No, I'm not dumb, everyone has an accent. Speaking of dumb, the dumbest people here in the USA are the ones voting for convicted felon Don the Con Trump. Trump was the worst US president in history.
No, I'm not dumb, everyone has an accent. Speaking of dumb, the dumbest people here in the USA are the ones voting for convicted felon Don the Con Trump.
Reason 4: They don't have a describable accent. As in, it's not northern or southern or London or Mancunian or even Standard. If their accent doesn't have a name or a way to describe it, does it really exist? Kind of like asking the question if water has a flavour.
See, that I'll accept. When a foreign speaker says "I can speak this language without an accent," it's not that they have no accent at all, just that they don't have any detectable artifacts of their original language that give away that they're not native speakers. I hear the same thing when people tell me I don't have an accent when I speak Spanish.
@@brokenursa9986 one thing is when others tell you, and another thing is being delusional, lack self awareness, and thinking that you're something that you don't.
@brokenursa9986 they might br telling you that you have no spanish accent rather than English accent. If you learn British English and come over here and an English man could pick you out in a crowd, especially up north, as the british English people learn is called "RP", which is basically an accentless accent - no one in the UK actually speaks like it as its,called BBC English, because it sounds like the BBC news reporters. Its a little weird
@@TheRealSealStudios You say this, but even the BBC hasn't used received pronunciation for decades. I grew up on Trevor McDonald, but this too is antiquated.
i always thought "no accent" meant that when non native speakers speak for example english, you wouldn't be able to tell they're either foreigners or where they're from. like i am from Czechia but you wouldn't be able to tell that from the way i speak.
English (monolingual) speakers rarely know the difference between accent and dialect. You are correct. He just uses words that are better understandable to someone not knee deep in languages. As an armchair linguist the lack of nuance is a bit frustrating, but it is what it is.
But, you have no accent *_where?_* if somebody can't tell you're from Czechia (I assume you mean, a native English speaker), then that's because you speak with the same accent *_they_* do. So to anybody from any other English-speaking area, you would definitely have an accent. Just not a *_Czech_* accent.
Not really - I'm an RID CI/CT Nationally certified interpreter/transliterator - can you give me ONE example? Some cities have signs that are local and unique to them, true. Black Americans stylistly CAN sign in a way that is different than white people but that's like saying people who use black english are speaking with an accent, that's not true. New Yorkers sign faster than maybe someone in Alabama but that's speed, not sign choice or vocabulary and certainly not an accent. So please, can you explain this accent to me?
@@Jaggerbush Accent is literally what you described. There's no correct "way of speaking", so if a black person stylistly sign differently, a black person ca stylistly speak differently. That's how accents are made. How do I know that? I'm Black and I live in a rural area of Brazil, so I speak some of the brazillian equivalent with "ebonics" mixed with a lot of the "redneck" side of the country. Accent is a social thing, so if you have a different social sphere in which you exchange things, that means you have an accent of this area, this group or this social sphere.
I'm American.. I made the mistake of commenting I don't have an accent on a Reddit post once… That was horrible hundreds of downvotes really set my karma back a bit nothing like dozens of strangers telling me how stupid I am 😂
Well karma has a capping point, so you wouldn't have lost proportionately to the amount of downvotes you received. But if you want a taste of why it irks us so much, imagine saying "I'm heterosexual, so I don't really have a sexual orientation" or "I'm white, so I don't really have a race or ethnicity". It's that presuming yourself to be normal while everybody else is some variant that gets under people's skin. I'm from London. If there's a centre of the universe, it's here. Shit, time is measured from London! If *I* recognise that it's not *really* where all things start and end, then the idea of someone else thinking "Everyone on television sounds like me, so I must be the default!" is just....ugh. Of course, even being from London, I only have to travel 20 minutes in any direction and the accents change. It keeps us in check,
Cows have accents. Genuinely. Scientific tests have shown that herds of the same breed found in different parts of the country have distinctly different sounds for the same thing (like "milk me now!"). Maybe they're moosical? When I moved to Kent in the late 1980s, I worked with a teenage girl who hadn't long left school (we were both engineering clerks). Btw, I'm Welsh, from the South. (There's a point to the following!) An English linguist back in the '40s, give or take (I'm telling this second hand from my mother and she passed away 13 years ago, so it's an old story) had done research throughout the UK and had come to the conclusion that the people who spoke "the best English" were educated Welsh people. I understood that to a point because our dialect was so strong where I lived (it's officially called "Wenglish" because it's a mix of both languages. There are others like Hinglish - Hindi-English - and Singlish - Singaporean-English) that they taught us English much like we were taught French. And German. And Welsh. And for us masochists, Latin 😂 (yes, I took them all, minus Welsh for O level because it didn't fit in with my choices.) One of my English teachers actually gave us elecution lessons! Back to Kent, my colleague had a _very_ strong Kentish accent. My husband is from just outside the north of London and despite my having adapted to his accent, hers was tougher to understand. According to my husband, and probably because I'd lived in Lancashire and worked at a _very_ multicultural university, followed by living in London working on a mobile library in a _very, very_ multicultural area, my accent was actually pretty mild, probably because it helped my borrowers understand me. It was still mostly a Welsh accent, but I had a few bits and bobs from where I'd lived. My grammar was still really good back then, too. Anyway, one day, completely out of the blue and in the broadest northern Kentish accent I'd ever heard, she said to me, "You should talk the Queen's English, like what I do!" It took me a while to return from the loo where I'd run to so I could laugh in private!
I am from the US. I used to think I didn’t have an accent. Then I started taking Communications courses in college and needed to focus on how I speak. In the process, I realized that my casual voice was an odd combination of a Southern Drawl and slang from low-income urban areas, with the occasional Spanish slang word thrown in. That made perfect sense considering where I have lived. Seriously, pay attention to how you speak. I went from thinking I didn’t have an accent to realizing that I have a very strange way of speaking lol.
Similar deal here. For years I thought I had a General American accent, but doing some research has made me realize I actually have a LOT of Southern features.
I don’t think most Brazilians consider Rio’s accent as the standard tbh…while a lot of TV shows are made there (and hence have that accent), the news tend to use a more “neutral” accent, similar to upstate São Paulo but with softer “r”s.
The Portuguese music I listen to is primarily bossa nova, and many carioca singers pronounce word-final s as sh, I fear I might be picking up their accent even though it's not the standard brasilian accent I suppose 😅
@@merte.2047, Well, there's no problem in having a carioca accent, I just think that everyone who speaks this accent non-natively needs to be careful and avoid pronouncing the SH sound too intensely, because it can sound super heavy or forced. Another thing that makes Brazilian accents sound strange is avoiding nasalization or exaggerating it.
5:36 I'm from Michigan and can absolutely confirm, I've heard plenty of people say they don't have an accent because everyone around here talks almost the exact same.
I'm South African and the South African accent is quite distinct, which makes me stand out like a sore thumb because I speak with a British/ Australian accent. This is because I watched a lot of Aussie youtubers growing up and I got a permanent British accent off of Wheatly of all things.
When I was about 12 or 13, my mother gave me the 19" black and white TV for my bedroom because she had gotten a color TV for the living room. That's when I discovered Doctor Who and Monty Python's Flying Circus on my local PBS affiliate station here in Oklahoma. Monty Python was especially difficult to understand the accents, especially when the Pythoners would dress in drag and talk in a high-pitched falsetto. When I worked customer service in a call center that took calls across the nation, I was rather proud of the fact that people couldn't tell that I in Oklahoma. Maybe I had an accent, but it wasn't a specifically Oklahoman or southern accent. As I've gotten older, though, I seem to be lapsing into a more local or regional accent, although I haven't figured out why. In any case, it should probably be self-evident that communication is one of the primary purposes of language, spoken or otherwise, and thus people will tend to sound like the people they most commonly talk to, so that they can be understood better. That would usually be the people you live around, but TV and movies showed that people can learn accents that are not local. With the international nature of the internet, it'll be interesting to see if there's some kind of move towards a world or non-regional accent.
I keep forgetting middle aged, and old people use youtube, and especially that they watch the same stuff I do, or maybe the black and white TV threw me off.
@@crazyalabamaguy4970 Yes. I was born in 1965, so I would have gotten the black and white TV in '77 or '78. I can't remember exactly. Before she got the color TV, the black and white was our main TV. And we had a choice of watching 3 major networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC) and PBS. There were no local UHF stations in operation until the 80s.
Yeah, we old people watch TH-cam, too, and the same stuff you do! But hey - That don‘t make no never mind! I had an acquaintance from Alabama many years ago who once used that phrase. He was joking (he certainly knew better), but I just loved it and occasionally use it myself.😊
@@crazyalabamaguy4970 Yes, I was born in 1965, so I would have gotten the TV in '77 or '78. Before that we just had the black and white TV in the living room. And we really weren't bothered by the fact that it wasn't in color.
usually no, unless the language is spoken in a very small area. However, what the author fails to realise is that most societies select a dialect they consider "better" and that usually becomes the "standard" that needs to be imitated by educated people.
I recently saw a ad for a teaching position in Valladolid where they laid it on with a trowel that it is the best place to learn Spanish because the accent is so "pure". I leant Spanish in Spain and during my travels in South America people quite often comented on my "peninsula" accent - including a teacher who made fun of the way I spoke! Not a good look on his part but I take it as a kind of compliment.
if you go back far enough that everyone speaking is using the same inflections, you're not going to be looking at the same language the population speaks today
I studied at Northumbria University. I'm from Northumberland and speak heavy Pit. The southerners all mocked me for my accent and dialect. I was like "herea yeev come herea and am tahkin with me local dialect, nuw get a bottle of broon and watch the toon, Howay!"
It's not that I don't have an accent. It's that I don't sound like where I'm from! I've never lived anywhere but SE Texas! When I meet people for the 1st time, I like to where they think I' from, based on how I talk I get different amusing answers ranging from being from Britain to being An American raised in Europe to being a Northerner (Northerners never make this mistake!) On a related note, when I was going to uni, I heard accent that was definitely from a few hours from where I lived. There was a lively conversation that kept mentioning someone named P.I.J. I used context clues to figure out they were discussing Piaget, the Swiss psychologist!
