Ask Lemmy

DO YOU SPEAK ENGLISH?

SORRY

when I was in Australia, they told me I sounded Canadian. What do they sound like?

Aluminium

Really? Fuck, I love it

..and Elmer Fudd’s oft kicked hate-child.

I’m from Connecticut and used to work in a call center taking insurance claims nationwide. I once got a call from a guy in rural North Carolina, who had a super thick accent. He was explaining that the damage to his car came from the tar blowing up and I was trying to figure out wtf he meant by this (sometimes customers are nuts or lie- it was okay to take down a story that definitely didn’t happen, it just needs to be clear and true to what the caller claimed). I kept asking what caused the asphalt to explode and he was totally uninterested, saying it was old, sometimes that happens, isn’t that our job to figure out?

Anyway, I was having a tough time understanding this guy, but my coworker went to college in Tennessee, so I roped her in and transferred him.

His tire exploded, not the tar. He just pronounced tire the way that I pronounce tar. For me, it’s two syllables and indistinguishable from the word for one who ties.

In port cities that had lots of similar immigrants during the 1800’s, you can often tell what neighborhood someone is from by their accent. NYC (and other East Coast cities to a lesser extent) and New Orleans have some overlap because they happened to be the biggest port cities at the time and some neighborhoods had similar demographics. (Obviously, both cities have unique accents where demographics were different but there’s a lot of overlap due to that time period.)

The “neutral American accent” is supposedly originally from the Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa part of the Midwest, apparently by an accident of history. Walter Cronkite (a popular news reader as national TV broadcasts became ubiquitous) was from Kansas. Other national TV personalities happened to be from the area and it basically became the “TV” accent.

There were different historical reasons for it but it’s sort of like how “BBC English” became the accent people consider the default in England and Beijing Mandarin became “standard” Mandarin instead of Shanghainese. It’s just who was on TV/radio when media went national.

Prisencolinensinainciusol? Oll right!

Oh is that that Italian guy who liked the aesthetic of American rock & roll but didn't speak a syllable of English so he sings nonsense with an impeccably imitated California accent?

I haven’t done any drugs in a very long time, but I’d love to go back in time and hear this for the first time unexpectedly while on drugs.

I've heard that a lot, and I always thought it had to do with lazy talking (not moving your mouth much). I do think that's part of it, and some people do that more than others.

But the thing about having a potato in your mouth is it pushes your tongue down and back, into your throat. Which is something you need to say the American "r" and a lot of other sounds, like "w" and the dark L like in "pull." It's hard to teach, and very hard to unlearn. It's part of the characteristic American sound.

German is basically the opposite. You can see the difference here, with a German speaker talking in an MRI. There's a lot of space between the back of the tongue and the back wall of the throat. And here's a picture of someone saying an American "r". The base of the tongue is all bunched up in the throat.