Okay, we were talking and got curious, so I’m going to post this sample and ask for your input.
From what you can hear in this recording, where do you think this person is from?
(Apologies for poor audio quality.)
@injygo replied: ‘instinctively, I think “lives in Minnesota but family is Irish”’
Huh, interesting. That is not any of the answers I was expecting.
(Everyone else: please submit a guess first before reading below the cut, as there are spoilers.)
Before seeing your response, I’d have phrased the real answer as “southern New Jersey (far enough south not to be Joisey), moved to Ontario but late enough not to have much effect, subconsciously overcorrecting her accent and ending up more British than the British guy whose song she is singing”. (Although to be fair, British guy is probably at least somewhat attempting to sound American, so that gets complicated. And everyone sounds American if I listen to them long enough†, so I’m likely to underestimate how British Phil Collins sounds anyway.)
(The “we” in “we were talking” is me and my, ah, *friend*, as in “so my, ah, *friend* is having this problem…”. I just wanted to make it slightly less obvious that it was me, to encourage people not to factor in stuff they already know about me when deciding.)
What does a Minnesota accent even sound like? *looks up some examples*
Apparently it’s similar to “rural Canadian”. Hmm. Possibly Ontario has had more influence on my voice than I thought? I wonder if my brain is doing the “this voice is familiar and therefore normal and therefore American” trick to its own sound output.
(I wonder if I should try doing the accent meme again…)
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†I think my brain gets like “ah, this voice is familiar, so therefore normal”, but without changing its definition of what “normal” means.
Tags:
#replies #accents #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #(the following category tags were added retroactively:) #home of the brave #our home and cherished land
Brinens and Things 
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