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This is fairly useless nitpicking in this context – he's talking about a non-native English speaker, who has learned English to the point that her accent is nea
by numeri 5y ago
This is fairly useless nitpicking in this context – he's talking about a non-native English speaker, who has learned English to the point that her accent is nearly indistinguishable from some native English accent. This is a very common, and very well understood use of accentless (in the context of non-native speakers).
- jhugo 5y agoInteresting. I've always been confused by "accentless", and since I had only heard the term used by Americans, had always interpreted it the same uncharitable way as GP. Your interpretation makes much more sense. TIL!
- dhosek 5y agoThis, exactly. If I would have to identify an accent it would be television news anchor, the sort of speech which lacks any distinctive regional indicators. I did student teaching at a high school a mile and a half away from the high school I attended just outside Chicago. I remember the students (mostly Mexican-American) mocking how I said “root” (and other oo-words) where I use the short o͝o sound rather than the long o͞o sound of, e.g., boot. Everyone I grew up with (except my Mom who was born in Western Pennsylvania), pronounces these words the same as I do, but the changes in the demographics of the area (from mostly Slavs, Italians and some Greeks and Serbs to mostly Latino) have also changed the micro-regional accent as well. It is interesting to note that Barack Obama, despite his cosmopolitan upbringing, has acquired the Chicago habit of truncating a lot of vowels to schwas so he will, for example, say “tuh” for “to.” Then again, I’ve picked up a lot of L.A. regionalisms in my own speech thanks to living there for 18 years of my life (the most notable is saying freeway rather than expressway).