"People tell me, 'Oh, I love your accent!' So I tell them, 'Well, actually, I don't have an accent; I'm from England. This is just how words sound when they're pronounced properly.'" -Jimmy Carr
Which is funny, because British English is fully made up, American English is closer to how it was historically spoken, the Brits created their own latet to sound posh :D
@@sospetyo American English does not sound the same as it did 200 years ago though, so how true is this statement? Also English people trying to sound more posh is an outright lie, as name explain says here, that’s just one accent out of a lot in England. Talk to literally anyone on the streets in London and you’ll get what I mean
@@sospetyo That's absolutely false 😂 That's an American myth. The English accent has been relatively the same since Shakespeare's time. The only accent in England that's changed is the London accent. It's the American accent that changed heavily, considering it's an amalgamation of different European accents speaking English, like Swedish, Dutch, German, Irish, Scottish etc
I'm from Lincolnshire and my accent is very subtle and very close to "standard English". Only once in my life has anyone guessed my acent with any accuracy, and even he was 30 miles off - thought I was from Nottingham. Most people guess "somewhere South". I live in Manchester now and everyone here thinks I have a "posh" accent.
You should try moving to Lincolnshire, Illinois, USA and work on a Midwestern American accent. 🤪 I'm a bloody Yank who lived in Manchester, Limeyland (England), but now I live a short drive from Lincolnshire, Illinois. We bloody Yanks will soon conquer Limeyland. Lol
@@stanleygagner Birmingham and Liverpool are 100 miles away - the accent varies A LOT, as in, day and night. There's a lot of history behind our country in comparison, and deviation in a standard english is because of other languages and such influencing them beforehand (this helps understand some regional sland too)
The New York Times posted a quiz about ten years ago where you answer how you say certain words and it tells you what part of the US it thinks you're from. It only works for US accents, but it's incredibly accurate. Pinpointed the exact part of the Mid-Atlantic I'm from.
In the Netherlands, the capital and most populous city, Amsterdam, is very much considered to have a non-standard accent, and the same is true for the seat of Government: The Hague. And honestly, I'm not even sure if there really is any regional accent that could be considered the standard; maybe Hilversum as that's where a lot of the TV studios are, or Utrecht because it's quite centeally located whilst still large, but I'm not sure.
As an African, Africans who say they don't have an accent often live in a big city where are the regional and tribal accents blend into one 'Standard' accent. People often mistake this lack of a regional accent to mean they lack an accent altogether. They extend this across borders so think everyone else is speaking with some regional accent while they don't have one. In their defense, standard accents are easier to understand by foreigners than regional accents. Imagine all Brits spoke with a Scouse accent or all Americans spoke with southern drawl or all Nigerians spoke with a strong Igbo accent, it would ten times more difficult to understand other people. So, in a sense, a standard accent is a lack of an accent to at least a lack of a strong accent.
7:41 You are a bit correct in that there is a sort of Standard Brabandic, Standard Limburgian, Standard Hollandic and Standard Eastern Dutch accent. Maybe even a North one. Personally I consider myself a South-West Standard speaker, which is Hollandic, but don't tell the people around here that. Historically I don't even think we were ever part of Holland (but Flanders then or State-Flanders), nevertheless. SWS is the standard you hear In The Rotterdam - The Hague area and Zeeland. Oh, plus there is Flemish standard.
Back in college, I had a professor who was from Albany, NY he once said to our whole class that people who talked like us wouldn't be news casters because of our improper speech 😂 he's teaching in rural NC, if he turned on the news any station here that's ALL he'd hear. He was older and sometimes said some REALLY outta pocket stuff, but he was a great teacher and a great guy. He always made me laugh 😂😂😂
Had he never heard of Chris Cuomo, lol he went to school in Albany and became extremely famous by newscaster standards. He did purposely alter his accent to be more General American (I actually found a quote of him confirming this) but even I can still hear that he is from New York at times, and I'm not American.
I live in Västerbotten, Sweden and the standard accent is based on the Stockholm-accent. My grandparents talks in a accent called bondska which is considered as `unintelligent`, therefore it is dying out, especially in the coastal areas. Although I do know quite a few people who speak that way.
I was very aware of accents growing up. My father grew up on the West Coast of the US and my mother grew up in New York. I also had a grandmother who grew up in Germany. There was no "normal" accent in my childhood home. My children have had a different experience. Almost everyone that they know has a West Coast American accent. They probably don't think that they have an accent.
I had this discussion with my barber here in Sevilla. We can chat happily for the half hour of my haircut without me missing a thing. I once asked hime why this was beause he is just an ordinary guy from a tradtional barrio here in Seville (notorious for its "difficult" accent). His explanatin was because his mom is from pueblo in one province and his dad is from a pueblo in a different province the home laguage was as near to standard Spanish as possible.
As a broadcaster, I was trained in the "Omaha Accent"-- a neutral, flat, slightly nasal pronunciation. I am from Indiana, so it wasn't a hug stretch. Living in Kentucky for several years, I can hear just how my accent had been colored by the mid-South.
I definitely think that in Canada there is more variation than 3 english accents. When I lived out east some people were confused by my western accent and I definitely noticed that others spoke different than me.
Interestingly enough, in Spain it's the accent of Valladolid, Burgos and Salamanca that is seen as the standard pronunciation, despite those regions having very little economical or political influence. This is because there is a Royal Academy for Language with the authority to set the nationwide standard, and the guys there decided that they liked that accent. Madrid accents are seen as _very_ pronounced and characteristic, and people outside of Madrid tend to make fun of them.
But people in Madrid make fun of the Andaluz accent / way of expressing themselves. I have heard many stories about people from the South being criticised / corrected for the things they say.
I remember hearing a young girl (obviously from France) tell me (in French) "J'ai pas d'accent, tu vois?" ("I don't have an accent, you see." Except she ended her comment with an upswinging intonation that we don't use in that context where I'm from. I'm from Québec.) And then she just kept going on and on and I could feel myself getting more and more annoyed by the minute. There's NO SUCH THING as "pas d'accent/no accent." Only in the eyes of those who are stuck on themselves.
As a Romanian living in UK, I definitely agree to your video. There are no accents in UK, only natives and foreigners.🤣 I'm obviously kidding, lol. I had my fair share of people who told me they don't have accents...I just had to agree but silently disagree, otherwise I'd be bullied 😂
ive said that "i dont really have an accent in english" before because ive never lived in an english speaking country and dont interact with people in engish (at least spoken), i dont have a "recognizable" accent i absolutely have my own idiolect, but i dont fit in any well known dialects/accent
As someone who has english as their second language, I thought I really didn't. I guess I just don't speak English anymore. My "accent" has no name. It's an "accent" that only I speak. There you go.
If the way you speak is unique, it just as much an accent as if others speak it. Accent is just however you consistently use intonation, stress, pitch and formants. The only way to not have an accent would be to use those things in a random way, randomly pronouncing each word in drastically different ways each time you say the word. You are confusing accent with "dialect". A dialect is a system of phonetics and vocabulary and grammar spoken by multiple people who have some kind of connection, usually geographical or socioeconomic. You can't be the only person with a certain dialect but you can be the only person with a certain accent. The word for a system of phonetics and lexicography and grammar that is unique to a person, is "ideolect", but that is different to accent because accent is only about phonetics, not grammar or vocabulary.
I think 'standard accents', at least for English, tend to be accents that are easiest to understand to a largest amount of people. Example: real thick Cajun or Cockney accents can be difficult for people who don't have those accents to understand in real time, even for native English speakers.
That is due to media exposure and people from all around the country often taking on the accent they hear in the media, so that people become used to hearing it in daily life even in their local community and not just in the media, which becomes a self-perpetuating cycle. It is not due to inherent qualities of those accents, except in the case of standard German because that was chosen specifically for being from the centre of the country where the accents farthest apart geographically still had similarity with it, as that is how accent continuums work. The centre of a country will typically be the best to choose for intelligibility. But General American and Received Pronunciation were not from the centre of the accent continuum. The centre of the accent continuum in the UK would have been a Midlands accent, not RP which was originally a regional Oxford area accent, and so was VERY different phonetically from the accents of the geographical extremes. A midlands accent would have not been so drastically different to people from the geographical extremes.
Australia doesn't have regional accents. While some people talk in different ways, its more due to class separation or ethnic heritage than region. I don't speak the same way that everyone from my small town/region speaks and I've met people from other parts of Australia that speak similarly to me. But to be honest I wouldn't consider that having different accents and rather just slight differences in how people with the same accent speak. I think accent implies that there is at least some separation between people of different accents (whether that is region, class, ethnicity, etc.) that doesn't explain why I talk slightly different than people that I sat next to in primary school. There's generally only considered to be 3 types of Australian accent, and they're largely class based.
In the US, The Standard Accent, which is taught to TV Anchors and such is prevalent around Cleveland OH. I'm from Indiana and Live in Kentucky now, and there are too many different accents in Indiana. It really varies a lot between the North, Central, and Southern parts of the state.
The Standard accent was centered around Detroit, Toledo Cleveland but now those cities' accents are shifting significantly so the standard is moving more west towards the PNW. That's probably why Indiana has a mesh of accents.. because there's a major accent shift happening.
Hear me out, I think Sentinelese people might actually *not* have an accent - accents require a different way of speaking to be compared to (i.e. comparing between north and south of a country, or speaking german with an english accent), but since they are isolated they cannot actually have a comparison point - they only speak their language and they do so without an accent
No, accent is just however you systematically use intonation, stress, and formants (vowel quality and consonant sound) to pronounce words. It is impossible to vocalise without having a certain pitch, vowel/consonant quality, etc., and in language this is always systematic, not random. You would have to programme a computer to do it randomly. If in a parallel universe only one human being had ever existed, genetically engineered as a one-off experiment by some other high-tech species, then whatever he did with his hair (tying it back out of the way, cutting it very short, etc.) would still be a hairstyle. It still is a certain manner out of many that he could theoretically have chosen, of managing the inconvenience of constantly growing head hair. Same with languages spoken by only a single tribe. I bet they still teach their children "no that is the wrong way to pronounce this word" as they are learning to speak, just as when English speakers try to teach their toddlers to say "yellow" instead of "yeyyow" if the toddler cannot yet vocalise "l". If Sentinelese teach their children how to pronounce words "properly", they are teaching them the tribe's accent.
