Accents

Gisella

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mjfriel said:
Gisella said:
Damn you are a devil woman! Since I was a hormone-charged pubescent I have had an overriding passion for Brazilians. Even had a picture of exquisite Brazilian form inside my locker. Pity the distance is so great, but the language of excess is universal! Can you mime putting a drink to your lips or a straw to your nose? Then I am sure there wold be no problems with communication! Certainly no underwear issues.

:cool:

Ops...me devil woman ??? :eek: Please do not curse me!!! :tongue:

I cant drink to my nose..sorry...i dont drink much at all just couple of margaritas once in a while and i hate beer...my wisky must be preper with coconut water ice cubes though...

My next visit to England i may go to Scotland...the land of comando kilts!!!:wink:
 

mjfriel

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My next visit to England i may go to Scotland...the land of comando kilts!!!:wink:[/quote

You must! make sure they know you are Brazilian and you will be well taken care of. Just get a bit of practice with the drinking as it is how we welcome people to our rain-soaked little country. If you are not drunk, we assume you are not having fun. Go figure!
 

Nelly Gay

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missbec said:
A thought that occurred to me today: How can American and Australian accents be different yet we speak the same language, not considering some spelling differences?

The same applies to Glasgow, Birmingham, Liverpool, Cockney accents which are all "English" but vary tremendously in delivery !
 

Gisella

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senor rubirosa said:
Is your cabinet large enough? Hehehehe.

Just joking.:smile:

How did you learn English, BTW?

Well...i'm learning as u can notice...:biggrin1: on the streets mostly...working as immigrant...very little opportunity to go learn proper in classes and etc...now i'm lazy..best way is to have native bf and talk with him...:wink:

My files are kind of dusty and a mess...i have to travel more for sure.
 

DC_DEEP

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Most languages are constantly evolving. The local influences will generally dictate what direction those accents and dialects take themselves. Physical and social isolation tends to diminish some types of changes, and emphasize others.

Senor Rubirosa, you are correct. It's funny that so many people who enjoy making fun of what they would call "hillbilly" dialect (especially that of Appalachia and Ozark) are unaware that it is in fact much more similar to the spoken English common in England circa early to mid 17th century... not too terribly different from what would have been heard among theatre-goers at the Globe or the first settlers who landed at Plymouth Rock or in Jamestown. Yes, Londoners did pronounce "victuals" as "vittles", and "creatures" as "critters."

I'm sure that the aboriginal language influence, plus the physical isolation, contributed to the unique Aussie accent (which, to me, sounds about as "British" as does "American"...) and probably the same is true with Afrikaans and Dutch (I actually had a native Niederlander tell me that the only difference between Dutch and Afrikaans was the name, but I doubt that...)
 

D_Gunther Snotpole

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DC_DEEP said:
Senor Rubirosa, you are correct. It's funny that so many people who enjoy making fun of what they would call "hillbilly" dialect (especially that of Appalachia and Ozark) are unaware that it is in fact much more similar to the spoken English common in England circa early to mid 17th century... not too terribly different from what would have been heard among theatre-goers at the Globe or the first settlers who landed at Plymouth Rock or in Jamestown. Yes, Londoners did pronounce "victuals" as "vittles", and "creatures" as "critters."

Exactly, DC_DEEP. Appalachia.
Thank you for the reminder.:smile:
 

headbang8

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BigPoppaFury said:
I think accents just tend to form naturally over a couple of generations. I hear a lot of Irish in many American accents. Also English and Australian accents do NOT sound the same, I think people from both countries are fairly astounded when Americans can't tell the difference.

True. American English is derived from the working class Irish (which is why the British mercantile Protestants of New England sound so British, but the working-class midwest sounds more Irish). The Australian dialect is derived from Cockney prisoners, which is why colloquial Australian preserves some cockney elements, like rhyming slang.

HB8. Total Merchant Banker.
 

B_NineInchCock_160IQ

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missbec said:
A thought that occurred to me today: How can American and Australian accents be different yet we speak the same language, not considering some spelling differences?

Really? There are even multiple different accents within America and within Austrailia... even within England (to say nothing of Ireland or Scotland) there are many different very distinct accents and England is a tiny little island... Regional, social and economic differences come into play here, forming different social groups that speak roughly the same language but deviations form in the phonology of the language, in slang, sometimes in the language's grammar... producing different accents at first... left unchecked for long enough you'll come up with dialects so different from each other that people speaking one won't necessarily be able to understand people speaking another (as is the case in different regions in China... or when you have someone speaking Cockney English trying to understand someone from the American South) Left unchecked longer, eventually these disparate dialects evolve into their own distinct languages, as with Latin > Italian, Portuguese, French, Spanish, Romanian, etc..
Everyone speaks with an accent.
 

