I heard someone explaining that he had learned Swedish to a very advanced level and he once asked a Swedish (male) friend to assess his accent. His friend said the accent was near native but he sounded strangely female but couldn't work out why. Eventually, they worked out that in Swedish they have a certain pitch or tone called pitch/tone 2 in which the voice goes up in pitch at the end of certain words. Females generally do this in a slightly more noticeable way than males and the learner had nearly always had female teachers and practised with females. So he'd ended up with a female sounding pitch.
@@languagejones Yeah, I’m studying Japanese, and it’s like “Damn, it sounds pretty good, but I don’t sound like the dudes.” 😂 I’ve been switching over to male voices to make it better.
Yeah, interesting, I always share Kató Lomb's speaking about this on "How I learn Languages": " I would just say here that, in general, women’s speech tends to sound more protracted, more drawn-out. One of the reasons for this is the doubling of vowels. This style of double emphasis invests words with a strong emotional content." "[...] Another feature of feminine language is the shift of all consonants towards sibilants /ſ, s, z/ that gives a slightly affected tone to speech. I think these phonetic changes play the same role as fashion: to emphasize femininity. The male voice is deeper, due to men’s anatomical makeup. " So, this happens in almost every language, there is some kind of shift... Kató Lomb said that even though there is a modern tendency to have an unissex accent, girls "instinctively start to twitter at a higher pitch when a [handsome] guy appears on the horizon".
I find that I can get started once I have the theory, but otherwise I'm just lost. Some people have a gift and can just do the accents without consciously knowing what they're doing. I'm definitely not one.
@@languagejones it's not necessarily a gift. you just have to actually pay attention and take the effort to remember how they pronounced certain words. then once you have enough material to see some form of pattern extrapolate from there. It's probably also a lot easier to do an accent if you're the one picking the phrases than given random ones. or at least given time to listen and pay attention to the words in the phrase you were given. it's kinda like learning another language's vocab /phrases except it's the same as yours in everything but the way they say the words.
@@ghosthunter0950when you argue that something is not a gift "you just have to", consider whether you also have the gift. Whenever you "just" do something you're talking about something you find obvious/easy. Maybe it's neither obvious nor easy to others
@@ghosthunter0950 I believe the gift that he's referring to in this instance is exactly what you're describing: good pattern recognition skills. Not everyone has that "gift," and everyone goes about learning things differently because of what skills they do have.
It's not the theory, it's being able to recognize the differences when hearing them. Once you recognize the differences when hearing, it follows naturally (through some practice) to produce them when speaking.
I have a very neutral Irish accent. The type you'd expect from a News Presenter. Here in Dublin, most say I don't sound Irish. Most say I sound American. Most ask me "So when did you move to Ireland?" or "So how long were you in the States for?". All this despite me never having been to American. Yet without fail. Every single American I've ever spoken to, instantly recognized my Irish accent. Moreso, they said it was strong to their ears. It's amazing how much personal perceptions affect how people interpret accent.
this is a similar phenomenon with my dad; he was born in sydney, but moved to portland when he was 6. when he was 18, he moved back to australia for the cheap university. at 18, he had a completely american accent. however, over the years it has softened out a lot. (this also could be because he has a liverpudlian mother and a dutch father, so he grew up saying ‘mum’ rather than ‘mom’) however, people in australia always comment on his american accent. two years ago, he went back to the u.s, and he could not escape people immediately clocking him as australian. just goes to show that even the way you hear someone elses accent depends on where you are and what you’re used to.
I listen to James O'Brien on LBC. As an American, when I hear Dubliners call in, they sound like neutral American to me, maybe kinda East Coast, but can't pin it. Not much different than our Colorado accent, though. I do pick up Irish accents from other than Dublin. I did pick up your accent when you wrote "Moreso"
Handsoapinc and zaper2904, I respect hearing your experiences and of course haven’t heard your speech, which I’m sure is lovely. But I offer this contrary experience. On my two visits to Ireland from my American home, I’ve been struck by how familiar the speech is in County Wicklow and Dublin area. I haven’t heard a linguistic expert take up the question of the similarities, but I’m convinced they’re present.
I'm from a small town a bit up the road from Kenmare in Kerry, and when traveling around Ireland, people notice how different I sound compared to a 'stereotypical' Kerry accent. I'm close in pronunciation to Glen from the youtube channel Sheep Shepherd.
I had to pause the video to collect myself on learning that Russian speakers can come across as rude when asking questions in English. I am a native Russian speaker and moved to an Anglophone country as a child. Before moving, I was often told by adults that I am a polite and considerate child. I was proud of this, and it meant that I could have positive interactions with adults. After moving, English speakers reacted poorly to me, and other children would sometimes tell me, often angrily, that I speak rudely to people. I didn't change the way I approach people that much since then, but my accent is barely perceivable now, and no one calls me rude or reacts poorly to me anymore.
as an arab, i have the same issue, often i make sarcastic jokes and north americans don't pick up on them and think i'm 100% serious. and often think im angry when i'm talking normally. i had to learn to speak in a "clam white dude on the morning radio" voice to make people understand i'm just friendly and expressive cause that's how my language is haha
This stereotype was lampshaded in The Simpsons, when Lisa got lost & ended up in "the Russian district". Everyone looked & sounded very angry even though the subtitles were normal happy/polite speech.
@@LightBringer666 I worked with a handful of people who were native Arabic speakers for 13yrs, and while im sure most people wouldn't do this to accommodate, I actually taught myself to like... hear them differently for that reason. Often I'd be talking to them and be like "tone indicates he is agitated, but the context doesn't support that at all" and gradually it boiled down to a similar thing - basically when I speak to native Arabic speakers (also Russian, German and some others), I tell myself "they're not angry and if they are, they'll let you know" and its done me a lot of good in terms of interactions.
I was in Tennessee once for Bonnaroo, a multi-day concert they host there, and someone asked me if i had a ladder. I looked at them like they were crazy and responded with "a ladder?" They said "Yeah, a ladder" and looked at me like I was crazy for questioning them. I just responded with "Why the f*** would i have a ladder??" to which they responded by doing the universal hand gesture for flicking a lighter as they once again repeated "a ladder." "Oh, you mean a LIGHTer" I said as i passed him my lighter. After that we both broke out laughing. We actually ended up talking about how I thought they had a crazy accent and they thought I had a crazy accent. They then proceeded to teach me how to ask for a lighter in a good ol' southern drawl. To this day, one of my all time favorite interactions I've ever had.
Haha! Sounds similar to an incident my Mom had with a college friend of hers from New York (with an accent thicker than a Katz's Deli sandwich): Mom was trying to buy a grape soda from the vending machine, and it wasn't working for some reason. NYC friend walked up and said, "It's outta waudah!" Mom heard this as "out of water", but she was trying to say it's "out of order". Her friend finally had to write the words on a piece of paper.
I'm from the south and was talking to a German girl that I knew that prided herself on speaking English "with absolutely no accent." She spoke with a British accent. I had a form I needed to fill out and asked her if she had a pen I could use. She gave me a strange look and asked me to repeat myself. I did, and she still looked confused. Finally she said "Are you asking me for a hairpin?" Ok, I'm aware that we do that "e" "i" pronunciation that he pointed out, and I do try to tone down the southern accent when I'm with non-native English speakers, but sometimes a funny sound like that slips out. What got me is that she couldn't figure out that small vowel difference from context. I was at a desk with a paper in my hand that I was supposed to write on, and she figured that I'd decided at that moment to re-do my hair?
@@AndyGneissMy husband has a West Indian father and he used to be so frustrated with my pronunciation of pin=pen. I couldn't figure out why he made that distinction. He was born in NY but grew up in Atlanta. I am from the Midwest. Still can't figure out why we say it differently, but I figure his Trini father was much more careful with English pronunciation than my parents (who were both raised by Southerners).
My wife has a habit of picking up a few tones wherever we wind up living. After a decade in Minnesota, she has long Os, regional idioms, and other bits of Minnesota detritus in her conversation. We were at a diner in California a few years ago before we caught our flight and the waitress asked where we were going. My wife said 'Back to MinnesOta (with the long O), and the waitress replied she figured as much because of her accent. Never seen her so mad, and she claimed the entire ride to the airport that she doesn't have a Minnesota accent. She really doesn't realize how many 'Oh fer' s and 'Holy Buckets' that populate her speech now. I find it pretty funny. I took Russian in college, and am learning Spanish now, and I have to unlearn my default pronunciation of things. My Spanish sounds like I'm a Russian tourist.
I'll give you two of my (kiwi) accent not being understood 1. Working in London in a wine shop and not understanding why the customer did not wanting to buy the wine that I had said was better, when she explained she did not like bitter wine 2. On a wrestling tour to the States and Canada had crossed into Canada on foot and then returning sitting in no mans land waiting for my party to catch up I was approached by a US boarder guard who asked what I was doing 'Oh don't worry I'm just waiting for those guys to come through', he went to is radio and asked for a Polish translator.
My (US, English L1) family had a Kiwi houseguest (from the South Island) when I was about ten. It took me probably twenty minutes for my ears to acclimate enough to comprehend any of his speech 😅 Great guy. I still say "they don't indi-kite!" when a car driver doesn't use their turn signal properly.
Kia ora! My (US, English L1) first day in NZ (Ōtautahi Christchurch), we went to the grocery store in the late afternoon. The clerk asked, "Home-time?" Between the vowel shifts and a phrase we'd never heard (though I've seen it since in British media), my partner and I had no idea what she was talking about until there was a lot of repetition and clarification. (Are you heading home now, because it is the end of the workday.) Fun on kiwi radio: hearing "women's nipple" but realizing it was about netball. The mysterious "ripplewoppa" turned out to be the meatless Rebel Whopper. And a carpentry company had fun with ads about what they could do with your deck.
In high school my friend had a Russian classmate. Once his mum called and it led to a very intense but brief conversation in Russian. His classmates were worried and asked what's wrong. He was surprised about the question. Nothing had been wrong. They had talked about what's for lunch when he gets home. This happened in Austria, so all the classmates mentioned were (mostly native) German speakers.
I work for a trucking company where I interact with long-haul drivers on a daily basis. I'm not only exposed to American regional accents but also Hispanic, Bosnian, and even in some cases African, Caribbean, and New Zealand accents. I don't quite know *how* this video will help me, but it's absolutely fascinating learning about what makes up the differences in speech patterns and intonations. Also, if you could do more videos of random accent facts that'd much appreciated. Thanks!
For me, the key to any accent is finding what it feels like in my mouth, then speaking while maintaining that feeling. I think that finding that feeling must be more complicated that I think it is because I can't describe exactly how I do it. I was once demonstrating my Italian accent (speaking English) to an Italian girl I had recently met. She exclaimed, "Calabrese!" The people who I was copying were mostly from Calabria, so I must have it pretty good.
@@evercuriousmichelle To describe the feel of my mouth is to describe how it feels different to my normal accent. If you can imitate Hugh Jackman speaking in his native accent, you will have an idea of my starting position. I can tell you that my soft palate feels wider and sibilants seem to occur just behind the alveolar ridge but I don't think that's going to help much. I got my Italian accent by imitating an exuberant Italian bus driver, "Never fear. Johnny's here!" What I suggest is you listen to someone you would like to sound like and pick a single sentence and practice it until you get the sound and rhythm. You might try doing an exaggerated comic accent, then toning it down, "Hey you! Shut uppa ya face." Learning German I found some sound changes difficult. I would stumble over the word. I kept saying the word and allowing my tongue to take different positions. Eventually I found a way to smoothly change from one sound to the next. In this way the word come out sounding like a German word and not an English rendition of a German word. Hope this is helpful.
@@sigmaoctantis1892 I've been learning french and enjoying the accent. Funnily enough I find it very similar to the yoshi/stitch voice thing, like swedish but toned down a bit lol
@@samuelwaller4924 The first thing to notice about French is that it is a syllable timed language. All the syllables are the same length, unlike English with its stress pattern of long and short syllables. I learned French in high school. I'm Australian and so was my teacher, however, he had lived for several years in Strasbourg. Naturally, I imitated his accent. When I tried speaking (poor) French, in France, due to my accent, I was mistaken for a German! One girl told me it was actually an Alsace accent! At least I have an ear for accents.