Actually the dumbest statements in language for me is saying that X language is not a language. And ok, if we are comparing 2 very similar languages there can be some debate, but I have heard people saying that isolated indigenous language are not languages bcos theyre not official in any country or they dont have a enough speakers to be a language or thing like that, as if "language" was a word reserved only to internationally relevant languages.
In Czechia it's actually really funny because past Germans nearly wiped out our language so the standard accent and grammar comes from rural parts. Which is funny because then the person comes to Prague and they sound like a douche who thinks they're better than everybody but that's just how they speak in their town... :D
As someone from Rio, I really don't think it's thought of as a "standard accent" in Brazil. Sure, it's common just by the fact of it being the second largest urban area and having the headquarters of the largest media conglomerate in the country, but it's so incredibly distinct and recognisable that it isn't seen as "neutral". A good comparison to the anglosphere would probably be NYC: it's a very large and important city with a huge media presence, but no sane person would ever say that New Yorkers have a neutral accent. Personally I'd say that São Paulo is a lot closer to having a "netutral" sounding brazilian accent, or maybe even Brasília.
I’m also from Rio, and I agree. I think Brasilia’s accent is closer to the neutral accent, or maybe also a mixture of Rio and São Paulo accent. It’s interesting how Brazil does not have an “RP” or “general American “ of its own. I’ve lived in Rio my whole life and the way people talk has always been seen as the right way for people in Rio only
@@danielimmortuos666 TBF, the 'general American' accent used to be actively taught to actors, newscasters, etc. So maybe it's more that you didn't have any media moguls with strong opinions on how people _should_ speak.
I live in a different country from the one where I was born and have been here for over 30 years. A few years ago I moved from a cosmopolitan city to a small town. From time to time I meet people who inform me “You have an accent!”. My response is always the same. “So do you!” They then try to guess where I’m from, and invariably they are wrong.
I was born and raised in the Black Country of the UK, so I had a noticeable reginal accent. (Faded now - I've lived on the South Coast for 40 years!) I visited some friends in High Wycombe (a very RP sort of place), and a girl said to me; 'I wish we spoke with an accent'!
I think for language it is actually important to declare that there is a proper way of speaking. Not to say that other ways are wrong but to prevent language drift. English as a language should of fractured but due to English speaking nations acknowledging that the royal family speaks proper English has prevented it even when you get Australia using more slang than proper words. Unlike the situation with Korean which has fractured the same way that the romance languages fractured because they barely talk to each other.
The Brazilian standard accent is not from Rio, they have a very distinct and unique accent. Brasília would be closer to the standard/ news presenter accent
Who was the person who told him that "carioca" was considered the standard? I personally aways thought the standard was based around São Paulo, without slangs ofc.
A lot of CH and AUT tell me I have "no interesting accent" because I don't use much slang or regional dialect. It is because I'm from Hamburg and our slang is mostly Dutch or Dutch-adjacent. I don't use it with mixed audiences. Particularly with the Swiss, they take pride in being incomprehensible to Germans, and get very condescending about having to switch to standard German for the poor northern boy. They ask me if I feel sad that I sound like I "don't come from anywhere in particular." I think it boils down to regional accent pride being high in CH and AUT and dying off in Germany amongst under 50s.
Eeyup, truth. I have a strong country/rural cajun accent, that stood out even beyond my home region. And basically, to this day, despite being 40, i have people pick on me for it. (But, of course, unlike them, i've grown up about it.)
While I don't know the answer, I will say that for German, the characters do often pronounce the same words slightly differently, as if to give you a sample of pronunciation options. I particularly notice it in the "ig" suffix.
In the Netherlands, the concept of 'accent-less' (accentloos) exists, and quite a lot of people really believe this. What they really mean is that they speak a somewhat standardised accent, which is a mix of the various accents of the Randstad conurbation. The sad thing is, discrimination and prejudice based on accent is rather rife. If you're from the south, like I am, you're perceived as less developed or intelligent. I'm very happy to put people like those in their place. 😃 A friend of mine is originally from one of the southern provinces, where they have a distinguishable accent, and she claims that she now speak 'accent-less'. I told her that she speaks a displaced Randstad accent (ontheemd Randstadaccent). One thing I do find very important, though, is that I don't have a Dutch accent when speaking English. (I live outside the Netherlands now, and speak almost exclusively English.) While a Brit would immediately spot my fake south-eastern English accent, nobody can tell from my accent where I'm from. And, unlike the Dutch, I do pronounce the words bed, bet, bad and bat differently.
Why do you find it important that Brits can't tell where you are from? Do you think you would be discriminated against if they knew? I am British and in my experience, even the most xenophobic Brits do not have a problem with people from the Netherlands. Unfortunately, the likely reason that they do not, is rather shallow: the Netherlands is perceived as wealthy and predominantly white. Wealthy white immigrants are not worrying for British xenophobes, so being seen as Dutch should not be a problem. Polish immigrants are whiter than Brits but are not perceived as wealthy, and darker skinned Saudi immigrants are perceived as wealthy but not white, so they both sometimes face discrimination. That is how xenophobia typically works here, it might be different in other countries.
@@compulsiverambler1352 It's because I really dislike the Dutch accent when speaking English. When they speak, you can't tell if they say 'bed', 'bet', 'bad' or 'bat'. I'm a bit particular in the sense that, when I do something, I want to do it as well as possible, or not at all. Maybe it's my personal superiority complex, I don't know.
@@SeverityOne Oh, OK. It might be a coincidence, but I have a Dutch friend who has tried extremely hard to sound like a native English speaker, and gets annoyed when people ask where she is from. It seems to be more important to her than to other non-native speakers I know, most people just want to be understood easily. Maybe something in the Dutch culture? But a sample size of two is not scientific.
@@compulsiverambler1352 No, it's not in the Dutch culture. This is just me. 🙂 Most Dutch don't care, and grammatically, they're most of the way there. My brother-in-law's English is, shall we say, not exactly BBC-ready, but he's completely uninhibited. He manages to communicate pretty well all over the world (where he travels for his job). A proper English accent (I'll presume that your friend doesn't want to sound like she's from Glasgow or Cardiff) is very difficult to master. A native speaker can immediately tell. They had a lifetime of hearing the different accents, from RP to scouser. What I try to do is sound like some generic south-eastern English accent. These days, I live in Malta. English is an official language here, and some people will go through a lot of trouble to sound English - but they often end up sounding like a Maltese wanting to sound English. 🙂
@@Elvis.D99he worded this bad but what he is saying is, you don’t perceive yourself as having an accent but you perceive everyone else as having an accent.
I used to not consider myself as having an accent. I guess I would have an American accent, but this is exactly how I used to think of it: you have a British accent, you have a so-and-so accent
The only way I feel like I could even argue that I didn't speak with an accent is if literally every single person that speaks the language talks in the same way. And even then, it would be less that you don't talk with an accent and more that accents don't make a whole lot of sense if everyone speaks in the same way. And the same goes for dialects, because I have also heard people say they don't talk with a dialect.
I have not watched the video yet, but i think that the only way for someone to not have an accent in general is for them to speak a language that has such a low number of speakers that it wouldn't be possible for them to develop different accents hypothetical scenario, probably not possible
I'm not sure the Royal Family are the best example for Received Pronunciation. Lots of them have that upper class accent that RP might be based on, but isn't exactly the same. I think some actors are better examples. Like Patrick Stewart or Tom Hiddleston. I've got a Geordie accent, and I don't think of it as a very strong one - until I hear a recording of my voice, or I'm down south and people are like "You're so northern!"
I sometimes say I don't have an accent since my parents have strong rural accents, yet I speak in a more "standard" accent. Funnily enough, when I moved to a different country I started talking that language with a strong regional accent from the area I now live in, not the "standard" in the country. I think the reason is where I come from rural accents are not as common and are not seen as "cool", while where I moved to even people on TV have a variety of different accents.
Ha! Not *only* do I not have an accent, I *also* live in the only country on Earth not populated by foreigners. And I was lucky enough to be born into the One True Faith, and the only country with rational folkways. Take that, anthropologists!
South African here, the Standard accent isn't the Afrikaans one, it's actually upper class accent closer to RP, which the upper class Whites in KZN/Durban tend to have the closest as their natural accent. That's the accent you'll see in news and tv when people speak English for the most part
This is why I appreciate Argentinians, they do know they have an accent, but Mexicans insist they don't, Mexican accent is often said to be standard because all lAmerica (the real America) consumed mexican media all our life, but I would say Central Valley Costarricans, some Hondurans and Guatemala City Guatemalans have a pretty similar and neutral accent
Very interesting, do you think that it is possible to have a mixed accent? I think that my accent might be a mixture of my parents (who were both immigrants from two different parts of the world) as well as the host country that I was born in (UK). I've been told by a few people over the years that I have a slight way that I say certain words that makes people think that I may have been born overseas. But because it is a mixture of three different places, people have a hard time placing it to a particular country. I wonder if this is common and if this is one of the ways new accents form?
Mixed accents do exists. I have heard Premier League footballers who are from overseas but have been playing in England for a few years speak English with an accent that is partly that of their own country and partly that of the area local to the club they play for. It is thought that an influence on many US accents are those of south-west England as many early settlers in the 'New World' came from that area.
What I find weird is popular singers here in the US have a different accent when speaking as to when singing unless to become popular you have to sing with an accent that sells
I think everyone has thier own accent. They might sound similar to people in the same region in which they live, but thier accent is still thier own. I feel like my accent is even different to people in my own family because of how my brain works and hears things.
My great grandmother who came to Canada when she was 9 months old taught me how to read, so I pronounce some things with what I call a double bastardized Scottish accent.
The mention of Kuala Lumpur is pretty unexpected. As a Sabahan (person from Sabah) myself, we think that the KL accent is pretty weird since most of us has been living here our whole lives. I guess since the peninsula part of our country is more famous, we don’t get much attention but that’s alright I guess.
