. It's super obvious when a native speaker is just trying to get away from a situation like that, and I can only imagine how disheartening it would be to be the non-native speaker in such a situation.
  - dhon_ 8y ago
    I've heard a theory that the slow southern accent was due to a hookworm outbreak. So maybe historically at least there was some validity in the assumption. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/next/nature/how-a-worm-gave-the-south-a-bad-name/ http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/next/nature/how-a-worm-gave-the...
brlewis 8y ago
My family back in Madrid would have a hard time understanding the Spanish of my English-speaking students in my first-semester classroom. There's good reason for this. In English, if you pronounce a vowel wrong or leave it out, you have an accent. If you pronounce a consonant wrong or leave it out, you're unintelligible. Spanish is closer to the reverse, where the vowels are essential and the consonants are supplemental. If you're native to one language you'll need a lot of pronunciation drills to get good at the other.
- kevinmchugh 8y ago
  > If you pronounce a consonant wrong or leave it out, you're unintelligible I don't know anything about Spanish but this seems like an overgeneralization for English. There's rhotic and non-rhotic accents. Public figures start dropping their gs to appear folksy. My dad's side of the family says "the" as "da" and they're understood if occasionally lightly mocked.
  - brlewis 8y ago
    I'm overgeneralizing both on the English side and the Spanish side. But there's enough truth in my description to cause speakers of one language to focus on the wrong parts of pronouncing the other language.
zwieback 8y ago
It's not just foreign accents that might lead to discrimination. After 25 years in the US I still have a German accent but I'm pretty sure that's less of a liability than a southern or african american accent (or vernacular, probably), at least on the coasts where I'd be likely to job-hunt.
sevensor 8y ago
I've lived in enough different parts of the U.S. that I've lost track of what sounds the vowels are supposed to make. I sound odd wherever I am.
- rascul 8y ago
  I can relate. I've lived in many areas of the US, and picked up bits and pieces of accents from here and there. I'll even pronounce the same word differently at times without even realizing it, the most notable word being creek, pronounced either "creek" or "crik". I'm liable to pronounce it both ways in the same sentence!
ACow_Adonis 8y ago
>that nobody hearing their American accents presumes that they are less capable, less ambitious or less honest than if their R’s had a nicer trill I don't know if i'd say...less capable personally, but I'm a Urban-Modern-Australian english speaker, as distinct from what I'll call the lower-class suburban australian, rural-strine, or "snooty adeladian-recieved". I've included 4 accents there where most older australian academic literature seems to recognise 3, and I'm not including the various ethno-tinges based on how you might pronounce the phrase "fully-sick sub-woofer" for example. I've been personally told my accent sounds "upper-class and educated" from an american perspective, which I find hilarious considering I think i sound like an absolute bogan whenever in the presence of americans/english. However, I've also been told by non-english speaking persons that they really like the way myself and my wife speak: something to do with clear annunciation or something. Anyway, back to the main point: I question whether this is true, because you can bet I pick up on and have various aesthetic opinions on the various english accents. I find it very hard to believe that there are not connotations attached to how various english speakers speak and pronounce other languages. This would make english some kind of "magical" language that overcomes social-regional-contextual interpretation, and I simply do not believe that can be the case. And i know enough american friend's experiences overseas. I know there were parts/towns of the middle east while travelling I was advised not to stay in for very long with my accent, and I am well aware of the general advice for certain american accents to take advantage of the ambiguity and identify as canadian while travelling. For the record, the non-exhaustive list of accents I identify and their subjective opinion are something along the lines of (keeping in mind, I'm not saying these are my explicit-acted on opinions, they're the subjective-connotations I recognise them as carrying in my own subculture): > Californian: loud, extroverted, a little bit of extroverted stupidity, annoying. > New-york: loud, extroverted, annoying in a different way. > Boston-twang: personally, a bit humorous, not exactly intellectual (park the car in the harvard yard) > Various-southern US: slow, naive but friendly > English-RP: snooty, but never hear anyone who actually talks like this, except on some BBC programs, where sometimes it comes across as a bit comical like someone's taking the piss. > English-other: pretty friendly/approachable in general, obviously can't list all the many english-native accents > Scottish: cool, though stronger ones border on unintelligible until you get used to it > Irish: extremely cool + attractive > New Zealand: its practically urban-australian except for a handful of fish and chips-esque give-aways, basically one of us > Wog-english (using the term in a friendly way, not as a put-down): generally to cover the greek, lebanese, italian accents. Does have lower-middle class connotations for better or worse.
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Jonovono 8y ago
I've been trying to make my own accent. I sometimes hear people pronounce things differently and prefer that way so I start trying to say it that way. I guess less of an accent more just preferred pronunciations.
- jobigoud 8y ago
  I also do this. There are some words that I prefer to pronounce as Brittish English for emphasis.
tweedledee 8y ago
Accents are also a class signal. Given that it’s easier to adjust your accent than to change people’s opinion on them, it’s probably worth maki g the effort to soften up the accent.
dccoolgai 8y ago
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/is-there-a-place-in-america-where-people-speak-without-accents https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/is-there-a-place-in-am...
staunch 8y ago
I consider it a point of pride that I can understand virtually anyone speaking English no matter how strong their accent is. I assume it's from being around a lot of people that learned English as a second language. It would make sense that one of the factors that has made English successful is that it's very forgiving of varying pronunciations. Some other languages are much more precise. But it does often require a lot more effort to understand someone speaking with a heavy accent. A really great podcast, History on Fire, is hard for me to listen to because the author has a strong Italian accent. I can understand it perfectly well but it's mentally exhausting so I don't listen regularly. I consider it a shame because I like the content.
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incadenza 8y ago
As much as I agree, let’s obviously not judge people based on accents, I find this a bit ridiculous. I can’t help but raise an eyebrow at the idea of visiting let’s say France, completely butchering pronunciations, and then claiming that anybody who corrects me just has a different accent. There’s obviously more or less correct ways to speak a language...