The best advice I got from my stage dialect coach was that each accent has a focal point. Standard American at back of tongue, Received Pronunciation (UK) in the lips, Jamaica heavily in the lips, etc. When he would say a word in his accent then repeated the word in the target accent, it often sounded like two different people. This not only helped me get the accent but also to come up with a voice for the character I was playing. Of course, I still had to learn about letter substitution etc.
I actually forced a change of accent when I was 8. I had a very strong regional South Yorkshire (Northern English) accent. But I hated how it sounded, so I practiced speaking in RP. It worked very well. Northeners never think I'm one of them, although Southeners can tell. It ended up making me sound very posh, and has changed how people percieve me. Strangers treat me with more distance now, but people pay a lot more attention to what I have to say. I feel like an impostor talking to actually posh people though. The accent only gets you so far, because class divisions are very obvious.
Did you move out of South Yorkshire or go to private school or something? I'm assuming you're older as RP has so much less prestige than it used to - I think nowadays having a soft regional accent is if anything a benefit(though some, like West Country are still stigmatised) makes people sound more authentic and soft ones are common on TV and news
I had i Midlands accent. I purposely removed it . I have southern a e i o sounds but my u is still northern cant do the southern u without concentration.
As soon as they offer Dutch in Lingopie, I am all over it. In the meantime, I use Language Reactor (formerly called Language Learning with Netflix). This lets me watch any video on Netflix or UA-cam with: -Dual subtitles -Auto translate for any title where both languages sre not available -line looping -stop at end of line -jump to next line -jump to previous line -user color-coded words in subs -mouseover definitions -one click lookup in wiktionary and other dictionaries
As you begin wrapping up, I was disappointed feeling like I wanted you to go into more depth on these. It’s great to hear that you’re going to be doing deep dives into different accents. I look forward to the future videos.
I moved from Germany to Tennessee in high school. I thought my English was good enough but then I had to take “Civics” with the basketball coach. If he had not written homework assignments on the board, I would not have turned anything in for weeks, his accent was that impenetrable.
People in The South Eastern US have a very noticeable, heavy accent. Sometimes even Americans from other areas have a bit of trouble understanding them...
My French is pretty poor to start with (I am currently trying to improve it!), but when I went to Brussels back in February, I met a man who lived there and spoke French, but was originally from Mauritius, so he had what sounded to me like an Indian accent. It was SO hard to understand what he was saying, which was especially awkward when, at one point, I realized he was asking me if I wanted to go back to his place to sleep with him. I responded by saying "sorry, I'm married," and his answer to that was "that doesn't matter, you're on vacation." 😅😬
When i first started studying Japanese in university, I found it helpful to practice my pronunciation by trying to speak English as if it was written in katakana. Essentially I was speaking English with a Japanese accent. That way I didn't have to worry so much about Japanese grammar and lexicon, and could just focus on the pronunciation, how to hold my mouth, how to partition syllables, etc.
I'm Dutch and moved to Switzerland, where I learned standard German and Swiss-German. Somehow, I've been able to learn the latter without a noticeable "foreign" accent, as pretty much everyone I talk to assumes I'm Swiss (even though I still sometimes make mistakes with genders, cases, regional words, etc). This gives me great joy in asking people where in Switzerland they think I'm from. Almost all guesses have been on the right side of the country, with some rare exceptions (shout out to the dude who thought I was from Wallis lol). I'm also proud to say that over time, more and more people are guessing that I'm from Zurich (which is where I live), including some Zurich natives. Standard German is another story. Though I write it often, I rarely speak it, but I do watch a lot of German content on UA-cam, so I know how standard German is "supposed to sound" (yes there are loads of regional differences in "standard" German but whatever). However, even when trying my very best to speak the most beautiful, soft sounding standard German, everyone immediately assumes I'm Swiss lol On the other hand, I've been speaking English for 17 years longer, 10 of which at C2 level, and my Dutch accent sticks out like a sore thumb. I feel like my vowels are fine (especially since learning about weak forms) but my s's and t's seem unfixable. Many non-native speakers think I'm American but I don't think I'll ever fool a real one.
I'm from Montana, born and raised, both sides of my family have been here for generations. I'd say I'm an "thoroughbred" Montanan-Western American English speaker. And never thought anything of it, because I was surrounded by my fellow speakers. For a time I was living in Washington DC and had two roommates- one from Central California and the other from the Boston Metro Area. Anyway, I was absolutely horrified one day when my Bostonian/pahhk the cahh roommate told me that between myself and the Californian, I WAS THE ONE WITH THE ACCENT.
i've been working on vocal feminization and so i've been learning a lot of the gender differences in American accents. for example, women tend to have a wider range of intonation as well as higher pitch, although there are exceptions: a lower pitch with narrower range is perceived as "sultry." women also typically speak with the tongue more forward than men, although again there are exceptions like "gay voice" when men speak with a relatively forward articulation.
It’s in interesting to see you mention gay voice. I never tried to analyze it, but I have noticed that this phenomenon is real. I would occasionally remark (or just note to myself) that so-and-so speaks with a gay accent. I’ve noticed this in men; I’m not aware if there’s a similar phenomenon in lesbians.
@@davidkantor7978 i haven't noticed a consistent lesbian intonation, but there is a common "butch" voice with darker resonance from lowering the larynx. and it's not a queer thing specifically, but the vocal fry trend is partly a consequence of women speaking in lower pitches, which requires creaky voice to support falling intonation.
I'm from the south of England and sound like it. Growing up, I used to visit family in a working class area of Liverpool. Some of my family up there had accents, but the local kids were a different story. One time, I was playing in the gardene and a neighbour kid popped his head over the fence and said hello. He had a thick accent, but I managed to understand him until he said "oo dyoo spoor". He must have repeated a dozen times before my Dad has to come out and explain he was asking me who "who do you suppport?". I asked him what sport he was referring me and at that point the cultural gap proved too great, and he retreated to his own garden.
Mahalo Taylor, I really needed this. About 20 years ago my wife and I were in Donegal studying Irish. In the month we were there, I got pretty good at identifying what general area the Irish were from based on their accents (that has since faded). But there was a fellow from Scotland there (not sure what part) whose English I could not understand at all - I picked up maybe one word out of fine. There was a lot of nodding and laughing when he laughed. I think that's the only English accent. Conversely, I know folks on or from the continent who have an incredibly difficult time with Hawai‘i Creole English (we call it "pidgin"). We have a hard time convincing visitors and blow-ins that it's not just "bad English." 🙄 My current work involves several closely related Polynesian languages, and I'm working out the accent differences as well.
My girlfriend and I once got to know a nice man who was selling food out of the boot of his car to try to save up enough to open a restaurant. While he was always apologising for his bad English, I tried to assure him it was very good, but he couldn't understand a word I said and my gf would always have to "translate" me into RP.
Less about intonation and more about grammar, but when I had just met a Korean friend of mine she asked me if I wanted to come over to her house by saying “You will come to my house?” Stating it as fact but with a slight intonation. So I was like, damn, guess I’m going to her house now. A while later I’m learning a bit of Korean and find out that it doesn’t phase questions with “can you/ will you/ do you” etc. You just say the statement with the intonation of a question. So my friend wasn’t being trying to be forceful, she was asking me IF I wanted to come to her house. Thankfully it ended well for me but please don’t go to (almost) stranger’s homes.
Oh, wow! As a northern English speaker I have frequently hard about the bath/trap and the foot/strut splits in the UK. I had no idea those words were part of the Wells lexical set.
In addition to the consonants, vowels, and intonations, I might add idiomatic features of some accents. This can be the coastal "soda" vs. the midwestern "pop", the American "chips" vs. British "crisps", the Canadian propensity for "eh", or the South Asian propensity for pronouncing this symbol (@) as "at the rate of" even in things like email addresses. It's fascinating to see the varieties from everywhere. ...As for other accents, I've heard it said that the difference between Metropolitan French accents and Canadian French accents is heard with what they do with English's "TH". In France, they mostly turn it to "Z", but in Canada, they mostly turn it to "D". Would love to hear more about that.
Great video! As an opera singer, we study this thoroughly and intensely in music school. Especially within our German study, we tend to also study some differences between Hoch Deutsch and Viennese Austrian pronunciations, or moments, like in Fledermaus, when a character needs to speak German with an “Hungarian” accent
It sounds difficult to sing opera, it sounds difficult to nail an accent, and it sounds especially difficult to do both at once!! I'm glad people like you accomplish it though; I love opera.
I think there's 3 parts to getting an accent right. Understanding the linguistics behind it, understanding how the facial and throat muscles work in different languages, and musical ability. I have a feeling that the actors who are naturally good at accents have musical ability as well, but I may be wrong and it may not be true for all actors.
When I was in highschool, a kid from Guatemala had transferred to my school knowing no English. I was the only one around that was fluent in Spanish, so I volunteered to help him learn to play the guitar. I learned, however, that speaking and translating are two completely different skills and I suck at translation in real time. While I was mostly fluent in conversational Spanish, I knew very few musical terms like metronome, beat, string, tune, pegs, shift, pluck, etc. Furthermore, I was used to the Puerto Rican accent of my household and the "standard" Latinoamerican accent taught in school, but could not understand his thick, possibly rural Guatemalan accent at all
re: intonation -- my favorite is listening to flight attendants rattle off the entire spiel in English but with their primary language's intonation. I should try to figure out the lexical set (?) of the various generations of Chinese-English speakers...
both my parents have a different accent from me and i'm in an area with lots of immigrants (which is part of why we settled here lmao) so i always grew up hearing many different accents. i love them and find them fascinating, especially the social conditioning about "desirable" accents or "unintelligent" ones, and how accents form. intonation is super cool to learn as a language learner, too.
As an East Tennessean who lived in Louisville KY for 20, I can testify to the difficulty of trying to moderate my native dialect. I worked in a call center and people in Illinois could not understand me.
I’m a native New Yorker but have lived in California most of my adult life. I still have never gotten used to “lick in the mere” for “look in the mirror,” or people on radio call-in shows identifying themselves as a “first-time collar.” On the flip side of the coin, on a visit to Paris, someone hearing my French asked if I was German. She could tell I was foreign but misplaced the accent, probably because I have pretty good uvular r’s and French u and eu vowels (like German umlauted ü and ö).
I don't know if you've done it already, but you should make a video about the difference between an accent and a dialect. I personally think they're the same, but in German-speaking cultures there's a lot of emphasis on dialects whereas in English there are huge differences between the way people speak, but we tend to call them accents.
My favorite story to tell as a sign I’d end up studying language variation was asking my first grade teacher in Staten Island why the worksheet said dog and frog were rhyming words. We were told us not to count on the spelling but to listen to the sound, so I did!
Trying to find discussion on how the sounds in these two words diverged (or if they even started out in the same place to begin with), I came across a NYT article that was too on the nose, from July 21, 1985. “New Yorkers have developed yet another set of pronunciations, some of them so peculiar to their city that only people who grow up with them can get them right every time. What outsider, for example, would know that choral is pronounced coral, but that coral is CAH-rel? Or that frog is frahg, but dog is doo-AWG; that on is ahn, but off is oo-AWF?” Quite an interesting piece. Labov and Shuy are both quoted extensively.
This is great if you want to break down an accent, but I think there's a huge omission. Accents have an embodied internal logic to them, and if you can get a physical sense of that logic, then the accent becomes trivial and intuitive. The key is oral posture. People with different accents hold their mouths in different positions by default, which makes some sounds easier to pronounce than others in different contexts. French has an oral posture that's very front, relaxed, and round. Once you learn to shift to that posture, all those front round vowels, velar Rs, and (if you're speaking English with a French accent) Zs instead of THs become natural. Arabic is almost the opposite, with very tight, unrounded lips. The reason why my French pronunciation has always been decent is that one of my first French teachers taught us French oral posture. Sadly, she was the exception and I've never had another teacher try to show me the oral posture for a language. It's also unfortunately difficult to learn about online; it seems like relatively few people talk about it, at least for the languages I've tried to look into.