This also reminds me a while ago I’ve seen some comedy skit on TV about a woman who has a mom with such a strong Malay accent going to her house, when the woman has a hard time understanding her since that’s the point. It was pretty funny hearing the distinct accents lol
You have no idea how long it took me to find someone mentioning that part of the video (I was almost ready to assume no one really noticed him mention Malaysia.) I may be misremembering, but there was a time when the Riau-Johor accent was considered "standard", a primary basis for modern Bahasa Malaysia, or at least a "prestige accent" of sorts. The Bornean experience in KL is people asking you if you're from Sabah or Sarawak (they can either tell from how I speak or my name, of all things), and them saying you "cakap Bahasa Melayu pandai oh". I'd say many of us think accents from outside our home state are unusual. Yes, there's loghat Kelate that is the butt of many jokes, but orang semenanjung find loghat Sabah/Sarawak just as baffling. EDIT: Clarified the bit about Riau-Johor accent.
The fact that you can't not have an accent was brought home to me just recently. I was watching one of the Jumanji movies and decided I've never been impressed with Karen Gillan's American accent.
4:48 You claim to have a standard south-eastern accent (and maybe you do), but one thing I've noticed while watching this video is that you end almost every single utterance with a downwards , sort of mono-tone drawl, which is not typical here in in the south-east of England (or anywhere in the UK, I think). Does this fall under "accent", or does it come under a different category of idiosyncratic speech? Could make for another video.
I am the neurodivergent daughter of a South African and a Geordie, and like a few other neurodivergents I have met, I have what can be considered at least partially an RP accent. However, this is mixed in with some South African speaking habits and the northern pronunciation of ask and bath. Needless to say, growing up I was very confused as to why I was the only one with my accent for miles around.
I'm from the Midwest lived there my whole life but because I spen d a lot of time on the internet I have a different accent then my family and my families accent makes me laugh and some words I say make my friends laugh, like "Sorry, Tommorow, strawberry and Mum" and people ask If I'm Canadian.
I'm Brazilian from the state of Minas Gerais and I have always had a minas gerais accent up until some years ago, when I started playing video games everyday with some kids from São Paulo, when I absorbed a bit of their accent without noticing, like rolling the R after vowels and before consonants, something I never did my whole life and kind of made fun of my cousins from São Paulo for doing so
Interestingly, when you learn new languages, your own accent in your native language can change a bit. I noticed, that through learning Korean, I started pronouncing certain german and english words with a ㄹ[ɾ] sometimes. The word "riddle" would become "riㄹl", or german "Dattel" turns into "daㄹl". This is probably due to the ㄹ sound just being easier to enunciate in some cases than the "normal" way to say it.
I'm in 🍁 of 🇯🇲 heritage. This clip is amusing and reminds me of a convo between my brother and friend. My Bro,"U're accent is wild." Him, "I'm from England. I speak English. As far as I'm concerned, the rest of you have accents."😂 I also love how some North Americans pretty much need subtitles to understand convos between Caribbean folks speaking with Irish or Scots😸
In danish, wich is my native language, the standard accent is “rigsdansk” wich is something thats unlike any other accent in denmark! I also Think its the most common accent, at least on Fyn where i live, and its also my accent! Though the standard accent of denmark has evolved over time, becoming more ˋcasual´ sounding over time!
I'm from New Zealand, even though we are a relatively young country, we have started to develop some variances in accents, based on education, socio-economics, regions, and dare I say it, ethnicity. Some people have stronger nasal accents, but in general we don't have regional accents yet.
One thing I've noticed about your way of speaking--Is this standard southeast English?--is to pronounce th as f or v. Not as strikingly as the guy who does Thoughty2, but it's noticeable. One thing you left out about accents is that they shift through time. I grew up in Los Angeles, having been born in 1950, and notice that much younger Angelinos speak quite a bit differently. This shift can happen quickly so I've seen repeated changes. The "Valleyspeak" made famous by Moon Zappa was a phenomenon of the 1980s and '90s, and is long past.
As someone who's also from the south-east I would say that this pronunciation of 'th' isn't strictly standard, but it is not unusual. It could be considered to be what is sometimes known as 'Estuary English'. This is a form of south-eastern English that has working-class London influences that make it not 'standard'.
Notably, Hannover is in fact not the most important or populated city in Germany. Just happened to have an accent that is very similar to "Bühnendeutsch", the "ultimate compromise" of German accents according to some guy from Bremen and his biases.
I've only lived in Michigan in my life so far. But I still have known I have an accent, because I was raised in the north part. Other parts of Michigan say we have a Canadian-sounding accent🍁
LOL! Of course I don't have an accent! Everyone else has an accent, but not me! I am the prototype of the proper accent in English! Don't tell my British wife this -- she would definitely disagree. In German, I have a somewhat non-native accent, but most German speakers can't quite pin down what my mother tongue is. Or at least that used to be the case. Disuse may have changed this.
Anyone remember Frasier? Daphne and Niles and their 'will they, won't they' relationship? Daphne had a jokey Manc accent - I think the actress was from Surrey - but when her brother showed up he sounded like a Cockney geezer, 'Danny Dier' style. Daphne and her brother had 'British' accents. One suspects the producers wanted to play on this, to show how there was no single 'British' accent. I'd disagree on the 'no accent' label. OK, I've moved around the UK but even my accent has reverted to 'mid south', where I've lived for 30 years. But I'd ask anyone to differentiate between our current PM - Starmer - and previous PM, Sunak. To me they sound the same. One is the son of immigrants, the other the son of a 'toolmaker'.
Yeah, to myself, i sound like i don't have a relative accent (since I'm used to it, but ik i do have an accent like everyone else), but other people do know i have an accent, which is apparently different enough to be noticeable
I'm from Rio de Janeiro and indeed the "carioca" accent is more or less perceived as the standard one for the same reason the SoCal could be the English one for foreigners. The biggest media group in the country is headquartered in Rio. But São Paulo (the city) has had a noticeable increase in cultural relevance country-wide reach. But people in São Paulo (the state) have a quite different accent from the one from their state capital. As SP-city grows and attracts people and businesses from the countryside of SP-state, SP-city is becoming a blend of the hissed Italian-esque capital one with the morrrrrre native-Brazilian-influenced one from the countryside. Just my 2 cents about a place I never lived in, but visited countless ammounts of times. And it's the accent I hear the most often here in Berlin, whenever I happen to overhear Brazilian Portuguese.
The carioca accent is said to be closer to the European one spoken in the early 1800s, when the entire Portuguese court and capital were temporarily transferred to Rio to escape Napoleon. That was a massive event that would earn an entire youtube channel about it. But I'm sure there is a paralel for American English as well. It's closer to the British one from the late 1700s/early 1800s. I wish someone could confirm if it's a myth or if there's some truth to it.
I worked in a call center for about 20 years. Call centers regularly use agents who have a "Midwest" accent because it is the easiest to understand. Of course, the last call center I worked for shook things up by having the customer service agents based in Manilla....because hardly anyone can understand them...lol
"No accent" to me always meant speaking without a FOREIGN accent specifically. Or maybe I should say "no dialect" in this case. I'm thinking about the concept of the kind of German for example TV presenters speak versus just any random guy off the street. Most of the German spoken here has some kind of regional twang, but TV tries to speak as cleanly as possible. Hopefully this makes like, kind of sense to someone. People claiming they "don't have an accent" do tend to uh, be wrong though, I agree.
I enjoyed the video, since I live in a region where the royal family (at least the Duchess of Sussex, Prince Archie, and Princess Lilibet) speak with no accent (or at least with the same accent I have). Also don't forget that one day each year we all adopt the accent of the southwest of Britain 🏴☠
People in Michigan have a Northern American accent. The General American accent is found in the band between Chicago and Des Moines to the north and Kansas City and St. Louis to the south.
I think it’s the idea that our nation/culture is the norm while anything else is foreign or alien. It’s basic human nature to think we don’t talk weird, have weird beliefs, or have a weird society. It’s always other countries that are the weird ones for not living like us. But it’s an easy fix to cure people of this native-centrism. Just go to a foreign country where you’re the minority and you’ll see how different you really are
Something I had always thought was interesting was how a lot of singers who are British or from other English-speaking countries outside of the US sounded American, to me, in their music. I found a video saying that because of how people sing, their accents will usually turn more neutral. I don't remember if it was in the same video or something else I looked up, but I remember hearing that the northeastern US has the most neutral accent for English
It’s not neutral it’s Americanised British English of some flavour aka “Mid Atlantic” accent. It very definitely sounds like an accent to fellow Brits!
Did you ever think you don't have an accent?
No, I'm not dumb, everyone has an accent. Speaking of dumb, the dumbest people here in the USA are the ones voting for convicted felon Don the Con Trump. Trump was the worst US president in history.
No, I'm not dumb, everyone has an accent. Speaking of dumb, the dumbest people here in the USA are the ones voting for Trump.
No, I'm not dumb, everyone has an accent. Speaking of dumb, the dumbest people here in the USA are the ones voting for convicted felon Don the Con Trump.
Reason 4: They don't have a describable accent. As in, it's not northern or southern or London or Mancunian or even Standard. If their accent doesn't have a name or a way to describe it, does it really exist? Kind of like asking the question if water has a flavour.
yeah ofc you just assume that accent means foreign accent
talking without an accent is like typing without a font
People wrote things for centuries before fonts were a thing. And have been doing so ever since.
i meant typing. i edited the comment.
although writing by hand does still use some sort of 'style' for the letters. it's probably not formally a font, but it's still kind of a font.
Typing in Arial
"I speak english without accent!", my german friend once uttered, with noticeable german accent and phonotactics.
See, that I'll accept. When a foreign speaker says "I can speak this language without an accent," it's not that they have no accent at all, just that they don't have any detectable artifacts of their original language that give away that they're not native speakers. I hear the same thing when people tell me I don't have an accent when I speak Spanish.
@@brokenursa9986 one thing is when others tell you, and another thing is being delusional, lack self awareness, and thinking that you're something that you don't.
@brokenursa9986 they might br telling you that you have no spanish accent rather than English accent. If you learn British English and come over here and an English man could pick you out in a crowd, especially up north, as the british English people learn is called "RP", which is basically an accentless accent - no one in the UK actually speaks like it as its,called BBC English, because it sounds like the BBC news reporters. Its a little weird
"Aye sspeek inglish wissowt an aksent"
@@TheRealSealStudios You say this, but even the BBC hasn't used received pronunciation for decades. I grew up on Trevor McDonald, but this too is antiquated.
i always thought "no accent" meant that when non native speakers speak for example english, you wouldn't be able to tell they're either foreigners or where they're from.
like i am from Czechia but you wouldn't be able to tell that from the way i speak.