D_Gunther Snotpole

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NineInchCock_160IQ said:
... left unchecked for long enough you'll come up with dialects so different from each other that people speaking one won't necessarily be able to understand people speaking another (as is the case in different regions in China... )

Very true.

I lived in Hong Kong for a while, and did some work for a Chinese professor at one of the universities. She was a native Mandarin speaker, from near Beijing. Hong Kong, of course, is a Cantonese-speaking city. This woman had taken four months to begin to be able to understand and make herself understood -- and this was an extremely bright and linguistically savvy woman. (Spoke very good English, for example.)

What is remarkable is that the written forms of the languages are more or less identical. She could read a Hong Kong newspaper with ease the day she arrived -- but for months radio and television were closed off from her.

The two dialects even sound totally different to a Westerner. Mandarin and Cantonese are both 'tonal' languages, which, among other things, means that many words are differentiated from each other solely on the nasality of their pronunciation and other factors. But Mandarin has four tones; Cantonese has nine.

An adult trying to learn either language will have big problems, but Cantonese, because of its much subtler tonal differentiations, presents vastly greater problems.
 

BigPoppaFury

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senor rubirosa said:
BigPoppaFury suggests that speech variations in London might not be evident to a foreigner. Oh, but they are, decidedly so. When I've been in London, most people have been easy to understand, but some, especially young cockney street kids, were impenetrable. Rare, but it's happened several times.

Let me clarify what I meant a little as I didn't make it so clear. I was talking about the differences in what you would call a 'cockney' accent in different parts of London. By that I mean the traditional working class accent associated with London. I have one of those accents, but I can pretty much always tell when someone is from the east end, or even south London. Essex would most likely sound the same as I do to an outsider but it's fairly easy to pick out for me.

I myself have to change the way I talk in order to be understood by 99% of Americans I meet. I have to drop any slang, sound my t's, sound my 'th's, remember to pronounce words fully ('you know what I mean' sounds more like 'y'nah uhmean' when I say it) and pronounce my h's too. When I've been in the US I have had untold trouble with people not catching a thing I say over and over.

Other than that accent London is full of other dialects- Jamaican, African, middle class, upper class, Asian English.. the list could go on.
 

B_NineInchCock_160IQ

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DC_DEEP said:
Most languages are constantly evolving. The local influences will generally dictate what direction those accents and dialects take themselves. Physical and social isolation tends to diminish some types of changes, and emphasize others.

Senor Rubirosa, you are correct. It's funny that so many people who enjoy making fun of what they would call "hillbilly" dialect (especially that of Appalachia and Ozark) are unaware that it is in fact much more similar to the spoken English common in England circa early to mid 17th century... not too terribly different from what would have been heard among theatre-goers at the Globe or the first settlers who landed at Plymouth Rock or in Jamestown. Yes, Londoners did pronounce "victuals" as "vittles", and "creatures" as "critters."

I'm sure that the aboriginal language influence, plus the physical isolation, contributed to the unique Aussie accent (which, to me, sounds about as "British" as does "American"...) and probably the same is true with Afrikaans and Dutch (I actually had a native Niederlander tell me that the only difference between Dutch and Afrikaans was the name, but I doubt that...)

I've been taught the closest thing to Shakespearian English is now spoken in Nova Scotia and the New England states of the USA. The language used today on the BBC was a deliberate change over what was being spoken at the time. There's an interesting little interactive history here:
HTML:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/society_culture/launch_ani_language_tl.shtml
 

D_Gunther Snotpole

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NineInchCock_160IQ said:
I've been taught the closest thing to Shakespearian English is now spoken in Nova Scotia and the New England states of the USA.

I wonder why Nova Scotia. The Nova Scotia and New Brunswick accents seem quite similar to me ... in fact, I don't think I've ever noticed a difference. And neither are so very different from 'standard' Canadian English.

But maybe that reflects the homogenizing influence of mass media.

Perhaps it's a kind of backwoods, very rural Nova Scotian accent that harkens back to 16th Century English. An accent that would predate the CBC and mass distribution movies and so forth.

An accent, in other words, that really isn't so typical any more.
 