20-30 years ago, when I did some acting, we had tapes on various accents and this was a key the instructor on the tape always used. How you hold your mouth and where the "center" of your sound was informed the vowel sounds, and to some extent the consonant sounds, and made the accent more natural. IIRC, Irish was "centered" in front of the mouth, while Cockney was nearly in the throat.
I’ve been utilizing “Accents: A Manual for Actors- Revised and Expanded Edition” by Robert Blumenthal to teach dialects to actors for the past 20 or so years. Lots of work on mouth shape, jaw placement and tongue level. Love this video, Dr. Jones, BTW 😊
I remember as a Russian working in an Amusement park in the States my supervisors used to tell me that I'm not "friendly" enough despite me already trying twice as hard to put on the most fun and amiable persona I could. I remember being so pissed like how can you be even more friendly???
If you want to understand the intonation of a language it can be really helpful to look at their songs. My voice teacher takes the view that when someone rights a melody to fit some words, they (either consciously or subconsciously) write a melody that is an exaggerated version of how they hear the language. I use that to figure out how to sing in a foreign language (or even English) convincingly, but you could also use it to figure out how native speakers hear the intonation of their own language.
I grew up in Delaware, and moved to North Carolina in my early 20s. I think I lived there for at least 5 years before I could hear my home region's accent as an accent instead of just "normal." My first full-time job there involved working with migrant farm workers. I didn't have trouble understanding the Spanish speakers, but I had a memorable encounter with an English speaking farm worker. To determine eligibility, I had to ask about the crops they worked with. This gentleman told me he harvested "ish" (like ice, but with sh) potatoes. I had an awful time trying to figure out what iced potatoes were. It turns out that he was saying "Irish" potatoes. I hadn't heard regular potatoes called that before, so it took an embarrassingly long time to understand this other speaker of my native language.
I am russian and I’ve been polishing my English accent for fee years. Especially the last 2 years as I live abroad and meet all kinds of foreigners. In the last year I’ve fooled a fair amount of people into thinking I’m american/canadian. Even some americans. I think I’m super close with consonants, but the vowels… Some people even say I sound australian, because I can never keep those vowels in a fixed accent, and I just fluctuate them around. The good part is, Russian is not really poor in vowels, (unlike for example Serbian), but those appear in specific places. So sometimes when I see IPA for a word such as back-[bæk], I recall words where dictionary says it’s æ in Russian (I know I might not have that same accent as there, but it should be close). Learning other languages definitely helps also. I noticed that English speakers are more susceptible to accents than German speakers, because even with my unstable German, people might think I am German.
My wife is Mexican and honestly one of the best non-native English speakers I've met, but I'm from the edge of Appalachia in North Georgia. After a few years of practice, she still has trouble with my dad and says she only understands 30% of what my grandmother says lol
Remember, there are exception to vowel groups. For example, in my region in Southern Kerry, we do not use the typical 'goose' group for 'ewe', instead using the 'goat' group. This does not mean we pronounce it like the American 'Yo', but closer (yet distinct from) the general Southern US pronunciation of 'Y'all', as we do for all of our 'Goat' group vowels. 'So' may be pronounced closer to General American 'Saw'.
Yeah, saying that the lexical sets are all you need is fine for most English accents, but not *any* English accent. This is because Wells' lexical sets were constructed using only Received Pronunciation and (older) General American accents, and some dialects preserve vowel distinctions that those two had both collapsed Middle English /ɪw juː/ (preserved in some Welsh English dialects), /eː ɛː/ (MEET vs MEAT, preserved in some Midlands dialects), and /ʊɹ ɛɹ/ (preserved in a lot of southern Irish English accents).
I’m from the west coast of Scotland but have less of the accent than my parents did because my mother was very fussy about ‘proper pronunciation’ when I was growing up (fussy about my pronunciation, not her own). That did me no favours at school. When I worked in London, quite a few people assumed I was Irish rather than Scottish. Most Scottish people think I come from Edinburgh rather than the west coast. I would love it if you would do an episode on Scottish accents, but I’m sure I will enjoy any content on accents - especially if it helps me improve my accent when speaking German. Some German people have taken me for Dutch, which I take as a compliment (not obviously a native English speaker struggling) but it would be good to improve!
Where do people find complete reference IPA sets fully describing accents? Searching informally, what turns up are a zillion incomplete introductory commentaries (including this video) which note a few items about one or more accents. These are helpful, but if you’re new to this, when you’re practicing it’s hard to know whether you’re unconsciously neglecting certain sounds and persisting with howler mispronunciations from your native accent because there are sounds you don’t even know that you need to pay attention to. Leaving aside other aspects about fully inhabiting regional accents such as slang and idioms, as I try to learn various accents it would be helpful to know more or less all the sounds there are to learn. I’d be happy to pay for such resources, but I don’t even know where to look. There are courses, there are sometimes dictionaries for the most popular accents like RP or standard American, but what I think I’d be happiest to find are succinct IPA sets for a wide variety of accents. My main goal is to be able to read books aloud with colorful and convincing characterization, so I’m especially interested in regional accents of native English speakers e.g. Dublin, Glaswegian, South Boston, South Carolinian…
Many years ago I commented on a friend's Scottish accent. I told her I didn't have one. She then said, "You have a lovely Canadian accent." Since the internet became a huge resource I began researching accents. Pretty impressive.
Hi Language Jones, absolutely love your content, been watching for a few months, appreciate your style and humour 😂 One request, PLEASE can you talk about South African English pronunciation? Some interesting interactions going on down there, and I can find NOTHING on it elsewhere
This is a brilliant video, and makes so much sense when explained in that way. What trips me up in learning a Mexican Spanish accent, is I can’t trill my R’s yet.
I was raised all over the western US(minus Hawaii) and I've been told I sound like someone from Jersey. That completely threw me off. I've never been west of Western Michigan. I'm very excited to hear this video. Also half of my family is from appalachia but tried hard to adapt to swedes.
I grew up in the northern bit of the osarks, up near where the Salem Plateau ends and the great plains begin. the Ozark English dialect is understudied, mostly you'll find it in linguistics literature being referred to in relation to Appalachian English. I grew up in an isolated community and was raised by my grandparents. consequently, I speak a version of Ozark English that is largely associated with the elderly of Dent County, Missouri. I have never met someone not from the region who can understand it readily. I've been through the south, and not even there was I easy to understand. I mostly don't use it, but I do consciously practice to maintain it. after all, there's a possibility I could someday be the last person alive who sounds like, well, me. it did get me bullied when I moved north as a teen, though. one time, my grandpa talked to a traveling missionary. the guy had a New England accent. I couldn't place it, but I'd guess Connecticut. he seemed to have a hard time understanding my grandpa, and the conversation didn't last very long. it ended when my grandpa said "boy, you talk real funny. can't understand but half what you're saying!" it was pretty funny to me. my grandpa seems to think he doesn't have an accent.
Funny that you mention John C. Wells being famous for lexical sets. I only knew him as having been President of the Universal Esperanto Association, my dad worked with him there in the early 90s
I moved just two counties south within the same state, Ohio, and was surprised by the different accents in the area. I'd always assumed I had no accent but now I can clearly recognize the specific regional accent of my hometown area. I am fascinated by accents and enjoyed the video. 👍
When lived in Korea for a while I learnt Korean in Busan and could speak fairly well to get things done. It wasn't until I went to Seoul for the first time, I realised my Korean had a Busan accent! As I got better, I focused on the more standard pronunciation but I couldn't really get rid of it since I was living in Busan. I still get comments on it years after I've left Korea 😂
Intonation was one of the key aspects of begginer russian for me, and honestly it doesn't really click until you are more immersed in hearing native speakers Intonation
I am terrible with accents not using them but hearing and understanding them. I have a processing issue, so if your sound and your mouth don't do what I expect I need a lot of time to get used to your way of speaking. I always knew this but it hadn't been a problem until I lived in a city with a large immigrant population and now I work with people who are at different levels of english and hundreds of accents. I feel bad because I say "what" and "pardon" and "one more time please" these days more than anything else. It will take time I'd love to learn more languages, but it turns out I need to focus on different versions of english.
So, I grew up in an area with a lot of native russian speakers -- like, through my childhood and to today, if I walk around my home town for more than like two hours, I will almost certainly encounter someone speaking russian as their primary language, [or one of the neighboring slavic languages ... or more rarely. moldovan/romanian -- but all of them also speak russian anyway] I was SO confused why everyone thought russians were rude/mean to them or making fun of them when they were jsut asking them normal questions for years, until I finally noticed that the stress pattern russian speakers use for questions parses to most people as sarcastic.
9:11 is the Pin-Pen Merger the same thing I hear happening in people under 40yo saying “woman” and “women“ nearly identically? I first heard this teaching HS in NYC in the early ‘aughts, but now I’m hearing it more frequently both online and in Eastern PA. Disconcerting for older ears but also a real curiosity for me.
What lexical sets don't address is different accents grouping some words under different lexical sets. For example, while "dog" in the New York accent is a part of the THOUGHT set, in British English it's in LOT/CLOTH (which have merged). There are also diachronic variations, such as older RP speakers saying "off" like THOUGHT but modern southern Brits like LOT/CLOTH again.
The other major thing for accent authenticity, though, is colloquial language use. Case in point, kevin bridges. Because even if you get the vowels right, hell use a lot of slang terms like "wee" to mean "small", "aye" instead of "yes/yeah" or the way he fuses "cannot" into "cannae" etc.
Aussie here (for context). I did a lot of Japanese for a long time (and still can't speak it) but when my Irish bestie's Colombian mother-in-law came to stay with her for a few months, I thought I should learn some Spanish so I could talk with her more easily... bestie laughed at me so much because she reckoned I spoke Spanish with a Japanese accent :') I made no comment on her thick Irish accent permeating every part of her Spanish speaking. Now I'm learning Finnish and I think being so used to Japanese has kinda given me a small leg-up in terms of pronunciation, although I may be wrong!
I was brought up in Edinburgh, Scotland until age 11, and didn't think I had an accent. Then we moved to Yorkshire, and I was called Scotty for a few years. Then we moved to the North East, and I was called Yorkie for a while. When I returned to Yorkshire as an adult, I was called Geordie! I am able to use any of these accents at will, depending on context, but my usual speech is 'generalised northern'.
As someone who wants to record podfics for certain fandoms, I really wanna master a few regional American accents represented in said fandoms without sounding like the worst mimic ever or like I'm mocking those with said accent. Also a particular Irish variant (If I try an Irish accent for too long I end up sliding toward my generic American accent without thinking and it's annoying to my perfectionist brain). I'm an Australian, so I can pull off UK-English accents fairly well, but regional US ones trip me up and I would like to not be tripped up. This series could be a _goldmine_ for me.
I love the tempo of his videos. I have to speed things up sometimes because I have a poor attention span & I cant remember what people said if they say things too slowly. I never have to speed these up.
I also noticed that the sounds produced, like you mentioned about the p, move with the languages. For example, french and german... very front of the mouth sound production. Meanwhile, Spanish is more to the mid/back region of the mouth. I also felt that French was a very closed mouth language (think muttering) in contrast to Spanish which felt like a more open mouth language. Especially the lip movement and the lower jaw degree of tightness. Think adiós vs. bonsoir where, for me, the air/sound was mid/back for spanish and front/flat middle of the mouth for french. The french, to me, felt very very close to the teeth with a tighter lower jaw and a tighter nasal 'scrunch'. I do not have words for it besides scrunch. North American english feels like a more opened mouth language but not as open as Spanish. And the southern American accents.. I always hear a trace of British in how they say their vowels.
I realised I had an accent when I was about 12 - raised by a sole parent Anglo-Indian father, it was the fact that HE said some words 'funny' that led me to realise that I did too. He learned Urdu at school and I like to think (for reasons of sentiment not logic) that might be why when I watched the movie Ae Fond Kiss just 3 years after starting to learn Hindi I found the characters easier to understand when speaking their Urdu-Panjabi than when speaking Glaswegian English. It's also always amused me that while I'm constantly told by pretty much everyone I meet that my Hindi pronunciation is very good, I cannot imitate an Indian English accent like my cousins' at all.