English (monolingual) speakers rarely know the difference between accent and dialect. You are correct. He just uses words that are better understandable to someone not knee deep in languages. As an armchair linguist the lack of nuance is a bit frustrating, but it is what it is.
But, you have no accent *_where?_* if somebody can't tell you're from Czechia (I assume you mean, a native English speaker), then that's because you speak with the same accent *_they_* do. So to anybody from any other English-speaking area, you would definitely have an accent. Just not a *_Czech_* accent.
@@sharonminsuk yeah that's what i mean, i'd say i have a mix of american accents from learning english from a lot of different speakers.
@@pawtistic Ah, so in that case *_everybody_* would say you have an accent!
@@sharonminsuk well yeah i guess
Even sign language has accents
Not really - I'm an RID CI/CT Nationally certified interpreter/transliterator - can you give me ONE example?
Some cities have signs that are local and unique to them, true. Black Americans stylistly CAN sign in a way that is different than white people but that's like saying people who use black english are speaking with an accent, that's not true. New Yorkers sign faster than maybe someone in Alabama but that's speed, not sign choice or vocabulary and certainly not an accent. So please, can you explain this accent to me?
People who use black English are speaking with an accent, that's the whole point of the video @Jaggerbush
Out of curiosity how
@@Jaggerbush Accent is literally what you described. There's no correct "way of speaking", so if a black person stylistly sign differently, a black person ca stylistly speak differently. That's how accents are made. How do I know that? I'm Black and I live in a rural area of Brazil, so I speak some of the brazillian equivalent with "ebonics" mixed with a lot of the "redneck" side of the country. Accent is a social thing, so if you have a different social sphere in which you exchange things, that means you have an accent of this area, this group or this social sphere.
@@Jaggerbush You LITERALLY just described accents. Different cities sign differently? That's an accent!
I'm American.. I made the mistake of commenting I don't have an accent on a Reddit post once… That was horrible hundreds of downvotes really set my karma back a bit nothing like dozens of strangers telling me how stupid I am 😂
Well karma has a capping point, so you wouldn't have lost proportionately to the amount of downvotes you received.
But if you want a taste of why it irks us so much, imagine saying "I'm heterosexual, so I don't really have a sexual orientation" or "I'm white, so I don't really have a race or ethnicity". It's that presuming yourself to be normal while everybody else is some variant that gets under people's skin.
I'm from London. If there's a centre of the universe, it's here. Shit, time is measured from London! If *I* recognise that it's not *really* where all things start and end, then the idea of someone else thinking "Everyone on television sounds like me, so I must be the default!" is just....ugh.
Of course, even being from London, I only have to travel 20 minutes in any direction and the accents change. It keeps us in check,
@@RiC_Davidso it's like people saying they don't have pronouns
It was stupid
@@smorrowbut not as stupid as saying "you have an accent"
yeah but they're redditors, their opinion is worthless
Cows have accents. Genuinely. Scientific tests have shown that herds of the same breed found in different parts of the country have distinctly different sounds for the same thing (like "milk me now!"). Maybe they're moosical?
When I moved to Kent in the late 1980s, I worked with a teenage girl who hadn't long left school (we were both engineering clerks). Btw, I'm Welsh, from the South.
(There's a point to the following!) An English linguist back in the '40s, give or take (I'm telling this second hand from my mother and she passed away 13 years ago, so it's an old story) had done research throughout the UK and had come to the conclusion that the people who spoke "the best English" were educated Welsh people. I understood that to a point because our dialect was so strong where I lived (it's officially called "Wenglish" because it's a mix of both languages. There are others like Hinglish - Hindi-English - and Singlish - Singaporean-English) that they taught us English much like we were taught French. And German. And Welsh. And for us masochists, Latin 😂 (yes, I took them all, minus Welsh for O level because it didn't fit in with my choices.) One of my English teachers actually gave us elecution lessons!
Back to Kent, my colleague had a _very_ strong Kentish accent. My husband is from just outside the north of London and despite my having adapted to his accent, hers was tougher to understand. According to my husband, and probably because I'd lived in Lancashire and worked at a _very_ multicultural university, followed by living in London working on a mobile library in a _very, very_ multicultural area, my accent was actually pretty mild, probably because it helped my borrowers understand me. It was still mostly a Welsh accent, but I had a few bits and bobs from where I'd lived. My grammar was still really good back then, too.
Anyway, one day, completely out of the blue and in the broadest northern Kentish accent I'd ever heard, she said to me, "You should talk the Queen's English, like what I do!" It took me a while to return from the loo where I'd run to so I could laugh in private!
I am from the US. I used to think I didn’t have an accent. Then I started taking Communications courses in college and needed to focus on how I speak. In the process, I realized that my casual voice was an odd combination of a Southern Drawl and slang from low-income urban areas, with the occasional Spanish slang word thrown in. That made perfect sense considering where I have lived. Seriously, pay attention to how you speak. I went from thinking I didn’t have an accent to realizing that I have a very strange way of speaking lol.
Similar deal here. For years I thought I had a General American accent, but doing some research has made me realize I actually have a LOT of Southern features.
I don’t think most Brazilians consider Rio’s accent as the standard tbh…while a lot of TV shows are made there (and hence have that accent), the news tend to use a more “neutral” accent, similar to upstate São Paulo but with softer “r”s.
O sotaque falado na tv parece muito com o português falado no ES, com R e tudo
The Portuguese music I listen to is primarily bossa nova, and many carioca singers pronounce word-final s as sh, I fear I might be picking up their accent even though it's not the standard brasilian accent I suppose 😅
@@merte.2047,
Well, there's no problem in having a carioca accent, I just think that everyone who speaks this accent non-natively needs to be careful and avoid pronouncing the SH sound too intensely, because it can sound super heavy or forced.
Another thing that makes Brazilian accents sound strange is avoiding nasalization or exaggerating it.
5:36 I'm from Michigan and can absolutely confirm, I've heard plenty of people say they don't have an accent because everyone around here talks almost the exact same.
I'm South African and the South African accent is quite distinct, which makes me stand out like a sore thumb because I speak with a British/ Australian accent. This is because I watched a lot of Aussie youtubers growing up and I got a permanent British accent off of Wheatly of all things.
When I was about 12 or 13, my mother gave me the 19" black and white TV for my bedroom because she had gotten a color TV for the living room. That's when I discovered Doctor Who and Monty Python's Flying Circus on my local PBS affiliate station here in Oklahoma. Monty Python was especially difficult to understand the accents, especially when the Pythoners would dress in drag and talk in a high-pitched falsetto.
When I worked customer service in a call center that took calls across the nation, I was rather proud of the fact that people couldn't tell that I in Oklahoma. Maybe I had an accent, but it wasn't a specifically Oklahoman or southern accent. As I've gotten older, though, I seem to be lapsing into a more local or regional accent, although I haven't figured out why.
In any case, it should probably be self-evident that communication is one of the primary purposes of language, spoken or otherwise, and thus people will tend to sound like the people they most commonly talk to, so that they can be understood better. That would usually be the people you live around, but TV and movies showed that people can learn accents that are not local. With the international nature of the internet, it'll be interesting to see if there's some kind of move towards a world or non-regional accent.
I keep forgetting middle aged, and old people use youtube, and especially that they watch the same stuff I do, or maybe the black and white TV threw me off.
@@crazyalabamaguy4970 Yes. I was born in 1965, so I would have gotten the black and white TV in '77 or '78. I can't remember exactly. Before she got the color TV, the black and white was our main TV. And we had a choice of watching 3 major networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC) and PBS. There were no local UHF stations in operation until the 80s.
Yeah, we old people watch TH-cam, too, and the same stuff you do! But hey -
That don‘t make no never mind!
I had an acquaintance from Alabama many years ago who once used that phrase. He was joking (he certainly knew better), but I just loved it and occasionally use it myself.😊
@@crazyalabamaguy4970 Yes, I was born in 1965, so I would have gotten the TV in '77 or '78. Before that we just had the black and white TV in the living room. And we really weren't bothered by the fact that it wasn't in color.
One question: Is there a default/original accent for each language?
usually no, unless the language is spoken in a very small area.
However, what the author fails to realise is that most societies select a dialect they consider "better" and that usually becomes the "standard" that needs to be imitated by educated people.
I recently saw a ad for a teaching position in Valladolid where they laid it on with a trowel that it is the best place to learn Spanish because the accent is so "pure". I leant Spanish in Spain and during my travels in South America people quite often comented on my "peninsula" accent - including a teacher who made fun of the way I spoke! Not a good look on his part but I take it as a kind of compliment.
No; even the most conservative accents eventually evolve into something slightly different from the original
if you go back far enough that everyone speaking is using the same inflections, you're not going to be looking at the same language the population speaks today
In German the way it is spoken in and around Hannover is considered standard.
I studied at Northumbria University. I'm from Northumberland and speak heavy Pit. The southerners all mocked me for my accent and dialect. I was like "herea yeev come herea and am tahkin with me local dialect, nuw get a bottle of broon and watch the toon, Howay!"
It's not that I don't have an accent. It's that I don't sound like where I'm from! I've never lived anywhere but SE Texas! When I meet people for the 1st time, I like to where they think I' from, based on how I talk I get different amusing answers ranging from being from Britain to being An American raised in Europe to being a Northerner (Northerners never make this mistake!) On a related note, when I was going to uni, I heard accent that was definitely from a few hours from where I lived. There was a lively conversation that kept mentioning someone named P.I.J. I used context clues to figure out they were discussing Piaget, the Swiss psychologist!
"People tell me, 'Oh, I love your accent!' So I tell them, 'Well, actually, I don't have an accent; I'm from England. This is just how words sound when they're pronounced properly.'" -Jimmy Carr
Which is funny, because British English is fully made up, American English is closer to how it was historically spoken, the Brits created their own latet to sound posh :D
@@sospetyo American English does not sound the same as it did 200 years ago though, so how true is this statement? Also English people trying to sound more posh is an outright lie, as name explain says here, that’s just one accent out of a lot in England. Talk to literally anyone on the streets in London and you’ll get what I mean
@@sospetyo That's absolutely false 😂 That's an American myth.