81 points by kilovoltaire 8y ago

> Worldwide, nonnative speakers of English outnumber natives by a ratio of three to one. I was vaguely aware of this, but hadn't really thought about the numbers.

delinka 8y ago
For reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_native_speakers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of... In the event it's not obvious, English is 3rd in terms of native speakers, but you'll need to calculate all the others to compare with all non-native speakers of English.
- jake-low 8y ago
  Of the languages on this list, here are the subset where non-native (L2) speakers outnumber native (L1) speakers by a factor of two or more: - English (378m L1, 744m L2) - French (77m L1, 208m L2) - Malay (77m L1, 204m L2) - Swahili (16m L1, 82m L2) - Thai (21m L1, 40m L2) Technically Thai isn't quite 2x, but the error bars on these numbers are generally big. Some languages have an opposite distribution, where nearly all of the language's speakers are L1 speakers. Bengali, Japanese, Portuguese, and Wu/Shanghainese are in this category, as well as perhaps Spanish (only ~14% of speakers are L2, which surprised me). Many others fall somewhere in between. This would make an interesting data visualization.
  - geomark 8y ago
    Thailand's population is around 68 million. So they are saying that only about a third of Thais are L1 speakers of Thai? That seems quite strange.
    - jake-low 8y ago
      About 20 million people in northeastern Thailand speak Isan, a dialect of Lao. There's also a long tail of languages spoken in minority communities. Thai is widely spoken in Bangkok but the rural areas are much more of a patchwork in terms of languages used. As I said though, these numbers have large error bars so it's hard to be very certain of what the actual distribution looks like today.
chiph 8y ago
Well, there's India. Which sort of blows up the curve, what with their billion-plus population.
- incompatible 8y ago
  Only a minority speak English.
  - flashman 8y ago
    A 12% minority of one billion[1] is still greater than the combined populations of the UK, Canada, Australia and South Africa. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-speaking_population https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-s...

Panjam 8y ago

As a child I had a strong South African accent, although I could not hear it. I remember visiting some relatives in the north of England and being very surprised by their accents - and saying to my mother, "thank goodness we don't have accents!". I now have an American accent and equally don't hear my accent when I talk, and laughed at a recording I recently heard of my childhood accent.

igitur 8y ago
I'm 40 years old and still have a very strong Afrikaans accent. I've made peace with it and actually embrace my accent. Although my English grammar is good and my vocabulary above average I definitely perceive different reactions when I have a discussion with an English South African vs written communication. It frustrates me, and since I realised it I also picked up on how many white people mock black South Africans' English accents. The prejudice will hopefully stop one day.
Taniwha 8y ago
I grew up in NZ, lived in Silicon Valley for 20 years starting in my mid 20s, have been back in NZ for 15 years now - I variously have an American/Australian/English/Kiwi accent depending on where I'm being listened to and the general exposure of the person doing the listening to the rest of the world. In fact there's no where on the planet where I don't have an accent, and I'm old enough that this will always be true. I am well and truly screwed.
- lb1lf 8y ago
  I happen to have a slight Scottish accent, despite never having lived there (or in any other country where English is the dominant language, for that matter.) Reason is simply that when I was a kid, the house next door - the only house next door, this being rural Norway - was purchased by a family from Aberdeen, who'd decided to move to Norway to try something new. If I wanted to play with their kids, I'd better learn some English fast - and the only speakers around were the Scottish kids next door. Incidentally, I now go to Aberdeen for work on a regular basis, and the locals never fail to ask how long I've been living there, seeing as I've started to pick up their accent and all...