I grew up in Central Connecticut (1970s/80s) and was teased relentlessly in elementary school for “having an accent”…but I never understood why. (My parents and grandparents were all raised in Central CT too, and they all spoke English as their first language.) Most of my classmates were pretty much in the same socioeconomic class and ethnic background as my family, so I still don’t know why my accent stood out so much to them! After college, I moved around to other parts of the US and people often ask me where I’m from, “because it’s not from here!” Anyway, I find this topic fascinating and am looking forward to the rest of the series! Thanks!
I'm constantly telling my cats not to look at me in that tone of voice. I have a mild Deaf accent, and in sign language, my friends and I talk about saying or hearing things the same way a blind person might say "I see what you mean"
That's an expression I've used my whole life. My family uses it, but I don't think I can recall other Aussies using it. I'm not sure where it came from, but there you go, it seems to pop up here and there.
There's a particular variety of South African accents that I find so, so interesting (e.g. Sharlto Copley). Even though I KNOW it has defined and consistent rules, it always feels like it's pinging off in all sorts of unpredictable directions. I'm also interested in whether one's own accent makes a difference to the accents one finds interesting - I'm a southern British English speaker and I've noticed a pattern in the accents I like nearly all having long monophthongs, where my accent diphthongises all over the place.
People have a really rough time placing my accent because of…well a lot. I grew up in an Italian-American household (most of the older members of my family that I interacted with the most were born in Italy and their accents were noticeable) in the Great Lakes region in the suburbs around a city not unlike Detroit. When I was 11, we moved to Arkansas. While there, I spent most of my time with non-native English speakers and other transplants from other areas of the country anywhere from Mississippi to Oregon. I spent a stint just outside Boston then moved to Japan. A lot of people guess Latina, which I guess is pretty close to Italian thinking about Romance Languages and speech patterns. The most interesting was recently a woman from Texas said I sound like an Italian from New Orleans. So accents are fun. I tend to mimic and pick up various speech patterns without paying much attention as well which I have to be careful of. I learned to mimic the people around me to blend into my environment, but that’s just going to be bad in certain places.
I once moved to eastern Poland from the south-west, and people used to tell me I was speaking with an accent. I thought, "No, YOU speak with an accent." Then I learned about accents when studying philology, and it surprised me to learn that we were all right. They didn't know that my accent wasn't typical for Upper Silesia, though. I also learned of a phonetic alphabet used for Polish and how blind we are to many aspects of sound in our language, claiming our language is pronounced as it's written. Well, it is in a way, but also, no, it isn't.
When I was 15 I read something by John C. Wells about pronunciation of Italian vowels, and the order in which he listed them was i,e,a,o,u. ("i" as in "machine", "e" as about halfway between a "short e" is in "bet" and a "long a" as in "bait" (that's a crude way to put it), "a" is in "father", "o" as in "sold" (not as in "soda"), "u" as in "June moon"). At the time I thought maybe there's a scientific reason for that order, but I didn't know what it was. About a year later a 15-year-old girl pointed out the reason: You can feel your tongue moving from the front to the back as you pronounce them.
Thanks for the full list of lexical sets. It really explains the concepts and usefully distinguishes from phonetics. It will be very useful in commenting on future videos. The dimenson you miss is which set any particular word falls into, which can be unpredictable. In the UK it can also be a class shiboleth e.g. "room" is a [goose] for most of us, but a [foot] for posh people; likewise "poor" can be [north] or [cure] according to class - which goes the opposite way in England and Australia. Getting stuff like this wrong is the easiest way of seeing through an accent fake.... It always amuses that the American lyricist of My Fair Lady has an upper class English character rhyme "bother" (lot) with "rather" (bath/palm/start merge).
3:13 I might be the winner. Lived in New Orleans for a few years, and my neighbor had that keep south creole accent and he also missing all of his teeth. Needed subtitles to understand him 😂
This is great as a GM for DnD who can only do a Russian and Southern Accent. I'd love a dive into romance language accents. I doubt you could do a Latin one but if so that would be awesome!
I would be interested to know why you didn't include syllabic vs stress timing in this discussion. (Well, okay. I'm impressed how well you DID explain so much in so little time. But still.) The hardest English to understand that I run into is that spoken by people whose native language is syllable-timed. Also, I have a question about fake accents. In particular, I used to tease my kids by putting on a fake accent when we were out shopping and such. There were two of them. One* was a very fake RP, which I defined as locking my teeth an eighth of an inch apart and then talking without ever allowing it to change. As I think back, it wasn't _only_ that, but I'm curious whether you have any comments on that technique -- bearing in mind that it's a joke! not a serious attempt at sounding like some real people's real manner of speech. * The other was a hodgepodge centered on my German grandmother's accent, but with intrusions from French, Spanish, a bit of Hebrew, and the sounds I kinda recognized as characteristic after spending a couple of weeks in Scandinavia as a teenager.
I can speak German, due to living in Germany for two years using it every day. When I returned to the US my Dad was interested in how well I spoke it, so he asked a work colleague who was native German to call me on the phone to assess my ability. He later told my father that he could tell I wasn't a native speaker, but couldn't tell what my native language was. I've been learning Spanish lately, and when I tried having a conversation with a native Mexican Spanish speaker, she said that my accent was not American at all. You'd think that I could speak English with a German or Spanish accent, but I can't do it. It's weird.
You asked for actors & i don't know if that offer is still open, but here they go: Sharon Small, a Glaswegian(i think) who played Barbara Havers in "the Inspector Lynley Mysteries." Havers is from Acton(west London) but personally she sounds more east to me or perhaps standard Estuary English. She plays a role in many British dramas & plays, including "Call the Midwife" which is handy in comparing the London accent. It is so annoying that sooo many Scottish actors have to drop their own accent to get roles. This includes Martin Compston who plays Steve Arnott in "Line of Duty", compare it to the political ad he did for the SNP. Or David Tennant. Further on the same soggy island; "Hinterland" is set in Wales & features the language. Richard Armitage played a Victorian mill owner in "North & South," that accent is definitely worth a look. Especially as his work is so broad, he did voice acting for Wolverine for example. And i saved the best for last; Audrey Hepburn & not only for the role of Eliza Doolittle. She was born in Brussel to a Dutch mum & a British father. Her parents divorced & with the threat of the second world war looming her mum went to the estate of her parents in Arnhem.(in WW1 NL was neutral, Belgium devastatingly wasn't) As an upper class girl she was of course taught French, next to Dutch & English. Her first role was a little bit part in a language film,"Dutch in seven lessons," as the narrator is horribly sexist. Later she also learnt Italian, probably during her second marriage. I don't speak Italian so cannot conform when others tell that she has an upper class accent in it. I do know the other three & she always sounds extremely posh.(except in "My Fair Lady" i guess)
I work with someone who grew up in rural Idaho and recently moved here in the bay area. I could only understand about a third of what they said for Months. After about a year I was pretty acclimated, and I might be picking up some of their tendencies myself
Excellent. I had a revelation when my middle eastern friends would conduct themselves in a manner considered rude, however in hindsight it was most likely cultural/linguistic differences.
The last few people I helped with English all appreciated my “neutral accent.” That to me is the closest one can get to having “no accent,” but I know I still sound Canadian
There was a teacher in my high school whose accent I really liked, because it sounded so "precise" to me. I learned later that she was Canadian. I never had a class with her, so IDK which part of Canada she was from.
@@TallWillow1 That’s cool! Perhaps the crude nature of a stereotypical “Canadian accent,” pressures a lot of us to maintain a more neutral tone and to swear less lol
@ZackIsCody2024 not swearing was a given, since this was a long time ago, and I didn't see her outside of school. I wonder how much was the school context and how much was the times and the fact that she was Black.
@@TallWillow1 Definitely a greater amount of factors at play there. Truly the only reason I modulate my voice to be clearer is out of some bygone and misplaced sense of propriety
I live in Phoenix, AZ and have absolutely no problem understanding English in a thick Mexican accent. I went to a conference in Orlando and I never looked so dumb and said "huh?" so many times in one week. Cuban/Caribbean Hispanic accents are faster, rise and fall (pitch) all over the place, and mixed with casual sprinkings of creols that baffled me.
When I moved from the Midwestern US to the South, I could not understand anyone to save my life! First here was the accent itself, and then there was the fact that I had trouble processing words spoken at a much slower rate than I was used to. Pair that with the extra syllable thrown into of words like "yes" and "can", and I felt like an idiot having to constantly ask people to repeat themselves. My ear did eventually acclimate, but those first few weeks and months were rough!
In my accent, ‘paw’, ‘poor’ and ‘pore’ are synonyms, but ‘Mary’, ‘marry’ and ‘merry’ are quite different from each other. Many speakers of my dialect always sound like everything they say is a question. (Rising intonation at the end of a phrase is fairly common.) Apart from that, speakers of my dialect are often accused of sounding ‘flat’ and a little ‘nasal’. I pronounce th properly (interdental fricative), but ‘al’ in words can often sound like ‘ol’ (“oltar”, “olternate”). Can you guess where?
I quite agree with the basic vowel/consonant/intonation split as the important. But especially for foreign accents word stress can be an important factor for some languages. Hungarian speakers of English, for example, often have initial stress in words in English because this is the pattern in Hungarian. It is not so often the case that different accents in the same language have different word stress, but it can be the case for names, for example. The English north-eastern city of Newcatle has stress on the first syllable of the city's name in the standard British English accent, but on the second syllable in the local Geordie dialect.
at some point i went through a phase where i noticed myself and people around me would pronounce a word differently from how it _looks_ like it should be pronounced (e.g. "pen" being pronounced like "pin"), assumed we were all pronouncing it "wrong", and "corrected" myself (e.g. by pronouncing "pen" with the "e" in "bed"). it hadn't occurred to me until i started learning about linguistics that all i was doing was inventing an idiosyncratic accent founded on arbitrary rules
I totally get the intonation thing when it comes to misunderstanding the intent of a sentence! My first language is English, but as a child, the first language I acquired was isiXhosa (long story). In isiXhosa, a question is just a statement but with a with different intonation. I've realised (since being married) that most of the time I'm asking a question, people (especially my wife) just think I'm just making a statement. And if I don't use a rising tone at the end, it can be very confusing. The weirdest thing for me has been that saying statements a question isn't foreign to English. But I've become really aware that something about my intonation (maybe lack of intonation) that people tend to miss. Maybe even the context that I tend use these statement-ified questions. I'm still not even sure what I'm doing wrong / different at times, but this video was an ah-ha moment for me. I'll be asking myself a lot of questions in the next few days.
I went to university in Boston and once spent 10 minutes trying to understand a Scottish family that were looking for the “Cheese Bar.” Just as we’d given up and were walking away from each other it hit me and I ran to catch them and point them in the correct direction of the bar from the sitcom “Cheers.”
I heard someone explaining that he had learned Swedish to a very advanced level and he once asked a Swedish (male) friend to assess his accent. His friend said the accent was near native but he sounded strangely female but couldn't work out why. Eventually, they worked out that in Swedish they have a certain pitch or tone called pitch/tone 2 in which the voice goes up in pitch at the end of certain words. Females generally do this in a slightly more noticeable way than males and the learner had nearly always had female teachers and practised with females. So he'd ended up with a female sounding pitch.
This is so common, especially with Japanese!
@@languagejones
Yeah, I’m studying Japanese, and it’s like “Damn, it sounds pretty good, but I don’t sound like the dudes.” 😂
I’ve been switching over to male voices to make it better.
That’s really interesting. I would love to know how I sound in Spanish.
Sounds like Lamont from Days of French n' Swedish
Yeah, interesting, I always share Kató Lomb's speaking about this on "How I learn Languages": " I would just say here that, in general, women’s speech tends to sound more protracted, more drawn-out. One of the reasons for this is the doubling of vowels. This style of double emphasis invests words with a strong emotional content." "[...] Another feature of feminine language is the shift of all consonants towards sibilants /ſ, s, z/ that gives a slightly affected tone to speech. I think these phonetic changes play the same role as fashion: to emphasize femininity. The male voice is deeper, due to men’s anatomical makeup. "
So, this happens in almost every language, there is some kind of shift... Kató Lomb said that even though there is a modern tendency to have an unissex accent, girls "instinctively start to twitter at a higher pitch when a [handsome] guy appears on the horizon".
Understanding it theoretically is one thing. Actually speaking in that accent is a whole other ball game.