The English accent has been relatively the same since Shakespeare's time. The only accent in England that's changed is the London accent. It's the American accent that changed heavily, considering it's an amalgamation of different European accents speaking English, like Swedish, Dutch, German, Irish, Scottish etc
I'm from Lincolnshire and my accent is very subtle and very close to "standard English". Only once in my life has anyone guessed my acent with any accuracy, and even he was 30 miles off - thought I was from Nottingham. Most people guess "somewhere South". I live in Manchester now and everyone here thinks I have a "posh" accent.
You should try moving to Lincolnshire, Illinois, USA and work on a Midwestern American accent. 🤪 I'm a bloody Yank who lived in Manchester, Limeyland (England), but now I live a short drive from Lincolnshire, Illinois. We bloody Yanks will soon conquer Limeyland. Lol
How quaint that just 30 miles is considered a pretty big distance when it comes to accents in the UK
@@stanleygagner No kidding - there are some parts of the UK where the regional accent can change in 2 miles.
@@stanleygagner Birmingham and Liverpool are 100 miles away - the accent varies A LOT, as in, day and night. There's a lot of history behind our country in comparison, and deviation in a standard english is because of other languages and such influencing them beforehand (this helps understand some regional sland too)
So you have a British accent 🤦♀️
The New York Times posted a quiz about ten years ago where you answer how you say certain words and it tells you what part of the US it thinks you're from. It only works for US accents, but it's incredibly accurate. Pinpointed the exact part of the Mid-Atlantic I'm from.
It guessed halfway across the state
In the Netherlands, the capital and most populous city, Amsterdam, is very much considered to have a non-standard accent, and the same is true for the seat of Government: The Hague.
And honestly, I'm not even sure if there really is any regional accent that could be considered the standard; maybe Hilversum as that's where a lot of the TV studios are, or Utrecht because it's quite centeally located whilst still large, but I'm not sure.
Same here in Flemish Belgium, no one speaks Standard (Belgian) Dutch natively
As an African, Africans who say they don't have an accent often live in a big city where are the regional and tribal accents blend into one 'Standard' accent. People often mistake this lack of a regional accent to mean they lack an accent altogether. They extend this across borders so think everyone else is speaking with some regional accent while they don't have one.
In their defense, standard accents are easier to understand by foreigners than regional accents. Imagine all Brits spoke with a Scouse accent or all Americans spoke with southern drawl or all Nigerians spoke with a strong Igbo accent, it would ten times more difficult to understand other people. So, in a sense, a standard accent is a lack of an accent to at least a lack of a strong accent.
7:41 You are a bit correct in that there is a sort of Standard Brabandic, Standard Limburgian, Standard Hollandic and Standard Eastern Dutch accent. Maybe even a North one.
Personally I consider myself a South-West Standard speaker, which is Hollandic, but don't tell the people around here that.
Historically I don't even think we were ever part of Holland (but Flanders then or State-Flanders), nevertheless.
SWS is the standard you hear In The Rotterdam - The Hague area and Zeeland. Oh, plus there is Flemish standard.
Back in college, I had a professor who was from Albany, NY he once said to our whole class that people who talked like us wouldn't be news casters because of our improper speech 😂 he's teaching in rural NC, if he turned on the news any station here that's ALL he'd hear.
He was older and sometimes said some REALLY outta pocket stuff, but he was a great teacher and a great guy. He always made me laugh 😂😂😂
Had he never heard of Chris Cuomo, lol he went to school in Albany and became extremely famous by newscaster standards. He did purposely alter his accent to be more General American (I actually found a quote of him confirming this) but even I can still hear that he is from New York at times, and I'm not American.
I live in Västerbotten, Sweden and the standard accent is based on the Stockholm-accent. My grandparents talks in a accent called bondska which is considered as `unintelligent`, therefore it is dying out, especially in the coastal areas. Although I do know quite a few people who speak that way.
I was very aware of accents growing up. My father grew up on the West Coast of the US and my mother grew up in New York. I also had a grandmother who grew up in Germany. There was no "normal" accent in my childhood home.
My children have had a different experience. Almost everyone that they know has a West Coast American accent. They probably don't think that they have an accent.
I had this discussion with my barber here in Sevilla. We can chat happily for the half hour of my haircut without me missing a thing. I once asked hime why this was beause he is just an ordinary guy from a tradtional barrio here in Seville (notorious for its "difficult" accent). His explanatin was because his mom is from pueblo in one province and his dad is from a pueblo in a different province the home laguage was as near to standard Spanish as possible.
As a broadcaster, I was trained in the "Omaha Accent"-- a neutral, flat, slightly nasal pronunciation. I am from Indiana, so it wasn't a hug stretch. Living in Kentucky for several years, I can hear just how my accent had been colored by the mid-South.
I definitely think that in Canada there is more variation than 3 english accents. When I lived out east some people were confused by my western accent and I definitely noticed that others spoke different than me.
Interestingly enough, in Spain it's the accent of Valladolid, Burgos and Salamanca that is seen as the standard pronunciation, despite those regions having very little economical or political influence. This is because there is a Royal Academy for Language with the authority to set the nationwide standard, and the guys there decided that they liked that accent.
Madrid accents are seen as _very_ pronounced and characteristic, and people outside of Madrid tend to make fun of them.
But people in Madrid make fun of the Andaluz accent / way of expressing themselves. I have heard many stories about people from the South being criticised / corrected for the things they say.
I remember hearing a young girl (obviously from France) tell me (in French) "J'ai pas d'accent, tu vois?" ("I don't have an accent, you see." Except she ended her comment with an upswinging intonation that we don't use in that context where I'm from. I'm from Québec.) And then she just kept going on and on and I could feel myself getting more and more annoyed by the minute. There's NO SUCH THING as "pas d'accent/no accent." Only in the eyes of those who are stuck on themselves.
As a Romanian living in UK, I definitely agree to your video. There are no accents in UK, only natives and foreigners.🤣
I'm obviously kidding, lol. I had my fair share of people who told me they don't have accents...I just had to agree but silently disagree, otherwise I'd be bullied 😂
Born in Texas * Raised in Idaho * Formative years in Tennessee * Adult life in the Philippines = not only do I have an accent, but a very muddled one
ive said that "i dont really have an accent in english" before
because ive never lived in an english speaking country and dont interact with people in engish (at least spoken), i dont have a "recognizable" accent
i absolutely have my own idiolect, but i dont fit in any well known dialects/accent
As someone who has english as their second language, I thought I really didn't. I guess I just don't speak English anymore. My "accent" has no name. It's an "accent" that only I speak. There you go.
If the way you speak is unique, it just as much an accent as if others speak it. Accent is just however you consistently use intonation, stress, pitch and formants. The only way to not have an accent would be to use those things in a random way, randomly pronouncing each word in drastically different ways each time you say the word. You are confusing accent with "dialect". A dialect is a system of phonetics and vocabulary and grammar spoken by multiple people who have some kind of connection, usually geographical or socioeconomic. You can't be the only person with a certain dialect but you can be the only person with a certain accent. The word for a system of phonetics and lexicography and grammar that is unique to a person, is "ideolect", but that is different to accent because accent is only about phonetics, not grammar or vocabulary.
I think 'standard accents', at least for English, tend to be accents that are easiest to understand to a largest amount of people. Example: real thick Cajun or Cockney accents can be difficult for people who don't have those accents to understand in real time, even for native English speakers.
That is due to media exposure and people from all around the country often taking on the accent they hear in the media, so that people become used to hearing it in daily life even in their local community and not just in the media, which becomes a self-perpetuating cycle. It is not due to inherent qualities of those accents, except in the case of standard German because that was chosen specifically for being from the centre of the country where the accents farthest apart geographically still had similarity with it, as that is how accent continuums work. The centre of a country will typically be the best to choose for intelligibility. But General American and Received Pronunciation were not from the centre of the accent continuum. The centre of the accent continuum in the UK would have been a Midlands accent, not RP which was originally a regional Oxford area accent, and so was VERY different phonetically from the accents of the geographical extremes. A midlands accent would have not been so drastically different to people from the geographical extremes.
Australia doesn't have regional accents. While some people talk in different ways, its more due to class separation or ethnic heritage than region. I don't speak the same way that everyone from my small town/region speaks and I've met people from other parts of Australia that speak similarly to me. But to be honest I wouldn't consider that having different accents and rather just slight differences in how people with the same accent speak. I think accent implies that there is at least some separation between people of different accents (whether that is region, class, ethnicity, etc.) that doesn't explain why I talk slightly different than people that I sat next to in primary school. There's generally only considered to be 3 types of Australian accent, and they're largely class based.
In the US, The Standard Accent, which is taught to TV Anchors and such is prevalent around Cleveland OH. I'm from Indiana and Live in Kentucky now, and there are too many different accents in Indiana. It really varies a lot between the North, Central, and Southern parts of the state.
The Standard accent was centered around Detroit, Toledo Cleveland but now those cities' accents are shifting significantly so the standard is moving more west towards the PNW. That's probably why Indiana has a mesh of accents.. because there's a major accent shift happening.
Hear me out, I think Sentinelese people might actually *not* have an accent - accents require a different way of speaking to be compared to (i.e. comparing between north and south of a country, or speaking german with an english accent), but since they are isolated they cannot actually have a comparison point - they only speak their language and they do so without an accent
as much as my new bias for the idea of accents always being a thing and it being impossible to not have one, you may be right
No, accent is just however you systematically use intonation, stress, and formants (vowel quality and consonant sound) to pronounce words. It is impossible to vocalise without having a certain pitch, vowel/consonant quality, etc., and in language this is always systematic, not random. You would have to programme a computer to do it randomly.
If in a parallel universe only one human being had ever existed, genetically engineered as a one-off experiment by some other high-tech species, then whatever he did with his hair (tying it back out of the way, cutting it very short, etc.) would still be a hairstyle. It still is a certain manner out of many that he could theoretically have chosen, of managing the inconvenience of constantly growing head hair. Same with languages spoken by only a single tribe.
I bet they still teach their children "no that is the wrong way to pronounce this word" as they are learning to speak, just as when English speakers try to teach their toddlers to say "yellow" instead of "yeyyow" if the toddler cannot yet vocalise "l". If Sentinelese teach their children how to pronounce words "properly", they are teaching them the tribe's accent.
leaving your home accent and noticing it when you come back is like noticing that 12edo is spicy just like all the other edos
Actually the dumbest statements in language for me is saying that X language is not a language. And ok, if we are comparing 2 very similar languages there can be some debate, but I have heard people saying that isolated indigenous language are not languages bcos theyre not official in any country or they dont have a enough speakers to be a language or thing like that, as if "language" was a word reserved only to internationally relevant languages.