tlb 8y ago

The article focuses on how standard an accent is, but to me the main factor is whether it's familiar enough to the listener for nuanced conversation to be understood. All English speakers are familiar with the Western US accent and British RP. But faced with an accent they haven't heard before, they miss nuances. By 'nuances', I'm not talking about literary subtleties. For instance, when you ask if someone can do something and they say "Okaaaaaay...", there's a lot of content in the inflection of the aaaaaay that tells you how likely it is to happen. That content is different for different accents. Since it's a hopeless cause that everyone will learn to speak with the same accent, people working in global businesses should learn to understand the major world accents. It seems like an order of magnitude less work to understand an accent than to speak it. In the tech world, it's pretty useful to be able to understand Hindi, Mandarin, French, German, Spanish, Russian, Australian, Singapore, Israeli, and Filipino accents.

dbelchamber 8y ago

This is definitely useful to keep in mind, but I think one point that might not be represented adequately is the utility of a standard. I understand that there are difficulties for people speaking in a nonnative accent, but there is also actual value in being close to standard and having less accents considered standard. When many people are specializing in many things, having a standard way of speaking allows us to more quickly understand one another and skip the basics. The judgement that I personally make when I hear a non-standard accent is not that they are lower in status; it's simply that it will take more work on my end to understand them, and thus I'm less inclined to deal with them in particular because of the language barrier and my being lazy.

DonaldPShimoda 8y ago
> The judgement that I personally make when I hear a non-standard accent is not that they are lower in status; it's simply that it will take more work on my end to understand them, and thus I'm less inclined to deal with them in particular because of the language barrier and my being lazy. Not everybody understands this. There are plenty of people in the US who think Southerners are stupid just because of their accent, or who look poorly upon speakers of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) simply because of the perceived difference in class, regardless of actual education or intellectual capability. It's terribly unfortunate, but pop culture often leans into the stereotypes, reinforcing the perception of a class distinction. Additionally, I think your decision to still avoid non-native speakers is somewhat disappointing. How are they (non-native speakers) supposed to get better if nobody will interact with them? A native accent comes from a combination of things (fluency, confidence, and exposure to the accent itself). Choosing not to interact with them prevents them from being exposed, and it also lessens their confidence. It's super obvious when a native speaker is just trying to get away from a situation like that, and I can only imagine how disheartening it would be to be the non-native speaker in such a situation.
- dhon_ 8y ago
  I've heard a theory that the slow southern accent was due to a hookworm outbreak. So maybe historically at least there was some validity in the assumption. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/next/nature/how-a-worm-gave-the-south-a-bad-name/ http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/next/nature/how-a-worm-gave-the...

brlewis 8y ago

My family back in Madrid would have a hard time understanding the Spanish of my English-speaking students in my first-semester classroom. There's good reason for this. In English, if you pronounce a vowel wrong or leave it out, you have an accent. If you pronounce a consonant wrong or leave it out, you're unintelligible. Spanish is closer to the reverse, where the vowels are essential and the consonants are supplemental. If you're native to one language you'll need a lot of pronunciation drills to get good at the other.

kevinmchugh 8y ago
> If you pronounce a consonant wrong or leave it out, you're unintelligible I don't know anything about Spanish but this seems like an overgeneralization for English. There's rhotic and non-rhotic accents. Public figures start dropping their gs to appear folksy. My dad's side of the family says "the" as "da" and they're understood if occasionally lightly mocked.
- brlewis 8y ago
  I'm overgeneralizing both on the English side and the Spanish side. But there's enough truth in my description to cause speakers of one language to focus on the wrong parts of pronouncing the other language.

zwieback 8y ago

It's not just foreign accents that might lead to discrimination. After 25 years in the US I still have a German accent but I'm pretty sure that's less of a liability than a southern or african american accent (or vernacular, probably), at least on the coasts where I'd be likely to job-hunt.

sevensor 8y ago

I've lived in enough different parts of the U.S. that I've lost track of what sounds the vowels are supposed to make. I sound odd wherever I am.

rascul 8y ago
I can relate. I've lived in many areas of the US, and picked up bits and pieces of accents from here and there. I'll even pronounce the same word differently at times without even realizing it, the most notable word being creek, pronounced either "creek" or "crik". I'm liable to pronounce it both ways in the same sentence!