I find that I can get started once I have the theory, but otherwise I'm just lost. Some people have a gift and can just do the accents without consciously knowing what they're doing. I'm definitely not one.
@@languagejones it's not necessarily a gift. you just have to actually pay attention and take the effort to remember how they pronounced certain words. then once you have enough material to see some form of pattern extrapolate from there.
It's probably also a lot easier to do an accent if you're the one picking the phrases than given random ones. or at least given time to listen and pay attention to the words in the phrase you were given. it's kinda like learning another language's vocab /phrases except it's the same as yours in everything but the way they say the words.
@@ghosthunter0950when you argue that something is not a gift "you just have to", consider whether you also have the gift. Whenever you "just" do something you're talking about something you find obvious/easy. Maybe it's neither obvious nor easy to others
@@ghosthunter0950 I believe the gift that he's referring to in this instance is exactly what you're describing: good pattern recognition skills. Not everyone has that "gift," and everyone goes about learning things differently because of what skills they do have.
It's not the theory, it's being able to recognize the differences when hearing them. Once you recognize the differences when hearing, it follows naturally (through some practice) to produce them when speaking.
I have a very neutral Irish accent. The type you'd expect from a News Presenter.
Here in Dublin, most say I don't sound Irish. Most say I sound American. Most ask me "So when did you move to Ireland?" or "So how long were you in the States for?". All this despite me never having been to American.
Yet without fail. Every single American I've ever spoken to, instantly recognized my Irish accent. Moreso, they said it was strong to their ears.
It's amazing how much personal perceptions affect how people interpret accent.
this is a similar phenomenon with my dad; he was born in sydney, but moved to portland when he was 6. when he was 18, he moved back to australia for the cheap university. at 18, he had a completely american accent. however, over the years it has softened out a lot. (this also could be because he has a liverpudlian mother and a dutch father, so he grew up saying ‘mum’ rather than ‘mom’)
however, people in australia always comment on his american accent. two years ago, he went back to the u.s, and he could not escape people immediately clocking him as australian.
just goes to show that even the way you hear someone elses accent depends on where you are and what you’re used to.
Same except I've been mistaken for an American by multiple people including non American English speakers but Americans don't think I'm American.
I listen to James O'Brien on LBC. As an American, when I hear Dubliners call in, they sound like neutral American to me, maybe kinda East Coast, but can't pin it. Not much different than our Colorado accent, though. I do pick up Irish accents from other than Dublin. I did pick up your accent when you wrote "Moreso"
Handsoapinc and zaper2904, I respect hearing your experiences and of course haven’t heard your speech, which I’m sure is lovely. But I offer this contrary experience. On my two visits to Ireland from my American home, I’ve been struck by how familiar the speech is in County Wicklow and Dublin area. I haven’t heard a linguistic expert take up the question of the similarities, but I’m convinced they’re present.
I'm from a small town a bit up the road from Kenmare in Kerry, and when traveling around Ireland, people notice how different I sound compared to a 'stereotypical' Kerry accent.
I'm close in pronunciation to Glen from the youtube channel Sheep Shepherd.
I had to pause the video to collect myself on learning that Russian speakers can come across as rude when asking questions in English. I am a native Russian speaker and moved to an Anglophone country as a child. Before moving, I was often told by adults that I am a polite and considerate child. I was proud of this, and it meant that I could have positive interactions with adults. After moving, English speakers reacted poorly to me, and other children would sometimes tell me, often angrily, that I speak rudely to people. I didn't change the way I approach people that much since then, but my accent is barely perceivable now, and no one calls me rude or reacts poorly to me anymore.
I can confirm that it was definitely the accent, since I had a similar story growing up.
as an arab, i have the same issue, often i make sarcastic jokes and north americans don't pick up on them and think i'm 100% serious. and often think im angry when i'm talking normally. i had to learn to speak in a "clam white dude on the morning radio" voice to make people understand i'm just friendly and expressive cause that's how my language is haha
Now I think this might actually be the cause of most minor daily cultural tensions.
This stereotype was lampshaded in The Simpsons, when Lisa got lost & ended up in "the Russian district". Everyone looked & sounded very angry even though the subtitles were normal happy/polite speech.
@@LightBringer666 I worked with a handful of people who were native Arabic speakers for 13yrs, and while im sure most people wouldn't do this to accommodate, I actually taught myself to like... hear them differently for that reason. Often I'd be talking to them and be like "tone indicates he is agitated, but the context doesn't support that at all" and gradually it boiled down to a similar thing - basically when I speak to native Arabic speakers (also Russian, German and some others), I tell myself "they're not angry and if they are, they'll let you know" and its done me a lot of good in terms of interactions.
I was in Tennessee once for Bonnaroo, a multi-day concert they host there, and someone asked me if i had a ladder. I looked at them like they were crazy and responded with "a ladder?" They said "Yeah, a ladder" and looked at me like I was crazy for questioning them. I just responded with "Why the f*** would i have a ladder??" to which they responded by doing the universal hand gesture for flicking a lighter as they once again repeated "a ladder." "Oh, you mean a LIGHTer" I said as i passed him my lighter. After that we both broke out laughing.
We actually ended up talking about how I thought they had a crazy accent and they thought I had a crazy accent. They then proceeded to teach me how to ask for a lighter in a good ol' southern drawl. To this day, one of my all time favorite interactions I've ever had.
Your house is on far.
No, it’s right there.
(Turns around to see the fire)
Haha! Sounds similar to an incident my Mom had with a college friend of hers from New York (with an accent thicker than a Katz's Deli sandwich): Mom was trying to buy a grape soda from the vending machine, and it wasn't working for some reason. NYC friend walked up and said, "It's outta waudah!" Mom heard this as "out of water", but she was trying to say it's "out of order". Her friend finally had to write the words on a piece of paper.
I'm from the south and was talking to a German girl that I knew that prided herself on speaking English "with absolutely no accent." She spoke with a British accent. I had a form I needed to fill out and asked her if she had a pen I could use. She gave me a strange look and asked me to repeat myself. I did, and she still looked confused. Finally she said "Are you asking me for a hairpin?"
Ok, I'm aware that we do that "e" "i" pronunciation that he pointed out, and I do try to tone down the southern accent when I'm with non-native English speakers, but sometimes a funny sound like that slips out. What got me is that she couldn't figure out that small vowel difference from context. I was at a desk with a paper in my hand that I was supposed to write on, and she figured that I'd decided at that moment to re-do my hair?
@@snowangelnc I feel this (hello from the gulf coast). For me, pen = pin, phonetically, and I don't think I have a Southern US accent.
@@AndyGneissMy husband has a West Indian father and he used to be so frustrated with my pronunciation of pin=pen. I couldn't figure out why he made that distinction. He was born in NY but grew up in Atlanta. I am from the Midwest. Still can't figure out why we say it differently, but I figure his Trini father was much more careful with English pronunciation than my parents (who were both raised by Southerners).
My wife has a habit of picking up a few tones wherever we wind up living. After a decade in Minnesota, she has long Os, regional idioms, and other bits of Minnesota detritus in her conversation. We were at a diner in California a few years ago before we caught our flight and the waitress asked where we were going. My wife said 'Back to MinnesOta (with the long O), and the waitress replied she figured as much because of her accent. Never seen her so mad, and she claimed the entire ride to the airport that she doesn't have a Minnesota accent.
She really doesn't realize how many 'Oh fer' s and 'Holy Buckets' that populate her speech now. I find it pretty funny. I took Russian in college, and am learning Spanish now, and I have to unlearn my default pronunciation of things. My Spanish sounds like I'm a Russian tourist.
I'll give you two of my (kiwi) accent not being understood 1. Working in London in a wine shop and not understanding why the customer did not wanting to buy the wine that I had said was better, when she explained she did not like bitter wine 2. On a wrestling tour to the States and Canada had crossed into Canada on foot and then returning sitting in no mans land waiting for my party to catch up I was approached by a US boarder guard who asked what I was doing 'Oh don't worry I'm just waiting for those guys to come through', he went to is radio and asked for a Polish translator.
My (US, English L1) family had a Kiwi houseguest (from the South Island) when I was about ten. It took me probably twenty minutes for my ears to acclimate enough to comprehend any of his speech 😅 Great guy. I still say "they don't indi-kite!" when a car driver doesn't use their turn signal properly.
Feckin gold
Kia ora! My (US, English L1) first day in NZ (Ōtautahi Christchurch), we went to the grocery store in the late afternoon. The clerk asked, "Home-time?" Between the vowel shifts and a phrase we'd never heard (though I've seen it since in British media), my partner and I had no idea what she was talking about until there was a lot of repetition and clarification. (Are you heading home now, because it is the end of the workday.)
Fun on kiwi radio: hearing "women's nipple" but realizing it was about netball. The mysterious "ripplewoppa" turned out to be the meatless Rebel Whopper. And a carpentry company had fun with ads about what they could do with your deck.
To my American ears (inland north/Great Lakes area), the New Zealand accent sounds fun. It's like you guys pressed "shuffle" on all the vowels.
i was able to understand that! (i speak polish)
In high school my friend had a Russian classmate. Once his mum called and it led to a very intense but brief conversation in Russian. His classmates were worried and asked what's wrong. He was surprised about the question. Nothing had been wrong. They had talked about what's for lunch when he gets home.
This happened in Austria, so all the classmates mentioned were (mostly native) German speakers.
I work for a trucking company where I interact with long-haul drivers on a daily basis. I'm not only exposed to American regional accents but also Hispanic, Bosnian, and even in some cases African, Caribbean, and New Zealand accents. I don't quite know *how* this video will help me, but it's absolutely fascinating learning about what makes up the differences in speech patterns and intonations.
Also, if you could do more videos of random accent facts that'd much appreciated. Thanks!
I'm planning one a month or so
For me, the key to any accent is finding what it feels like in my mouth, then speaking while maintaining that feeling. I think that finding that feeling must be more complicated that I think it is because I can't describe exactly how I do it. I was once demonstrating my Italian accent (speaking English) to an Italian girl I had recently met. She exclaimed, "Calabrese!" The people who I was copying were mostly from Calabria, so I must have it pretty good.
I’m learning Italian and am so curious to learn more about the Italian mouth feel!
@@evercuriousmichelle To describe the feel of my mouth is to describe how it feels different to my normal accent. If you can imitate Hugh Jackman speaking in his native accent, you will have an idea of my starting position. I can tell you that my soft palate feels wider and sibilants seem to occur just behind the alveolar ridge but I don't think that's going to help much.
I got my Italian accent by imitating an exuberant Italian bus driver, "Never fear. Johnny's here!" What I suggest is you listen to someone you would like to sound like and pick a single sentence and practice it until you get the sound and rhythm. You might try doing an exaggerated comic accent, then toning it down, "Hey you! Shut uppa ya face."
Learning German I found some sound changes difficult. I would stumble over the word. I kept saying the word and allowing my tongue to take different positions. Eventually I found a way to smoothly change from one sound to the next. In this way the word come out sounding like a German word and not an English rendition of a German word.
Hope this is helpful.
@@sigmaoctantis1892 Thank you!! ☺
@@sigmaoctantis1892 I've been learning french and enjoying the accent. Funnily enough I find it very similar to the yoshi/stitch voice thing, like swedish but toned down a bit lol
@@samuelwaller4924 The first thing to notice about French is that it is a syllable timed language. All the syllables are the same length, unlike English with its stress pattern of long and short syllables.
I learned French in high school. I'm Australian and so was my teacher, however, he had lived for several years in Strasbourg. Naturally, I imitated his accent. When I tried speaking (poor) French, in France, due to my accent, I was mistaken for a German! One girl told me it was actually an Alsace accent! At least I have an ear for accents.
The best advice I got from my stage dialect coach was that each accent has a focal point. Standard American at back of tongue, Received Pronunciation (UK) in the lips, Jamaica heavily in the lips, etc. When he would say a word in his accent then repeated the word in the target accent, it often sounded like two different people. This not only helped me get the accent but also to come up with a voice for the character I was playing. Of course, I still had to learn about letter substitution etc.