In Czechia it's actually really funny because past Germans nearly wiped out our language so the standard accent and grammar comes from rural parts. Which is funny because then the person comes to Prague and they sound like a douche who thinks they're better than everybody but that's just how they speak in their town... :D
Interesting 🤔
lol I’ve never felt so called out by a video before. Even when you did the one specifically about my name 😅
As someone from Rio, I really don't think it's thought of as a "standard accent" in Brazil. Sure, it's common just by the fact of it being the second largest urban area and having the headquarters of the largest media conglomerate in the country, but it's so incredibly distinct and recognisable that it isn't seen as "neutral".
A good comparison to the anglosphere would probably be NYC: it's a very large and important city with a huge media presence, but no sane person would ever say that New Yorkers have a neutral accent. Personally I'd say that São Paulo is a lot closer to having a "netutral" sounding brazilian accent, or maybe even Brasília.
I’m also from Rio, and I agree. I think Brasilia’s accent is closer to the neutral accent, or maybe also a mixture of Rio and São Paulo accent. It’s interesting how Brazil does not have an “RP” or “general American “ of its own. I’ve lived in Rio my whole life and the way people talk has always been seen as the right way for people in Rio only
@@danielimmortuos666 TBF, the 'general American' accent used to be actively taught to actors, newscasters, etc. So maybe it's more that you didn't have any media moguls with strong opinions on how people _should_ speak.
I live in a different country from the one where I was born and have been here for over 30 years. A few years ago I moved from a cosmopolitan city to a small town. From time to time I meet people who inform me “You have an accent!”. My response is always the same. “So do you!” They then try to guess where I’m from, and invariably they are wrong.
I was born and raised in the Black Country of the UK, so I had a noticeable reginal accent. (Faded now - I've lived on the South Coast for 40 years!)
I visited some friends in High Wycombe (a very RP sort of place), and a girl said to me; 'I wish we spoke with an accent'!
A “standard” accent, in my view, is what people who learn a language that is not their native language are guided toward.
I think for language it is actually important to declare that there is a proper way of speaking. Not to say that other ways are wrong but to prevent language drift. English as a language should of fractured but due to English speaking nations acknowledging that the royal family speaks proper English has prevented it even when you get Australia using more slang than proper words. Unlike the situation with Korean which has fractured the same way that the romance languages fractured because they barely talk to each other.
The Brazilian standard accent is not from Rio, they have a very distinct and unique accent. Brasília would be closer to the standard/ news presenter accent
Who was the person who told him that "carioca" was considered the standard? I personally aways thought the standard was based around São Paulo, without slangs ofc.
Recruit division commander said this about accents, if you are more than 20 minutes away from your home town you have an accent,
A lot of CH and AUT tell me I have "no interesting accent" because I don't use much slang or regional dialect. It is because I'm from Hamburg and our slang is mostly Dutch or Dutch-adjacent. I don't use it with mixed audiences. Particularly with the Swiss, they take pride in being incomprehensible to Germans, and get very condescending about having to switch to standard German for the poor northern boy. They ask me if I feel sad that I sound like I "don't come from anywhere in particular." I think it boils down to regional accent pride being high in CH and AUT and dying off in Germany amongst under 50s.
Eeyup, truth. I have a strong country/rural cajun accent, that stood out even beyond my home region. And basically, to this day, despite being 40, i have people pick on me for it. (But, of course, unlike them, i've grown up about it.)
Video idea: What accent does each Duolingo language use
While I don't know the answer, I will say that for German, the characters do often pronounce the same words slightly differently, as if to give you a sample of pronunciation options. I particularly notice it in the "ig" suffix.
That's a great idea!
In the Netherlands, the concept of 'accent-less' (accentloos) exists, and quite a lot of people really believe this. What they really mean is that they speak a somewhat standardised accent, which is a mix of the various accents of the Randstad conurbation.
The sad thing is, discrimination and prejudice based on accent is rather rife. If you're from the south, like I am, you're perceived as less developed or intelligent.
I'm very happy to put people like those in their place. 😃
A friend of mine is originally from one of the southern provinces, where they have a distinguishable accent, and she claims that she now speak 'accent-less'. I told her that she speaks a displaced Randstad accent (ontheemd Randstadaccent).
One thing I do find very important, though, is that I don't have a Dutch accent when speaking English. (I live outside the Netherlands now, and speak almost exclusively English.) While a Brit would immediately spot my fake south-eastern English accent, nobody can tell from my accent where I'm from.
And, unlike the Dutch, I do pronounce the words bed, bet, bad and bat differently.
Why do you find it important that Brits can't tell where you are from? Do you think you would be discriminated against if they knew? I am British and in my experience, even the most xenophobic Brits do not have a problem with people from the Netherlands. Unfortunately, the likely reason that they do not, is rather shallow: the Netherlands is perceived as wealthy and predominantly white. Wealthy white immigrants are not worrying for British xenophobes, so being seen as Dutch should not be a problem. Polish immigrants are whiter than Brits but are not perceived as wealthy, and darker skinned Saudi immigrants are perceived as wealthy but not white, so they both sometimes face discrimination. That is how xenophobia typically works here, it might be different in other countries.
@@compulsiverambler1352 It's because I really dislike the Dutch accent when speaking English. When they speak, you can't tell if they say 'bed', 'bet', 'bad' or 'bat'. I'm a bit particular in the sense that, when I do something, I want to do it as well as possible, or not at all.
Maybe it's my personal superiority complex, I don't know.
@@SeverityOne Oh, OK. It might be a coincidence, but I have a Dutch friend who has tried extremely hard to sound like a native English speaker, and gets annoyed when people ask where she is from. It seems to be more important to her than to other non-native speakers I know, most people just want to be understood easily. Maybe something in the Dutch culture? But a sample size of two is not scientific.
@@compulsiverambler1352 No, it's not in the Dutch culture. This is just me. 🙂 Most Dutch don't care, and grammatically, they're most of the way there. My brother-in-law's English is, shall we say, not exactly BBC-ready, but he's completely uninhibited. He manages to communicate pretty well all over the world (where he travels for his job).
A proper English accent (I'll presume that your friend doesn't want to sound like she's from Glasgow or Cardiff) is very difficult to master. A native speaker can immediately tell. They had a lifetime of hearing the different accents, from RP to scouser.
What I try to do is sound like some generic south-eastern English accent.
These days, I live in Malta. English is an official language here, and some people will go through a lot of trouble to sound English - but they often end up sounding like a Maltese wanting to sound English. 🙂
Love this video. Can you do a video on the etymology of the accents in the UK.
Someone not having an accent is like something not having a color.
to be fair black is just a lack of colour 🤓 but the lack of colour is considered a colour so fair enough
Any solid, liquid, gas or plasma can be transparent or opaque, so it's not like that. It's like a sound not having a pitch or not having a volume.
Accents are relative. Everybody doesn't have an accent but everybody else does.
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@@Elvis.D99he worded this bad but what he is saying is, you don’t perceive yourself as having an accent but you perceive everyone else as having an accent.
I used to not consider myself as having an accent. I guess I would have an American accent, but this is exactly how I used to think of it: you have a British accent, you have a so-and-so accent
@@sillycatgamingREAL I know for a fact that I have an accent. I even hear it while I am speaking.
@@sillycatgamingREALhe didn't even word that bad, top reply is just retarded
5:33
As a Michigander, multiple people have told me I have an American 1980's film accent
The only way I feel like I could even argue that I didn't speak with an accent is if literally every single person that speaks the language talks in the same way. And even then, it would be less that you don't talk with an accent and more that accents don't make a whole lot of sense if everyone speaks in the same way.
And the same goes for dialects, because I have also heard people say they don't talk with a dialect.
I have not watched the video yet, but i think that the only way for someone to not have an accent in general is for them to speak a language that has such a low number of speakers that it wouldn't be possible for them to develop different accents
hypothetical scenario, probably not possible
I'm not sure the Royal Family are the best example for Received Pronunciation. Lots of them have that upper class accent that RP might be based on, but isn't exactly the same. I think some actors are better examples. Like Patrick Stewart or Tom Hiddleston.
I've got a Geordie accent, and I don't think of it as a very strong one - until I hear a recording of my voice, or I'm down south and people are like "You're so northern!"
I sometimes say I don't have an accent since my parents have strong rural accents, yet I speak in a more "standard" accent. Funnily enough, when I moved to a different country I started talking that language with a strong regional accent from the area I now live in, not the "standard" in the country.
I think the reason is where I come from rural accents are not as common and are not seen as "cool", while where I moved to even people on TV have a variety of different accents.
Ha! Not *only* do I not have an accent, I *also* live in the only country on Earth not populated by foreigners. And I was lucky enough to be born into the One True Faith, and the only country with rational folkways. Take that, anthropologists!
South African here, the Standard accent isn't the Afrikaans one, it's actually upper class accent closer to RP, which the upper class Whites in KZN/Durban tend to have the closest as their natural accent. That's the accent you'll see in news and tv when people speak English for the most part
This is why I appreciate Argentinians, they do know they have an accent, but Mexicans insist they don't, Mexican accent is often said to be standard because all lAmerica (the real America) consumed mexican media all our life, but I would say Central Valley Costarricans, some Hondurans and Guatemala City Guatemalans have a pretty similar and neutral accent
Have you thought about making a video about animal accents (if there is such a thing)? I wonder if any animals think they have no accent lol
Very interesting, do you think that it is possible to have a mixed accent? I think that my accent might be a mixture of my parents (who were both immigrants from two different parts of the world) as well as the host country that I was born in (UK). I've been told by a few people over the years that I have a slight way that I say certain words that makes people think that I may have been born overseas. But because it is a mixture of three different places, people have a hard time placing it to a particular country. I wonder if this is common and if this is one of the ways new accents form?
Mixed accents do exists. I have heard Premier League footballers who are from overseas but have been playing in England for a few years speak English with an accent that is partly that of their own country and partly that of the area local to the club they play for.
It is thought that an influence on many US accents are those of south-west England as many early settlers in the 'New World' came from that area.
