21 Accents
Posted on 06. Mar, 2008 by The Gimcracker in Stuff On The Internet
This girl does a bunch of accents in a row and they’re spot on. When she gets to the American accents I realized that I must be from California. Go figure.
Trans-Atlantic accent? Wha? I still say I don’t have an accent and everyone else in the world does. What is an accent anyway? Oh noez, my brain stopped.
I don’t know, more of a toss-up between Seattle and Cali. Maybe leaning towards Seattle. Not a whole lot of difference that I could hear though, except that in Cali everything sounded like a question (even in the below website, everything sounds kind of like a question in cali).
Here’s an interesting website for accents:
http://web.ku.edu/idea/northamerica/usa/usa.htm
I definitely don’t have as much of an “Indiana” accent as the first woman in the Indiana section. It would be interesting to see what a dialect coach would guess my accent was.
Oh, one more thing, according to Neal (Lacasto) most of the people we know speak “accent neutral” English.
I think there is definitely a way you are “supposed” to say things, and that all variation from that way is an accent. As to if that way is the way we speak, I think it’s close, but I have no idea.
It would be interesting to study I think.
Oh, and when I say “supposed” to say things, what I mean by that is that there has to be one standard way to say every letter. Accents are a result of mixing the standard way with another vowel.
Like take the girls name “Amy Walker”
The first time she says it
“Aemee Woolkuhr”
The next time she says it it’s more like
“Iymee Waolkeh”
Even though every time you would spell it “Amy Walker”. Then again, I guess I would say it:
Aymee Wallkre
So according to my theory, what would be the standard way to say it? No clue. But if there weren’t a standard way to say things, why would a dictionary include a pronunciation guide? (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/dictionary)
Maybe that’s why it took written vowels so much longer to develop (thanks greeks!), and why some languages STILL don’t have them (arabic)…
See what I mean about my brain stopping. If there’s a correct way of saying something based on the pronunciation in the dictionary, yet there are a million different dialects, who’s right? If no one’s right, who’s the closest?
I’m ashamed to be from Indiana after hearing how that first woman from Indiana read the story. Why didn’t they get someone that can read? There are millions of people in this state that could’ve read better than that. Yet they go to the boondocks and grab some trailer trash grandma who never went to school.
omg.. good work, brother