I actually forced a change of accent when I was 8. I had a very strong regional South Yorkshire (Northern English) accent. But I hated how it sounded, so I practiced speaking in RP. It worked very well. Northeners never think I'm one of them, although Southeners can tell. It ended up making me sound very posh, and has changed how people percieve me. Strangers treat me with more distance now, but people pay a lot more attention to what I have to say. I feel like an impostor talking to actually posh people though. The accent only gets you so far, because class divisions are very obvious.
Did you move out of South Yorkshire or go to private school or something? I'm assuming you're older as RP has so much less prestige than it used to - I think nowadays having a soft regional accent is if anything a benefit(though some, like West Country are still stigmatised) makes people sound more authentic and soft ones are common on TV and news
I had i Midlands accent. I purposely removed it . I have southern a e i o sounds but my u is still northern cant do the southern u without concentration.
@@avancalledrupert5130 why though? accents are cool
As soon as they offer Dutch in Lingopie, I am all over it.
In the meantime, I use Language Reactor (formerly called Language Learning with Netflix).
This lets me watch any video on Netflix or UA-cam with:
-Dual subtitles
-Auto translate for any title where both languages sre not available
-line looping
-stop at end of line
-jump to next line
-jump to previous line
-user color-coded words in subs
-mouseover definitions
-one click lookup in wiktionary and other dictionaries
As you begin wrapping up, I was disappointed feeling like I wanted you to go into more depth on these. It’s great to hear that you’re going to be doing deep dives into different accents. I look forward to the future videos.
I moved from Germany to Tennessee in high school. I thought my English was good enough but then I had to take “Civics” with the basketball coach. If he had not written homework assignments on the board, I would not have turned anything in for weeks, his accent was that impenetrable.
People in The South Eastern US have a very noticeable, heavy accent. Sometimes even Americans from other areas have a bit of trouble understanding them...
@@shutterchick79Hell I'm from the South and I struggle with some thicker accents
My French is pretty poor to start with (I am currently trying to improve it!), but when I went to Brussels back in February, I met a man who lived there and spoke French, but was originally from Mauritius, so he had what sounded to me like an Indian accent. It was SO hard to understand what he was saying, which was especially awkward when, at one point, I realized he was asking me if I wanted to go back to his place to sleep with him. I responded by saying "sorry, I'm married," and his answer to that was "that doesn't matter, you're on vacation." 😅😬
When i first started studying Japanese in university, I found it helpful to practice my pronunciation by trying to speak English as if it was written in katakana. Essentially I was speaking English with a Japanese accent. That way I didn't have to worry so much about Japanese grammar and lexicon, and could just focus on the pronunciation, how to hold my mouth, how to partition syllables, etc.
I'm Dutch and moved to Switzerland, where I learned standard German and Swiss-German. Somehow, I've been able to learn the latter without a noticeable "foreign" accent, as pretty much everyone I talk to assumes I'm Swiss (even though I still sometimes make mistakes with genders, cases, regional words, etc). This gives me great joy in asking people where in Switzerland they think I'm from.
Almost all guesses have been on the right side of the country, with some rare exceptions (shout out to the dude who thought I was from Wallis lol). I'm also proud to say that over time, more and more people are guessing that I'm from Zurich (which is where I live), including some Zurich natives.
Standard German is another story. Though I write it often, I rarely speak it, but I do watch a lot of German content on UA-cam, so I know how standard German is "supposed to sound" (yes there are loads of regional differences in "standard" German but whatever). However, even when trying my very best to speak the most beautiful, soft sounding standard German, everyone immediately assumes I'm Swiss lol
On the other hand, I've been speaking English for 17 years longer, 10 of which at C2 level, and my Dutch accent sticks out like a sore thumb. I feel like my vowels are fine (especially since learning about weak forms) but my s's and t's seem unfixable. Many non-native speakers think I'm American but I don't think I'll ever fool a real one.
I'm from Montana, born and raised, both sides of my family have been here for generations. I'd say I'm an "thoroughbred" Montanan-Western American English speaker. And never thought anything of it, because I was surrounded by my fellow speakers.
For a time I was living in Washington DC and had two roommates- one from Central California and the other from the Boston Metro Area.
Anyway, I was absolutely horrified one day when my Bostonian/pahhk the cahh roommate told me that between myself and the Californian, I WAS THE ONE WITH THE ACCENT.
i've been working on vocal feminization and so i've been learning a lot of the gender differences in American accents. for example, women tend to have a wider range of intonation as well as higher pitch, although there are exceptions: a lower pitch with narrower range is perceived as "sultry." women also typically speak with the tongue more forward than men, although again there are exceptions like "gay voice" when men speak with a relatively forward articulation.
It’s in interesting to see you mention gay voice. I never tried to analyze it, but I have noticed that this phenomenon is real. I would occasionally remark (or just note to myself) that so-and-so speaks with a gay accent.
I’ve noticed this in men; I’m not aware if there’s a similar phenomenon in lesbians.
@@davidkantor7978 i haven't noticed a consistent lesbian intonation, but there is a common "butch" voice with darker resonance from lowering the larynx. and it's not a queer thing specifically, but the vocal fry trend is partly a consequence of women speaking in lower pitches, which requires creaky voice to support falling intonation.
I'm from the south of England and sound like it. Growing up, I used to visit family in a working class area of Liverpool. Some of my family up there had accents, but the local kids were a different story. One time, I was playing in the gardene and a neighbour kid popped his head over the fence and said hello. He had a thick accent, but I managed to understand him until he said "oo dyoo spoor". He must have repeated a dozen times before my Dad has to come out and explain he was asking me who "who do you suppport?". I asked him what sport he was referring me and at that point the cultural gap proved too great, and he retreated to his own garden.
I’m also southern, but was able to figure out without too much trouble what ‘oo dyoo spoor’ meant. I’m not even into football
@@kyrakia5507It gets easier with age and experience.
The "Yall might not believe this but I used to have a real thick Tennessee accent" had me belly laugh hard enough to shed tears dude 😂😅
Mahalo Taylor, I really needed this. About 20 years ago my wife and I were in Donegal studying Irish. In the month we were there, I got pretty good at identifying what general area the Irish were from based on their accents (that has since faded). But there was a fellow from Scotland there (not sure what part) whose English I could not understand at all - I picked up maybe one word out of fine. There was a lot of nodding and laughing when he laughed. I think that's the only English accent. Conversely, I know folks on or from the continent who have an incredibly difficult time with Hawai‘i Creole English (we call it "pidgin"). We have a hard time convincing visitors and blow-ins that it's not just "bad English." 🙄 My current work involves several closely related Polynesian languages, and I'm working out the accent differences as well.
My girlfriend and I once got to know a nice man who was selling food out of the boot of his car to try to save up enough to open a restaurant. While he was always apologising for his bad English, I tried to assure him it was very good, but he couldn't understand a word I said and my gf would always have to "translate" me into RP.
Out of curiosity, what's your accent?
@@elsagreen1476 Belfast
@@elsagreen1476 Belfast
Less about intonation and more about grammar, but when I had just met a Korean friend of mine she asked me if I wanted to come over to her house by saying “You will come to my house?” Stating it as fact but with a slight intonation. So I was like, damn, guess I’m going to her house now. A while later I’m learning a bit of Korean and find out that it doesn’t phase questions with “can you/ will you/ do you” etc. You just say the statement with the intonation of a question. So my friend wasn’t being trying to be forceful, she was asking me IF I wanted to come to her house.
Thankfully it ended well for me but please don’t go to (almost) stranger’s homes.
Oh, wow! As a northern English speaker I have frequently hard about the bath/trap and the foot/strut splits in the UK. I had no idea those words were part of the Wells lexical set.
In addition to the consonants, vowels, and intonations, I might add idiomatic features of some accents. This can be the coastal "soda" vs. the midwestern "pop", the American "chips" vs. British "crisps", the Canadian propensity for "eh", or the South Asian propensity for pronouncing this symbol (@) as "at the rate of" even in things like email addresses. It's fascinating to see the varieties from everywhere. ...As for other accents, I've heard it said that the difference between Metropolitan French accents and Canadian French accents is heard with what they do with English's "TH". In France, they mostly turn it to "Z", but in Canada, they mostly turn it to "D". Would love to hear more about that.
Great video! As an opera singer, we study this thoroughly and intensely in music school. Especially within our German study, we tend to also study some differences between Hoch Deutsch and Viennese Austrian pronunciations, or moments, like in Fledermaus, when a character needs to speak German with an “Hungarian” accent
It sounds difficult to sing opera, it sounds difficult to nail an accent, and it sounds especially difficult to do both at once!! I'm glad people like you accomplish it though; I love opera.
I think there's 3 parts to getting an accent right. Understanding the linguistics behind it, understanding how the facial and throat muscles work in different languages, and musical ability. I have a feeling that the actors who are naturally good at accents have musical ability as well, but I may be wrong and it may not be true for all actors.
When I was in highschool, a kid from Guatemala had transferred to my school knowing no English. I was the only one around that was fluent in Spanish, so I volunteered to help him learn to play the guitar. I learned, however, that speaking and translating are two completely different skills and I suck at translation in real time. While I was mostly fluent in conversational Spanish, I knew very few musical terms like metronome, beat, string, tune, pegs, shift, pluck, etc. Furthermore, I was used to the Puerto Rican accent of my household and the "standard" Latinoamerican accent taught in school, but could not understand his thick, possibly rural Guatemalan accent at all
re: intonation -- my favorite is listening to flight attendants rattle off the entire spiel in English but with their primary language's intonation.
I should try to figure out the lexical set (?) of the various generations of Chinese-English speakers...
both my parents have a different accent from me and i'm in an area with lots of immigrants (which is part of why we settled here lmao) so i always grew up hearing many different accents. i love them and find them fascinating, especially the social conditioning about "desirable" accents or "unintelligent" ones, and how accents form. intonation is super cool to learn as a language learner, too.
As an East Tennessean who lived in Louisville KY for 20, I can testify to the difficulty of trying to moderate my native dialect. I worked in a call center and people in Illinois could not understand me.
I’m a native New Yorker but have lived in California most of my adult life. I still have never gotten used to “lick in the mere” for “look in the mirror,” or people on radio call-in shows identifying themselves as a “first-time collar.”
On the flip side of the coin, on a visit to Paris, someone hearing my French asked if I was German. She could tell I was foreign but misplaced the accent, probably because I have pretty good uvular r’s and French u and eu vowels (like German umlauted ü and ö).
I don't know if you've done it already, but you should make a video about the difference between an accent and a dialect. I personally think they're the same, but in German-speaking cultures there's a lot of emphasis on dialects whereas in English there are huge differences between the way people speak, but we tend to call them accents.
My favorite story to tell as a sign I’d end up studying language variation was asking my first grade teacher in Staten Island why the worksheet said dog and frog were rhyming words. We were told us not to count on the spelling but to listen to the sound, so I did!
Trying to find discussion on how the sounds in these two words diverged (or if they even started out in the same place to begin with), I came across a NYT article that was too on the nose, from July 21, 1985.
“New Yorkers have developed yet another set of pronunciations, some of them so peculiar to their city that only people who grow up with them can get them right every time. What outsider, for example, would know that choral is pronounced coral, but that coral is CAH-rel? Or that frog is frahg, but dog is doo-AWG; that on is ahn, but off is oo-AWF?”
Quite an interesting piece. Labov and Shuy are both quoted extensively.
This is great if you want to break down an accent, but I think there's a huge omission. Accents have an embodied internal logic to them, and if you can get a physical sense of that logic, then the accent becomes trivial and intuitive. The key is oral posture. People with different accents hold their mouths in different positions by default, which makes some sounds easier to pronounce than others in different contexts. French has an oral posture that's very front, relaxed, and round. Once you learn to shift to that posture, all those front round vowels, velar Rs, and (if you're speaking English with a French accent) Zs instead of THs become natural. Arabic is almost the opposite, with very tight, unrounded lips.
The reason why my French pronunciation has always been decent is that one of my first French teachers taught us French oral posture. Sadly, she was the exception and I've never had another teacher try to show me the oral posture for a language. It's also unfortunately difficult to learn about online; it seems like relatively few people talk about it, at least for the languages I've tried to look into.
