6 ms·

I'm a native English speaker, but I'm from Texas, and as a kid I tended to talk really fast and mumble: if you've ever seen the show King Of the Hill, I talked

I'm a native English speaker, but I'm from Texas, and as a kid I tended to talk really fast and mumble: if you've ever seen the show King Of the Hill, I talked like Boomhauer. I deliberately trained myself to speak with a neutral American accent - probably what you mean by a West Coast accent - by watching particular actors and practicing - in private - speaking like them. In particular, for me, it was John Malkovich, who has perfect diction and enunciation. This was in my teens and it took a couple of years, but it paid off. Nobody can tell where I'm from now, though people mostly assume California. I still say "y'all" but I say it with no Texan drawl, which sounds a bit odd to people, I think. Just find people who speak the way you want to speak and watch them, listen to them, try to repeat things they say until you've got the accent down. At first it'll seem embarrassing, even if you're alone, and you'll find yourself feeling like a pretentious poseur for a while, but eventually you won't. It'll just be how you speak English.

anonymousDan 4y ago
For what it's worth, I would take a beautiful Texan drawl all day every day over most other American accents (which tend to sound really nasally)!
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
willcipriano 4y ago
Were you the guy who left this voicemail for Mike Judge? https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kiwgG6T9se0 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kiwgG6T9se0
d23 4y ago
For me (also from the south), specifically, it was about identifying the sounds that I usually misspoke. Dragging vowels out was one obvious one, but one I literally couldn’t hear at first was e.g. the difference between “pen” and “pin”. That one took a lot of practice and I still have to think about it occasionally for multisyllabic words I’m not sure how to spell.
glmeece 4y ago
I grew up in SoCal (NW Orange County - in between Seal Beach & Los Alamitos), but my mom's family hailed from near Texarkana, TX. I can still recall one of my second cousins asking me, in a very Southern accent: "Gregory Lee - whaay dew yew tokk so fuunny?" It was the first time it occurred to me that I had an accent. I've reconnected with her on social media and talked to her a couple of times. Her accent has flattened out, but I still get a chuckle about that exchange.
- stavros 4y ago
  > It was the first time it occurred to me that I had an accent. As a non-native speaker, it's funny to me that some people think they don't have an accent. An accent is just the way you talk, if you speak, you have an accent. What everyone seems to think an accent is, is "this person has a different accent from mine, therefore they have an accent". It's like seeing a blond person for the first time in your life and saying "it never occurred to me I had a hair color".
dctoedt 4y ago
> I'm from Texas A relative grew up in Minnesota but moved to Dallas as a young adult and ended up with a mixture — now there was an accent! (The MN part is now more or less gone.)
rendall 4y ago
> I still say "y'all" but I say it with no Texan drawl, which sounds a bit odd to people, I think. We say it in Western Massachusetts, but it's clipped, more like "Can I help yal?"
- kibwen 4y ago
  Calling it now, in ten years "y'all" will be a standard fixture of every American English dialect and nobody born after 2020 will bat an eye at it. It's just a great word, distinct in semantic utility and satisfying to enunciate. Even as a Pittsburgher with a license to "yinz" I still say "y'all".
  - davidgh 4y ago
    Agree. “Ya’ll” is linguistically necessary in English since the word “ye” was deprecated. A common alternative to remove ambiguity between singular and plural “you” in some parts of the US is “you guys”.
    - wrycoder 4y ago
      Then, there’s all y’all.
    - rendall 4y ago
      English has "thou", which was the singular second person pronoun, and "you" which was the plural second person pronoun, but also used as a more formal, polite singular second person pronoun. Through a kind of formality inflation, everyone started using "you" all the time and abandoned "thou". Contemporary standard English doesn't have a plural second person pronoun, but needs one, and so "y'all" (or "ya'll") is being used now in some regions.
    - gnubison 4y ago
      “Ye” is just the nominative case (like “I” vs. “me” being accusative), it has nothing to do with number. Thou/thee is the one with number.
theophrastus 4y ago
As more of a story of external impressions, i'm from Seattle and I postdoc'ed in Germany and I got more than my share of the opinion on English from those who could speak English there (damn near 100% at a University). The first problem they had was placing my accent; they couldn't. Finally they concluded that i was some-sort of Canadian (which is pretty accurate). Then they did their own versions of U.S. accents. Almost universally these divided into New York and Texan. Their impression of the states, based on either vacationers or hollywood, confirmed their view that people from the U.S. were either loud with a Texas accent or loud with a New York accent. We decided that it was a natural sampling bias based on the overhearing of the loudness.
clairity 4y ago
the easiest way is to be around people who speak the way you want. my accent has changed multiple times in my life as i moved to different parts of the country (south, east, west). none of it was conscious doing. of course the hard part of that is the moving, but the internet lets you find people around the world to listen to and even talk with. that said, i wouldn't even worry about your accent. oftentimes, it's a great piece of conversation fodder, and a connection to your past that you take with you where ever you go.
horns4lyfe 4y ago
That’s funny, I grew up in west Texas and had the same accent. Interestingly, after living in Austin for a few years it was completely gone
- jiaaro 4y ago
  I live in Austin, and I frequently have to tell people I know, especially people from New York, that hardly anyone here talks the way they expect (I lived in New York for a long time before Austin). A related misconception: thinking it’s a desert.

anonymousDan 4y ago

For what it's worth, I would take a beautiful Texan drawl all day every day over most other American accents (which tend to sound really nasally)!

