this post was submitted on 16 May 2024
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My wife is a damn yankee, transplanted to the south.
Every family gathering she attends, she still sits next to me and ends up asking what someone said.
You want a real trip? There's a show called Moonshiners, that features some people with southern accents, or Appalachian accents so deep that I have trouble getting everything they're saying, and I'm from the same region. My wife has watched it with subtitles and will look at me and ask if that's what they really said because it sounded nothing like what the subtitles said lol.
But, in general, accents are easier if you grow up with a wide array of them to learn from. You then get used to processing them and it stays as an ability, up to a point.
The comment got me thinking that I have no problem understanding the more common British accents and wondering why, then realizing that living in Germany for 10 years watching Sky Channel probably has something to do with it.
I looked it up and realized that calling it Sky Channel really dates me, since it stopped being called that after 1989.
Growing up in Portugal were TV has subtitles rather than dubbing I ended up picking a sort of generic American (TV series) accent in my English because that's the most spoken English I was exposed to, though it was mixed with a Portuguese accent.
Mind you, as I later emigrated and lived for long periods in a couple other countries, I added more accents on top of it (first a Dutch Amsterdam accent, later an English RP accent - also known as the BBC accent) and eventually decided to make an effort and nowadays mostly speak English with an RP accent unless I'm feeling lazy and not even try, making it shifts partially back to the original American+Portuguese+Dutch+RP accent.
I've lived in a couple of countries abroad and can speak a number of languages and just love accents, can imitate several in my own language and can even immitated a few in some foreign languages (not to mention cross-languages accents, like English with a French or Italian accent).
It's amazing how even small nations (like my native Portugal or The Netherlands were I also lived) have several accents and they seem to include one which is hard to understand for everybody else.