20-30 years ago, when I did some acting, we had tapes on various accents and this was a key the instructor on the tape always used. How you hold your mouth and where the "center" of your sound was informed the vowel sounds, and to some extent the consonant sounds, and made the accent more natural. IIRC, Irish was "centered" in front of the mouth, while Cockney was nearly in the throat.
@@michaelmarks8443 Dang I wish I had those tapes that sounds awesome! That sounds about right for Cockney and Irish.
@@Salsmachev Looks like it was "Acting with an Accent" by Dr. David Alan Stern, looks like some products are still available.
I’ve been utilizing “Accents: A Manual for Actors- Revised and Expanded Edition” by Robert Blumenthal to teach dialects to actors for the past 20 or so years. Lots of work on mouth shape, jaw placement and tongue level. Love this video, Dr. Jones, BTW 😊
@@michaelmarks8443 Thanks!
I remember as a Russian working in an Amusement park in the States my supervisors used to tell me that I'm not "friendly" enough despite me already trying twice as hard to put on the most fun and amiable persona I could. I remember being so pissed like how can you be even more friendly???
If you want to understand the intonation of a language it can be really helpful to look at their songs. My voice teacher takes the view that when someone rights a melody to fit some words, they (either consciously or subconsciously) write a melody that is an exaggerated version of how they hear the language. I use that to figure out how to sing in a foreign language (or even English) convincingly, but you could also use it to figure out how native speakers hear the intonation of their own language.
Dr Jones you have a great sense of humours haha, and you are brilliant. bravo
Thank you so much! I've learned it's not for everyone, so I appreciate those who appreciate it
I've always loved this style of humour & lean in this direction myself. Not many people find me funny though 🤔
But what about rhythm? When I asked a specialist about Scottish accent, one of key things she mentioned is the specific rhythm.
I grew up in Delaware, and moved to North Carolina in my early 20s. I think I lived there for at least 5 years before I could hear my home region's accent as an accent instead of just "normal."
My first full-time job there involved working with migrant farm workers. I didn't have trouble understanding the Spanish speakers, but I had a memorable encounter with an English speaking farm worker. To determine eligibility, I had to ask about the crops they worked with. This gentleman told me he harvested "ish" (like ice, but with sh) potatoes. I had an awful time trying to figure out what iced potatoes were. It turns out that he was saying "Irish" potatoes. I hadn't heard regular potatoes called that before, so it took an embarrassingly long time to understand this other speaker of my native language.
I am russian and I’ve been polishing my English accent for fee years. Especially the last 2 years as I live abroad and meet all kinds of foreigners.
In the last year I’ve fooled a fair amount of people into thinking I’m american/canadian. Even some americans.
I think I’m super close with consonants, but the vowels…
Some people even say I sound australian, because I can never keep those vowels in a fixed accent, and I just fluctuate them around.
The good part is, Russian is not really poor in vowels, (unlike for example Serbian), but those appear in specific places.
So sometimes when I see IPA for a word such as back-[bæk], I recall words where dictionary says it’s æ in Russian (I know I might not have that same accent as there, but it should be close).
Learning other languages definitely helps also.
I noticed that English speakers are more susceptible to accents than German speakers, because even with my unstable German, people might think I am German.
My wife is Mexican and honestly one of the best non-native English speakers I've met, but I'm from the edge of Appalachia in North Georgia. After a few years of practice, she still has trouble with my dad and says she only understands 30% of what my grandmother says lol
Remember, there are exception to vowel groups. For example, in my region in Southern Kerry, we do not use the typical 'goose' group for 'ewe', instead using the 'goat' group. This does not mean we pronounce it like the American 'Yo', but closer (yet distinct from) the general Southern US pronunciation of 'Y'all', as we do for all of our 'Goat' group vowels. 'So' may be pronounced closer to General American 'Saw'.
Yeah, saying that the lexical sets are all you need is fine for most English accents, but not *any* English accent. This is because Wells' lexical sets were constructed using only Received Pronunciation and (older) General American accents, and some dialects preserve vowel distinctions that those two had both collapsed Middle English /ɪw juː/ (preserved in some Welsh English dialects), /eː ɛː/ (MEET vs MEAT, preserved in some Midlands dialects), and /ʊɹ ɛɹ/ (preserved in a lot of southern Irish English accents).
I’m from the west coast of Scotland but have less of the accent than my parents did because my mother was very fussy about ‘proper pronunciation’ when I was growing up (fussy about my pronunciation, not her own). That did me no favours at school. When I worked in London, quite a few people assumed I was Irish rather than Scottish. Most Scottish people think I come from Edinburgh rather than the west coast. I would love it if you would do an episode on Scottish accents, but I’m sure I will enjoy any content on accents - especially if it helps me improve my accent when speaking German. Some German people have taken me for Dutch, which I take as a compliment (not obviously a native English speaker struggling) but it would be good to improve!
Fascinating stuff, Dr. Jones! Thank you for sharing it. There's a lot to unwrap in this one, but it's a lot of fun!
Where do people find complete reference IPA sets fully describing accents?
Searching informally, what turns up are a zillion incomplete introductory commentaries (including this video) which note a few items about one or more accents. These are helpful, but if you’re new to this, when you’re practicing it’s hard to know whether you’re unconsciously neglecting certain sounds and persisting with howler mispronunciations from your native accent because there are sounds you don’t even know that you need to pay attention to.
Leaving aside other aspects about fully inhabiting regional accents such as slang and idioms, as I try to learn various accents it would be helpful to know more or less all the sounds there are to learn.
I’d be happy to pay for such resources, but I don’t even know where to look. There are courses, there are sometimes dictionaries for the most popular accents like RP or standard American, but what I think I’d be happiest to find are succinct IPA sets for a wide variety of accents.
My main goal is to be able to read books aloud with colorful and convincing characterization, so I’m especially interested in regional accents of native English speakers e.g. Dublin, Glaswegian, South Boston, South Carolinian…
I think there's a Wiki page with lexical sets and a lot of the world's Englishes
Many years ago I commented on a friend's Scottish accent. I told her I didn't have one. She then said, "You have a lovely Canadian accent." Since the internet became a huge resource I began researching accents. Pretty impressive.
Hi Language Jones, absolutely love your content, been watching for a few months, appreciate your style and humour 😂 One request, PLEASE can you talk about South African English pronunciation? Some interesting interactions going on down there, and I can find NOTHING on it elsewhere
YES! That’s coming later in the year
This is a brilliant video, and makes so much sense when explained in that way. What trips me up in learning a Mexican Spanish accent, is I can’t trill my R’s yet.
You mentioned John C. Wells! Wow, upvote just for that! He's a British Esperantist, whose book Concise Esperanto and English Dictionary I own.
I was raised all over the western US(minus Hawaii) and I've been told I sound like someone from Jersey. That completely threw me off. I've never been west of Western Michigan. I'm very excited to hear this video.
Also half of my family is from appalachia but tried hard to adapt to swedes.
As a New Yorker, I found the way you said 'caught' funny. I had to replay a few times to hear the difference.
I grew up in the northern bit of the osarks, up near where the Salem Plateau ends and the great plains begin. the Ozark English dialect is understudied, mostly you'll find it in linguistics literature being referred to in relation to Appalachian English. I grew up in an isolated community and was raised by my grandparents. consequently, I speak a version of Ozark English that is largely associated with the elderly of Dent County, Missouri. I have never met someone not from the region who can understand it readily. I've been through the south, and not even there was I easy to understand. I mostly don't use it, but I do consciously practice to maintain it. after all, there's a possibility I could someday be the last person alive who sounds like, well, me. it did get me bullied when I moved north as a teen, though.
one time, my grandpa talked to a traveling missionary. the guy had a New England accent. I couldn't place it, but I'd guess Connecticut. he seemed to have a hard time understanding my grandpa, and the conversation didn't last very long. it ended when my grandpa said "boy, you talk real funny. can't understand but half what you're saying!" it was pretty funny to me. my grandpa seems to think he doesn't have an accent.
As a Californian, thank you for teaching me that "cot" and "caught" are actually pronounced differently by some people.
Funny that you mention John C. Wells being famous for lexical sets. I only knew him as having been President of the Universal Esperanto Association, my dad worked with him there in the early 90s
I moved just two counties south within the same state, Ohio, and was surprised by the different accents in the area. I'd always assumed I had no accent but now I can clearly recognize the specific regional accent of my hometown area.
I am fascinated by accents and enjoyed the video. 👍
When lived in Korea for a while I learnt Korean in Busan and could speak fairly well to get things done. It wasn't until I went to Seoul for the first time, I realised my Korean had a Busan accent! As I got better, I focused on the more standard pronunciation but I couldn't really get rid of it since I was living in Busan. I still get comments on it years after I've left Korea 😂
Intonation was one of the key aspects of begginer russian for me, and honestly it doesn't really click until you are more immersed in hearing native speakers Intonation
I am terrible with accents not using them but hearing and understanding them. I have a processing issue, so if your sound and your mouth don't do what I expect I need a lot of time to get used to your way of speaking. I always knew this but it hadn't been a problem until I lived in a city with a large immigrant population and now I work with people who are at different levels of english and hundreds of accents. I feel bad because I say "what" and "pardon" and "one more time please" these days more than anything else. It will take time I'd love to learn more languages, but it turns out I need to focus on different versions of english.
So, I grew up in an area with a lot of native russian speakers -- like, through my childhood and to today, if I walk around my home town for more than like two hours, I will almost certainly encounter someone speaking russian as their primary language, [or one of the neighboring slavic languages ... or more rarely. moldovan/romanian -- but all of them also speak russian anyway]
I was SO confused why everyone thought russians were rude/mean to them or making fun of them when they were jsut asking them normal questions for years, until I finally noticed that the stress pattern russian speakers use for questions parses to most people as sarcastic.
9:11 is the Pin-Pen Merger the same thing I hear happening in people under 40yo saying “woman” and “women“ nearly identically?
I first heard this teaching HS in NYC in the early ‘aughts, but now I’m hearing it more frequently both online and in Eastern PA.
Disconcerting for older ears but also a real curiosity for me.
What lexical sets don't address is different accents grouping some words under different lexical sets. For example, while "dog" in the New York accent is a part of the THOUGHT set, in British English it's in LOT/CLOTH (which have merged). There are also diachronic variations, such as older RP speakers saying "off" like THOUGHT but modern southern Brits like LOT/CLOTH again.
Agreed. But that's a rabbit hole I really didn't want to go down in a YT video. Maybe Geoff Lindsay could do it justice
And that the lexical sets were based solely on GenAm and RP! Welsh English distinguishes yew and you and ewe, and those are all in the GOOSE set.
That lingo pie thing sounds like just what I was looking for. Unfortunately I'm sick RN and life is turbulent but hopefully I'll try it once day
The other major thing for accent authenticity, though, is colloquial language use. Case in point, kevin bridges. Because even if you get the vowels right, hell use a lot of slang terms like "wee" to mean "small", "aye" instead of "yes/yeah" or the way he fuses "cannot" into "cannae" etc.
Aussie here (for context). I did a lot of Japanese for a long time (and still can't speak it) but when my Irish bestie's Colombian mother-in-law came to stay with her for a few months, I thought I should learn some Spanish so I could talk with her more easily... bestie laughed at me so much because she reckoned I spoke Spanish with a Japanese accent :') I made no comment on her thick Irish accent permeating every part of her Spanish speaking. Now I'm learning Finnish and I think being so used to Japanese has kinda given me a small leg-up in terms of pronunciation, although I may be wrong!
I was brought up in Edinburgh, Scotland until age 11, and didn't think I had an accent. Then we moved to Yorkshire, and I was called Scotty for a few years. Then we moved to the North East, and I was called Yorkie for a while. When I returned to Yorkshire as an adult, I was called Geordie! I am able to use any of these accents at will, depending on context, but my usual speech is 'generalised northern'.
As someone who wants to record podfics for certain fandoms, I really wanna master a few regional American accents represented in said fandoms without sounding like the worst mimic ever or like I'm mocking those with said accent. Also a particular Irish variant (If I try an Irish accent for too long I end up sliding toward my generic American accent without thinking and it's annoying to my perfectionist brain). I'm an Australian, so I can pull off UK-English accents fairly well, but regional US ones trip me up and I would like to not be tripped up. This series could be a _goldmine_ for me.