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

willcipriano 4y ago

Were you the guy who left this voicemail for Mike Judge? https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kiwgG6T9se0 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kiwgG6T9se0

d23 4y ago

For me (also from the south), specifically, it was about identifying the sounds that I usually misspoke. Dragging vowels out was one obvious one, but one I literally couldn’t hear at first was e.g. the difference between “pen” and “pin”. That one took a lot of practice and I still have to think about it occasionally for multisyllabic words I’m not sure how to spell.

glmeece 4y ago

I grew up in SoCal (NW Orange County - in between Seal Beach & Los Alamitos), but my mom's family hailed from near Texarkana, TX. I can still recall one of my second cousins asking me, in a very Southern accent: "Gregory Lee - whaay dew yew tokk so fuunny?" It was the first time it occurred to me that I had an accent. I've reconnected with her on social media and talked to her a couple of times. Her accent has flattened out, but I still get a chuckle about that exchange.

stavros 4y ago
> It was the first time it occurred to me that I had an accent. As a non-native speaker, it's funny to me that some people think they don't have an accent. An accent is just the way you talk, if you speak, you have an accent. What everyone seems to think an accent is, is "this person has a different accent from mine, therefore they have an accent". It's like seeing a blond person for the first time in your life and saying "it never occurred to me I had a hair color".

dctoedt 4y ago

> I'm from Texas A relative grew up in Minnesota but moved to Dallas as a young adult and ended up with a mixture — now there was an accent! (The MN part is now more or less gone.)

rendall 4y ago

> I still say "y'all" but I say it with no Texan drawl, which sounds a bit odd to people, I think. We say it in Western Massachusetts, but it's clipped, more like "Can I help yal?"

kibwen 4y ago
Calling it now, in ten years "y'all" will be a standard fixture of every American English dialect and nobody born after 2020 will bat an eye at it. It's just a great word, distinct in semantic utility and satisfying to enunciate. Even as a Pittsburgher with a license to "yinz" I still say "y'all".
- davidgh 4y ago
  Agree. “Ya’ll” is linguistically necessary in English since the word “ye” was deprecated. A common alternative to remove ambiguity between singular and plural “you” in some parts of the US is “you guys”.
  - wrycoder 4y ago
    Then, there’s all y’all.
  - rendall 4y ago
    English has "thou", which was the singular second person pronoun, and "you" which was the plural second person pronoun, but also used as a more formal, polite singular second person pronoun. Through a kind of formality inflation, everyone started using "you" all the time and abandoned "thou". Contemporary standard English doesn't have a plural second person pronoun, but needs one, and so "y'all" (or "ya'll") is being used now in some regions.
  - gnubison 4y ago
    “Ye” is just the nominative case (like “I” vs. “me” being accusative), it has nothing to do with number. Thou/thee is the one with number.

theophrastus 4y ago

As more of a story of external impressions, i'm from Seattle and I postdoc'ed in Germany and I got more than my share of the opinion on English from those who could speak English there (damn near 100% at a University). The first problem they had was placing my accent; they couldn't. Finally they concluded that i was some-sort of Canadian (which is pretty accurate). Then they did their own versions of U.S. accents. Almost universally these divided into New York and Texan. Their impression of the states, based on either vacationers or hollywood, confirmed their view that people from the U.S. were either loud with a Texas accent or loud with a New York accent. We decided that it was a natural sampling bias based on the overhearing of the loudness.

clairity 4y ago

the easiest way is to be around people who speak the way you want. my accent has changed multiple times in my life as i moved to different parts of the country (south, east, west). none of it was conscious doing. of course the hard part of that is the moving, but the internet lets you find people around the world to listen to and even talk with. that said, i wouldn't even worry about your accent. oftentimes, it's a great piece of conversation fodder, and a connection to your past that you take with you where ever you go.

horns4lyfe 4y ago

That’s funny, I grew up in west Texas and had the same accent. Interestingly, after living in Austin for a few years it was completely gone

jiaaro 4y ago
I live in Austin, and I frequently have to tell people I know, especially people from New York, that hardly anyone here talks the way they expect (I lived in New York for a long time before Austin). A related misconception: thinking it’s a desert.