did you ever stop to think people are reading this sentence in different accents
Tags:
#yes #yes I have #well not this sentence specifically #but I have wondered what my writing sounds like to my friends #particularly my British friends #(I think most of the ones with significantly different accents are British) #perhaps there are people reading this to whom it sounds like nothing at all #it is possible to lack a mind’s eye #(the obvious way is by being blind since before one’s earliest memories) #(but it is also possible to lack a mind’s eye while still having ordinary sight) #I expect it is also possible to lack a mind’s ear #accents #tag rambles #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see
but me and my sister both live in yorkshire (I live in North and she lives in South) and she has to talk slowly when she comes to the north because no-one can understand a word she says, so there’s deviations of accents within accents.
Spread out all over the fucking place but more prevalent in the South: RP (which is what Murricans think of as a “British Accent” even though it’s a minority of the English that have it let alone the British)
I’ve lived in the UK for more than half my life, certainly my entire adult life, and I still can’t successfully ID all the accents there are here. I’m sometimes mortifyingly wrong, but less so now.
There’s way more than two Welsh accents. How can you categorize it as ‘Welsh’ or ‘Cardiff’? The accent in Caernarfon is completely different to the accent in Wrexham, so that’s at least four. Then the accent of Ceredigion is different again. Five. The Welsh hill farming accent is different to the Welsh mining accent (North/South divide.) People in Penmaenmawr sound different to people in Llanfairfechan and there’s a 7 minute drive between them.
This! Even if you’re grouping similar Welsh accents together, there’s at LEAST one in the North and one in the South. Cool map though!
Are there actually people who honestly believe there is only one British accent, or is that a myth? Whenever I see people claim Americans think there’s only one, they always use the existence of the phrase “British accent” as their evidence.
Yes, I say “British accent”. Thing is, it’s not that I don’t know there are a zillion different accents in Britain. It’s that I don’t know what they’re called, and so am forced to use “British accent” as an umbrella term because I don’t have the words to describe them more specifically except perhaps by comparison (“it was a Dave-Lister-y sort of voice*”).
*And even having heard that this is a Liverpool accent, I would still describe it by comparison if I could possibly get away with it. I don’t entirely trust my source on where Lister’s accent is from, nor do I trust Liverpool to have only one accent.
It was easier to make the words come out once I tried it in the second-most-secluded place in my house rather than going to the third-most-secluded. (The most secluded place is the Death Trap Room, a part of the attic whose door can only be opened from the outside. No way in hell am I setting more than one foot in there without use of the buddy system, and since the point was to make sure my family couldn’t hear me (so I wouldn’t have that awkwardness)…)
What is it called when you throw toilet paper on a house?
What is a bubbly carbonated drink called?
What do you call gym shoes?
What do you call your grandparents?
What do you call the wheeled contraption in which you carry groceries at the supermarket?
What is the thing you change the TV channel with?
Choose a book and read a passage from it.
Do you think you have an accent?
Be a wizard or a vampire?
Do you know anyone on Tumblr in real life?
End audio post by saying any THREE words you want.
Tags:
#eponymous rose #oh look an original post #can you tell I read this from a script I wrote up last night? #(I can) #(I’m significantly more coherent than usual) #but it was still an accomplishment that I got up enough nerve at all #and once I’d made sure the mic on my MP3 player could pick me up I did it in one take #(I could’ve sworn I was better at L’s than this) #(‘misweading statistics’) #(the following category tags were added retroactively:) #accents #fun wif forn fronting
You may think you speak “Standard English straight out of the dictionary” but when you step away from the Great Lakes you get asked annoying questions like “Are you from Wisconsin?” or “Are you from Chicago?” Chances are you call carbonated drinks “pop.”
“You have a Midland accent” is just another way of saying “you don’t have an accent.” You probably are from the Midland (Pennsylvania, southern Ohio, southern Indiana, southern Illinois, and Missouri) but then for all we know you could be from Florida or Charleston or one of those big southern cities like Atlanta or Dallas. You have a good voice for TV and radio.
68%
The South
63%
The West
51%
North Central
48%
The Inland North
30%
Philadelphia
28%
Boston
23%
The Northeast
Apparently, this is the accent you get when you spend a little less than half your life in NY and a little less than half your life in Minnesota and the rest in the south.
Bizarrely, if you’re English and you speak with a perfect southern, Queen’s English accent, this quiz says that you sound like you’re from the Northeast:
Judging by how you talk you are probably from north Jersey, New York City, Connecticut or Rhode Island. Chances are, if you are from New York City (and not those other places) people would probably be able to tell if they actually heard you speak.
“You have a Midland accent” is just another way of saying “you don’t have an accent.” You probably are from the Midland (Pennsylvania, southern Ohio, southern Indiana, southern Illinois, and Missouri) but then for all we know you could be from Florida or Charleston or one of those big southern cities like Atlanta or Dallas. You have a good voice for TV and radio.
“North Central” is what professional linguists call the Minnesota accent. If you saw “Fargo” you probably didn’t think the characters sounded very out of the ordinary. Outsiders probably mistake you for a Canadian a lot.
Strange, I got Inland North, despite being a lifelong West inhabitant (mid-northern California, Bay Area). I’ve never been asked if I’m from Wisconsin or Chicago, but have been asked if I’m English (I picked up a trace of it from Mom, who picked it up from her grandfather) or Irish (simply due to looks on that one; I don’t sound it at all).
I got Inland North too, but my accent’s actually Standard American – what this quiz calls “Midland”. Mainly it means that people don’t ask me if I’m from a particular area but they do ask me where I’m from a lot, because I never sound like I’m “from around here”.
This is what happens when you have one parent who spent their childhood in the Deep South and the Southwest, one from the Pacific Northwest who spent their young adulthood in Boston, and they met and got married in California and then moved to Indiana to have kids. I think the only major region NOT represented is Tornado Alley.
88% Boston. “You definitely have a Boston accent, even if you think you don’t.”
While my dad is from Massachusetts, all that means is that I’ve had enough exposure to Bostonians from family-reunion-type things to know they sound foreign.
(Next one’s 75% Midland, though.)
(I thought hah-rrible vs. hoh-rrible was an American vs. Canadian thing. When people ask me if I’m an immigrant, I respond “it was a long prah-cess getting here”, which indicates both “yes” and “from America” without explicitly saying either. (Though I admit not everyone picks up on the second part.))
Tags:
#meme #accents #our home and cherished land #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #home of the brave
Brinens and Things 