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missbec said:
A thought that occurred to me today: How can American and Australian accents be different yet we speak the same language, not considering some spelling differences?
As others have said America was a melting pot of immigrants from several countries and their influences have created numerous dialects.

Most of Australia's colonists, circa the 19th Century, were former British convicts. I assume that the majority of them spoke with a cockney type slang, as their descendents still do.

dreamer20
 

rawbone8

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I'd imagine the massive exposure to American programming on Canadian television and in movie theatres has had some influence on Canadian speech in the past 50 years.

The poser accents I hear from teenagers kill me. Riding on the subway and listening to local Toronto kids trying to sound like they come from the projects in Brooklyn or Jersey. At what age do they drop that?
 

findfirefox

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I have a few speech quarks.

1) My Great Grandmother spoke with a British accent, she raised me from birth to 6
2) My Grandmother spoke with a New Yorker accent, she raised me from 6-12
3) My mother spoke with a Pacific northwest accent (But that sounds normal to me) she raised me from 12-18.

Now, I randomly break out into British accents and not on any words in specific. Now I also have my grandmother's odd tweak on words, the majority of the time I speak in what would be normal for my area.
 

rawbone8

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rawbone8 said:
I'd imagine the massive exposure to American programming on Canadian television and in movie theatres has had some influence on Canadian speech in the past 50 years.

On reflection, It can work both ways though, with the infiltration of Canadian vocal content snuck into US mass media. To wit:

Canadian Actors / Comedians
Dan Aykroyd, Raymond Burr, John Candy, Jim Carrey, Tommy Chong, Hume Cronyn, James Doohan "Scotty", David James Elliott "JAG", Dave Foley, Glenn Ford, Michael J. Fox, Brendan Fraser, Matt Frewer "Max Headroom", Robert Goulet, Graham Greene "Dances with Wolves", Lorne Greene, Bruce Greenwood, Paul Gross "Due South", Phil Hartman, Walter Huston, John Ireland, Michael Ironside, Eugene Levy, Eric McCormack "Will & Grace", Bruce McCulloch, Kevin McDonald, Norm MacDonald "Saturday Night Live", Mark McKinney, Howie Mandel, Raymond Massey "Abe Lincoln", Rick Moranis, Barry Morse "The Fugitive", Mike Myers, Leslie Nielsen, Michael Ontkean, Matthew Perry, Walter Pidgeon, Gordon Pinsent, Christopher Plummer, Jason Priestley, Keanu Reeves, Saul Rubinek, William Shatner, Martin Short, Donald Sutherland, Kiefer Sutherland, Alan Thicke, Dave Thomas, Scott Thompson, Alex Trebek, John Vernon.

Canadian Actresses / Comediennes
Pamela Anderson, Neve Campbell, Kim Cattrall, Yvonne De Carlo, Colleen Dewhurst, Megan Follows, Jillian Hennessy, Margot Kidder "Lois Lane", Andrea Martin, Lois Maxwell "Moneypenny", Sheila McCarthy, Carrie-Anne Moss, Kate Nelligan, Sandra Oh, Catherine O'Hara, Molly Parker, Anna Paquin, Sarah Polley, Kate Reid, Helen Shaver, Jennifer Tilly, Deborah Unger.
 

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What I find funny is the way that so many actors use a "generic" regional accent that couldn't possibly fool a native of the area their character is supposed to be from. I'm from the South. People from Alabama don't sound like people from Virginia and people from Arkansas don't sound like people from South Louisiana. But it seems like in the movies all characters who are supposed to be from the South sound like they're from Georgia irregardless of what part of the South is s'posed to be their home. How odd.
 

warmhorizon

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Good point. I can't count the number of films where the actor/actress hasn't actually bothered to immerse themselves in an accent and just use a generic British one. It's strange how much a bad accent can ruin a film.
Notable exception being Renée Zellweger(sp?) in Bridget Jones. That was a brilliant accent. :biggrin1:
 

yhtang

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findfirefox said:
I have a few speech quarks.

1) My Great Grandmother spoke with a British accent, she raised me from birth to 6
2) My Grandmother spoke with a New Yorker accent, she raised me from 6-12
3) My mother spoke with a Pacific northwest accent (But that sounds normal to me) she raised me from 12-18.

Now, I randomly break out into British accents and not on any words in specific. Now I also have my grandmother's odd tweak on words, the majority of the time I speak in what would be normal for my area.

Hmm, looks like you would be a good challenge for Professor Higgins (of "My Fair Lady") to guess your origins based on your speech and accent.