ACow_Adonis 8y ago

>that nobody hearing their American accents presumes that they are less capable, less ambitious or less honest than if their R’s had a nicer trill I don't know if i'd say...less capable personally, but I'm a Urban-Modern-Australian english speaker, as distinct from what I'll call the lower-class suburban australian, rural-strine, or "snooty adeladian-recieved". I've included 4 accents there where most older australian academic literature seems to recognise 3, and I'm not including the various ethno-tinges based on how you might pronounce the phrase "fully-sick sub-woofer" for example. I've been personally told my accent sounds "upper-class and educated" from an american perspective, which I find hilarious considering I think i sound like an absolute bogan whenever in the presence of americans/english. However, I've also been told by non-english speaking persons that they really like the way myself and my wife speak: something to do with clear annunciation or something. Anyway, back to the main point: I question whether this is true, because you can bet I pick up on and have various aesthetic opinions on the various english accents. I find it very hard to believe that there are not connotations attached to how various english speakers speak and pronounce other languages. This would make english some kind of "magical" language that overcomes social-regional-contextual interpretation, and I simply do not believe that can be the case. And i know enough american friend's experiences overseas. I know there were parts/towns of the middle east while travelling I was advised not to stay in for very long with my accent, and I am well aware of the general advice for certain american accents to take advantage of the ambiguity and identify as canadian while travelling. For the record, the non-exhaustive list of accents I identify and their subjective opinion are something along the lines of (keeping in mind, I'm not saying these are my explicit-acted on opinions, they're the subjective-connotations I recognise them as carrying in my own subculture): > Californian: loud, extroverted, a little bit of extroverted stupidity, annoying. > New-york: loud, extroverted, annoying in a different way. > Boston-twang: personally, a bit humorous, not exactly intellectual (park the car in the harvard yard) > Various-southern US: slow, naive but friendly > English-RP: snooty, but never hear anyone who actually talks like this, except on some BBC programs, where sometimes it comes across as a bit comical like someone's taking the piss. > English-other: pretty friendly/approachable in general, obviously can't list all the many english-native accents > Scottish: cool, though stronger ones border on unintelligible until you get used to it > Irish: extremely cool + attractive > New Zealand: its practically urban-australian except for a handful of fish and chips-esque give-aways, basically one of us > Wog-english (using the term in a friendly way, not as a put-down): generally to cover the greek, lebanese, italian accents. Does have lower-middle class connotations for better or worse.

deleted 8y ago

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Jonovono 8y ago

I've been trying to make my own accent. I sometimes hear people pronounce things differently and prefer that way so I start trying to say it that way. I guess less of an accent more just preferred pronunciations.

jobigoud 8y ago
I also do this. There are some words that I prefer to pronounce as Brittish English for emphasis.

tweedledee 8y ago

Accents are also a class signal. Given that it’s easier to adjust your accent than to change people’s opinion on them, it’s probably worth maki g the effort to soften up the accent.

dccoolgai 8y ago

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/is-there-a-place-in-america-where-people-speak-without-accents https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/is-there-a-place-in-am...

staunch 8y ago

I consider it a point of pride that I can understand virtually anyone speaking English no matter how strong their accent is. I assume it's from being around a lot of people that learned English as a second language. It would make sense that one of the factors that has made English successful is that it's very forgiving of varying pronunciations. Some other languages are much more precise. But it does often require a lot more effort to understand someone speaking with a heavy accent. A really great podcast, History on Fire, is hard for me to listen to because the author has a strong Italian accent. I can understand it perfectly well but it's mentally exhausting so I don't listen regularly. I consider it a shame because I like the content.

deleted 8y ago

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incadenza 8y ago

As much as I agree, let’s obviously not judge people based on accents, I find this a bit ridiculous. I can’t help but raise an eyebrow at the idea of visiting let’s say France, completely butchering pronunciations, and then claiming that anybody who corrects me just has a different accent. There’s obviously more or less correct ways to speak a language...