What I find weird is popular singers here in the US have a different accent when speaking as to when singing unless to become popular you have to sing with an accent that sells
I think everyone has thier own accent. They might sound similar to people in the same region in which they live, but thier accent is still thier own. I feel like my accent is even different to people in my own family because of how my brain works and hears things.
Isn't that called an idiolect?
My great grandmother who came to Canada when she was 9 months old taught me how to read, so I pronounce some things with what I call a double bastardized Scottish accent.
News reporters have their own learned accent. To me socal and central Florida have the same accent (standard us)
The mention of Kuala Lumpur is pretty unexpected. As a Sabahan (person from Sabah) myself, we think that the KL accent is pretty weird since most of us has been living here our whole lives. I guess since the peninsula part of our country is more famous, we don’t get much attention but that’s alright I guess.
This also reminds me a while ago I’ve seen some comedy skit on TV about a woman who has a mom with such a strong Malay accent going to her house, when the woman has a hard time understanding her since that’s the point. It was pretty funny hearing the distinct accents lol
You have no idea how long it took me to find someone mentioning that part of the video (I was almost ready to assume no one really noticed him mention Malaysia.) I may be misremembering, but there was a time when the Riau-Johor accent was considered "standard", a primary basis for modern Bahasa Malaysia, or at least a "prestige accent" of sorts.
The Bornean experience in KL is people asking you if you're from Sabah or Sarawak (they can either tell from how I speak or my name, of all things), and them saying you "cakap Bahasa Melayu pandai oh".
I'd say many of us think accents from outside our home state are unusual. Yes, there's loghat Kelate that is the butt of many jokes, but orang semenanjung find loghat Sabah/Sarawak just as baffling.
EDIT: Clarified the bit about Riau-Johor accent.
The fact that you can't not have an accent was brought home to me just recently. I was watching one of the Jumanji movies and decided I've never been impressed with Karen Gillan's American accent.
I want people to think that it's my native language, there's an acceptable range of accents for me in English
4:48 You claim to have a standard south-eastern accent (and maybe you do), but one thing I've noticed while watching this video is that you end almost every single utterance with a downwards , sort of mono-tone drawl, which is not typical here in in the south-east of England (or anywhere in the UK, I think). Does this fall under "accent", or does it come under a different category of idiosyncratic speech? Could make for another video.
I am the neurodivergent daughter of a South African and a Geordie, and like a few other neurodivergents I have met, I have what can be considered at least partially an RP accent. However, this is mixed in with some South African speaking habits and the northern pronunciation of ask and bath. Needless to say, growing up I was very confused as to why I was the only one with my accent for miles around.
I'm from the Midwest lived there my whole life but because I spen d a lot of time on the internet I have a different accent then my family and my families accent makes me laugh and some words I say make my friends laugh, like "Sorry, Tommorow, strawberry and Mum" and people ask If I'm Canadian.
I'm Brazilian from the state of Minas Gerais and I have always had a minas gerais accent up until some years ago, when I started playing video games everyday with some kids from São Paulo, when I absorbed a bit of their accent without noticing, like rolling the R after vowels and before consonants, something I never did my whole life and kind of made fun of my cousins from São Paulo for doing so
Interestingly, when you learn new languages, your own accent in your native language can change a bit.
I noticed, that through learning Korean, I started pronouncing certain german and english words with a ㄹ[ɾ] sometimes.
The word "riddle" would become "riㄹl", or german "Dattel" turns into "daㄹl".
This is probably due to the ㄹ sound just being easier to enunciate in some cases than the "normal" way to say it.
I'm in 🍁 of 🇯🇲 heritage. This clip is amusing and reminds me of a convo between my brother and friend.
My Bro,"U're accent is wild."
Him, "I'm from England. I speak English. As far as I'm concerned, the rest of you have accents."😂
I also love how some North Americans pretty much need subtitles to understand convos between Caribbean folks speaking with Irish or Scots😸
I dont have an accent, you have
In danish, wich is my native language, the standard accent is “rigsdansk” wich is something thats unlike any other accent in denmark! I also Think its the most common accent, at least on Fyn where i live, and its also my accent! Though the standard accent of denmark has evolved over time, becoming more ˋcasual´ sounding over time!
I'm from New Zealand, even though we are a relatively young country, we have started to develop some variances in accents, based on education, socio-economics, regions, and dare I say it, ethnicity. Some people have stronger nasal accents, but in general we don't have regional accents yet.
One thing I've noticed about your way of speaking--Is this standard southeast English?--is to pronounce th as f or v. Not as strikingly as the guy who does Thoughty2, but it's noticeable. One thing you left out about accents is that they shift through time. I grew up in Los Angeles, having been born in 1950, and notice that much younger Angelinos speak quite a bit differently. This shift can happen quickly so I've seen repeated changes. The "Valleyspeak" made famous by Moon Zappa was a phenomenon of the 1980s and '90s, and is long past.
As someone who's also from the south-east I would say that this pronunciation of 'th' isn't strictly standard, but it is not unusual. It could be considered to be what is sometimes known as 'Estuary English'. This is a form of south-eastern English that has working-class London influences that make it not 'standard'.
Notably, Hannover is in fact not the most important or populated city in Germany. Just happened to have an accent that is very similar to "Bühnendeutsch", the "ultimate compromise" of German accents according to some guy from Bremen and his biases.
I've only lived in Michigan in my life so far. But I still have known I have an accent, because I was raised in the north part. Other parts of Michigan say we have a Canadian-sounding accent🍁
LOL! Of course I don't have an accent! Everyone else has an accent, but not me! I am the prototype of the proper accent in English! Don't tell my British wife this -- she would definitely disagree.
In German, I have a somewhat non-native accent, but most German speakers can't quite pin down what my mother tongue is. Or at least that used to be the case. Disuse may have changed this.
I have learned not to underestimate people's stupidity, I also try not to underestimate my own stupidity. XD
Always thought that the Dublin accent and Liverpool accent had some similarities.
Irish immigration has been cited as a reason for the difference between the Liverpool accent and that of other nearby towns and cities.
When I lived in the UK, not many people could tell that I was from NZ, I don't think that my accent is that strong.
British English is just the proper English. And the correct way of spelling and grammar
(Joke…. Right?)
Is this a joke?
A "standard accent" is just an accent with an army, just as, according to the famous quip, a language is just a dialect with an army.
Anyone remember Frasier? Daphne and Niles and their 'will they, won't they' relationship? Daphne had a jokey Manc accent - I think the actress was from Surrey - but when her brother showed up he sounded like a Cockney geezer, 'Danny Dier' style.
Daphne and her brother had 'British' accents. One suspects the producers wanted to play on this, to show how there was no single 'British' accent.
I'd disagree on the 'no accent' label. OK, I've moved around the UK but even my accent has reverted to 'mid south', where I've lived for 30 years. But I'd ask anyone to differentiate between our current PM - Starmer - and previous PM, Sunak. To me they sound the same. One is the son of immigrants, the other the son of a 'toolmaker'.
Yeah, to myself, i sound like i don't have a relative accent (since I'm used to it, but ik i do have an accent like everyone else), but other people do know i have an accent, which is apparently different enough to be noticeable
The standard accent from Macedonia is from the capital and western part of the country. The accent is on the third vowel from the end
I'm from Rio de Janeiro and indeed the "carioca" accent is more or less perceived as the standard one for the same reason the SoCal could be the English one for foreigners. The biggest media group in the country is headquartered in Rio. But São Paulo (the city) has had a noticeable increase in cultural relevance country-wide reach. But people in São Paulo (the state) have a quite different accent from the one from their state capital. As SP-city grows and attracts people and businesses from the countryside of SP-state, SP-city is becoming a blend of the hissed Italian-esque capital one with the morrrrrre native-Brazilian-influenced one from the countryside. Just my 2 cents about a place I never lived in, but visited countless ammounts of times. And it's the accent I hear the most often here in Berlin, whenever I happen to overhear Brazilian Portuguese.
The carioca accent is said to be closer to the European one spoken in the early 1800s, when the entire Portuguese court and capital were temporarily transferred to Rio to escape Napoleon. That was a massive event that would earn an entire youtube channel about it. But I'm sure there is a paralel for American English as well. It's closer to the British one from the late 1700s/early 1800s. I wish someone could confirm if it's a myth or if there's some truth to it.
I worked in a call center for about 20 years. Call centers regularly use agents who have a "Midwest" accent because it is the easiest to understand. Of course, the last call center I worked for shook things up by having the customer service agents based in Manilla....because hardly anyone can understand them...lol
"No accent" to me always meant speaking without a FOREIGN accent specifically. Or maybe I should say "no dialect" in this case.
I'm thinking about the concept of the kind of German for example TV presenters speak versus just any random guy off the street. Most of the German spoken here has some kind of regional twang, but TV tries to speak as cleanly as possible.
Hopefully this makes like, kind of sense to someone. People claiming they "don't have an accent" do tend to uh, be wrong though, I agree.
I enjoyed the video, since I live in a region where the royal family (at least the Duchess of Sussex, Prince Archie, and Princess Lilibet) speak with no accent (or at least with the same accent I have). Also don't forget that one day each year we all adopt the accent of the southwest of Britain 🏴☠
I guess people that speak a language that is only spoken in their small country/area don't have an accent.
They just all have the same accent.
People in Michigan have a Northern American accent. The General American accent is found in the band between Chicago and Des Moines to the north and Kansas City and St. Louis to the south.
I think it’s the idea that our nation/culture is the norm while anything else is foreign or alien. It’s basic human nature to think we don’t talk weird, have weird beliefs, or have a weird society. It’s always other countries that are the weird ones for not living like us. But it’s an easy fix to cure people of this native-centrism. Just go to a foreign country where you’re the minority and you’ll see how different you really are
Something I had always thought was interesting was how a lot of singers who are British or from other English-speaking countries outside of the US sounded American, to me, in their music. I found a video saying that because of how people sing, their accents will usually turn more neutral. I don't remember if it was in the same video or something else I looked up, but I remember hearing that the northeastern US has the most neutral accent for English
It’s not neutral it’s Americanised British English of some flavour aka “Mid Atlantic” accent. It very definitely sounds like an accent to fellow Brits!
Another reason could be because they actually have a mixed accent