I love the tempo of his videos. I have to speed things up sometimes because I have a poor attention span & I cant remember what people said if they say things too slowly. I never have to speed these up.
I have to slow these down to 1.25, everything else I watch at 1.5 or higher XD
I also noticed that the sounds produced, like you mentioned about the p, move with the languages. For example, french and german... very front of the mouth sound production. Meanwhile, Spanish is more to the mid/back region of the mouth. I also felt that French was a very closed mouth language (think muttering) in contrast to Spanish which felt like a more open mouth language. Especially the lip movement and the lower jaw degree of tightness. Think adiós vs. bonsoir where, for me, the air/sound was mid/back for spanish and front/flat middle of the mouth for french. The french, to me, felt very very close to the teeth with a tighter lower jaw and a tighter nasal 'scrunch'. I do not have words for it besides scrunch. North American english feels like a more opened mouth language but not as open as Spanish. And the southern American accents.. I always hear a trace of British in how they say their vowels.
I realised I had an accent when I was about 12 - raised by a sole parent Anglo-Indian father, it was the fact that HE said some words 'funny' that led me to realise that I did too. He learned Urdu at school and I like to think (for reasons of sentiment not logic) that might be why when I watched the movie Ae Fond Kiss just 3 years after starting to learn Hindi I found the characters easier to understand when speaking their Urdu-Panjabi than when speaking Glaswegian English. It's also always amused me that while I'm constantly told by pretty much everyone I meet that my Hindi pronunciation is very good, I cannot imitate an Indian English accent like my cousins' at all.
I grew up in Central Connecticut (1970s/80s) and was teased relentlessly in elementary school for “having an accent”…but I never understood why. (My parents and grandparents were all raised in Central CT too, and they all spoke English as their first language.) Most of my classmates were pretty much in the same socioeconomic class and ethnic background as my family, so I still don’t know why my accent stood out so much to them!
After college, I moved around to other parts of the US and people often ask me where I’m from, “because it’s not from here!”
Anyway, I find this topic fascinating and am looking forward to the rest of the series! Thanks!
I'm constantly telling my cats not to look at me in that tone of voice. I have a mild Deaf accent, and in sign language, my friends and I talk about saying or hearing things the same way a blind person might say "I see what you mean"
That's an expression I've used my whole life. My family uses it, but I don't think I can recall other Aussies using it. I'm not sure where it came from, but there you go, it seems to pop up here and there.
This content is right up my street thanks doc
There's a particular variety of South African accents that I find so, so interesting (e.g. Sharlto Copley). Even though I KNOW it has defined and consistent rules, it always feels like it's pinging off in all sorts of unpredictable directions. I'm also interested in whether one's own accent makes a difference to the accents one finds interesting - I'm a southern British English speaker and I've noticed a pattern in the accents I like nearly all having long monophthongs, where my accent diphthongises all over the place.
People have a really rough time placing my accent because of…well a lot. I grew up in an Italian-American household (most of the older members of my family that I interacted with the most were born in Italy and their accents were noticeable) in the Great Lakes region in the suburbs around a city not unlike Detroit. When I was 11, we moved to Arkansas. While there, I spent most of my time with non-native English speakers and other transplants from other areas of the country anywhere from Mississippi to Oregon. I spent a stint just outside Boston then moved to Japan.
A lot of people guess Latina, which I guess is pretty close to Italian thinking about Romance Languages and speech patterns.
The most interesting was recently a woman from Texas said I sound like an Italian from New Orleans.
So accents are fun. I tend to mimic and pick up various speech patterns without paying much attention as well which I have to be careful of. I learned to mimic the people around me to blend into my environment, but that’s just going to be bad in certain places.
I once moved to eastern Poland from the south-west, and people used to tell me I was speaking with an accent. I thought, "No, YOU speak with an accent." Then I learned about accents when studying philology, and it surprised me to learn that we were all right. They didn't know that my accent wasn't typical for Upper Silesia, though. I also learned of a phonetic alphabet used for Polish and how blind we are to many aspects of sound in our language, claiming our language is pronounced as it's written. Well, it is in a way, but also, no, it isn't.
When I was 15 I read something by John C. Wells about pronunciation of Italian vowels, and the order in which he listed them was i,e,a,o,u. ("i" as in "machine", "e" as about halfway between a "short e" is in "bet" and a "long a" as in "bait" (that's a crude way to put it), "a" is in "father", "o" as in "sold" (not as in "soda"), "u" as in "June moon"). At the time I thought maybe there's a scientific reason for that order, but I didn't know what it was. About a year later a 15-year-old girl pointed out the reason: You can feel your tongue moving from the front to the back as you pronounce them.
Thanks for the full list of lexical sets. It really explains the concepts and usefully distinguishes from phonetics. It will be very useful in commenting on future videos.
The dimenson you miss is which set any particular word falls into, which can be unpredictable.
In the UK it can also be a class shiboleth e.g. "room" is a [goose] for most of us, but a [foot] for posh people; likewise "poor" can be [north] or [cure] according to class - which goes the opposite way in England and Australia.
Getting stuff like this wrong is the easiest way of seeing through an accent fake.... It always amuses that the American lyricist of My Fair Lady has an upper class English character rhyme "bother" (lot) with "rather" (bath/palm/start merge).
3:13 I might be the winner. Lived in New Orleans for a few years, and my neighbor had that keep south creole accent and he also missing all of his teeth. Needed subtitles to understand him 😂
This is great as a GM for DnD who can only do a Russian and Southern Accent. I'd love a dive into romance language accents. I doubt you could do a Latin one but if so that would be awesome!
I would be interested to know why you didn't include syllabic vs stress timing in this discussion. (Well, okay. I'm impressed how well you DID explain so much in so little time. But still.) The hardest English to understand that I run into is that spoken by people whose native language is syllable-timed.
Also, I have a question about fake accents. In particular, I used to tease my kids by putting on a fake accent when we were out shopping and such. There were two of them. One* was a very fake RP, which I defined as locking my teeth an eighth of an inch apart and then talking without ever allowing it to change. As I think back, it wasn't _only_ that, but I'm curious whether you have any comments on that technique -- bearing in mind that it's a joke! not a serious attempt at sounding like some real people's real manner of speech.
* The other was a hodgepodge centered on my German grandmother's accent, but with intrusions from French, Spanish, a bit of Hebrew, and the sounds I kinda recognized as characteristic after spending a couple of weeks in Scandinavia as a teenager.
I can speak German, due to living in Germany for two years using it every day. When I returned to the US my Dad was interested in how well I spoke it, so he asked a work colleague who was native German to call me on the phone to assess my ability. He later told my father that he could tell I wasn't a native speaker, but couldn't tell what my native language was. I've been learning Spanish lately, and when I tried having a conversation with a native Mexican Spanish speaker, she said that my accent was not American at all. You'd think that I could speak English with a German or Spanish accent, but I can't do it. It's weird.
I lived in southern Louisiana for a little while, and I really enjoyed the Cajun accents there
You asked for actors & i don't know if that offer is still open, but here they go:
Sharon Small, a Glaswegian(i think) who played Barbara Havers in "the Inspector Lynley Mysteries." Havers is from Acton(west London) but personally she sounds more east to me or perhaps standard Estuary English. She plays a role in many British dramas & plays, including "Call the Midwife" which is handy in comparing the London accent. It is so annoying that sooo many Scottish actors have to drop their own accent to get roles. This includes Martin Compston who plays Steve Arnott in "Line of Duty", compare it to the political ad he did for the SNP. Or David Tennant.
Further on the same soggy island; "Hinterland" is set in Wales & features the language.
Richard Armitage played a Victorian mill owner in "North & South," that accent is definitely worth a look. Especially as his work is so broad, he did voice acting for Wolverine for example.
And i saved the best for last; Audrey Hepburn & not only for the role of Eliza Doolittle.
She was born in Brussel to a Dutch mum & a British father. Her parents divorced & with the threat of the second world war looming her mum went to the estate of her parents in Arnhem.(in WW1 NL was neutral, Belgium devastatingly wasn't) As an upper class girl she was of course taught French, next to Dutch & English. Her first role was a little bit part in a language film,"Dutch in seven lessons," as the narrator is horribly sexist. Later she also learnt Italian, probably during her second marriage.
I don't speak Italian so cannot conform when others tell that she has an upper class accent in it. I do know the other three & she always sounds extremely posh.(except in "My Fair Lady" i guess)
I work with someone who grew up in rural Idaho and recently moved here in the bay area. I could only understand about a third of what they said for Months. After about a year I was pretty acclimated, and I might be picking up some of their tendencies myself
Excellent. I had a revelation when my middle eastern friends would conduct themselves in a manner considered rude, however in hindsight it was most likely cultural/linguistic differences.
The last few people I helped with English all appreciated my “neutral accent.” That to me is the closest one can get to having “no accent,” but I know I still sound Canadian
There was a teacher in my high school whose accent I really liked, because it sounded so "precise" to me. I learned later that she was Canadian. I never had a class with her, so IDK which part of Canada she was from.
@@TallWillow1 That’s cool! Perhaps the crude nature of a stereotypical “Canadian accent,” pressures a lot of us to maintain a more neutral tone and to swear less lol
@ZackIsCody2024 not swearing was a given, since this was a long time ago, and I didn't see her outside of school. I wonder how much was the school context and how much was the times and the fact that she was Black.
@@TallWillow1 Definitely a greater amount of factors at play there. Truly the only reason I modulate my voice to be clearer is out of some bygone and misplaced sense of propriety
I live in Phoenix, AZ and have absolutely no problem understanding English in a thick Mexican accent.
I went to a conference in Orlando and I never looked so dumb and said "huh?" so many times in one week.
Cuban/Caribbean Hispanic accents are faster, rise and fall (pitch) all over the place, and mixed with casual sprinkings of creols that baffled me.
When I moved from the Midwestern US to the South, I could not understand anyone to save my life! First here was the accent itself, and then there was the fact that I had trouble processing words spoken at a much slower rate than I was used to. Pair that with the extra syllable thrown into of words like "yes" and "can", and I felt like an idiot having to constantly ask people to repeat themselves. My ear did eventually acclimate, but those first few weeks and months were rough!
this is like my new favorite channel
In my accent, ‘paw’, ‘poor’ and ‘pore’ are synonyms, but ‘Mary’, ‘marry’ and ‘merry’ are quite different from each other. Many speakers of my dialect always sound like everything they say is a question. (Rising intonation at the end of a phrase is fairly common.) Apart from that, speakers of my dialect are often accused of sounding ‘flat’ and a little ‘nasal’. I pronounce th properly (interdental fricative), but ‘al’ in words can often sound like ‘ol’ (“oltar”, “olternate”). Can you guess where?
I quite agree with the basic vowel/consonant/intonation split as the important. But especially for foreign accents word stress can be an important factor for some languages. Hungarian speakers of English, for example, often have initial stress in words in English because this is the pattern in Hungarian. It is not so often the case that different accents in the same language have different word stress, but it can be the case for names, for example. The English north-eastern city of Newcatle has stress on the first syllable of the city's name in the standard British English accent, but on the second syllable in the local Geordie dialect.
I think you'd have a blast analysis the Argentinian accent from Córdoba (a province from the middle-west)😅
at some point i went through a phase where i noticed myself and people around me would pronounce a word differently from how it _looks_ like it should be pronounced (e.g. "pen" being pronounced like "pin"), assumed we were all pronouncing it "wrong", and "corrected" myself (e.g. by pronouncing "pen" with the "e" in "bed"). it hadn't occurred to me until i started learning about linguistics that all i was doing was inventing an idiosyncratic accent founded on arbitrary rules
I haven’t read your book but you’ve probably noted that Black language is an evolving language. Not fixed. That is the part that I find most amazing.
I totally get the intonation thing when it comes to misunderstanding the intent of a sentence! My first language is English, but as a child, the first language I acquired was isiXhosa (long story). In isiXhosa, a question is just a statement but with a with different intonation. I've realised (since being married) that most of the time I'm asking a question, people (especially my wife) just think I'm just making a statement. And if I don't use a rising tone at the end, it can be very confusing. The weirdest thing for me has been that saying statements a question isn't foreign to English. But I've become really aware that something about my intonation (maybe lack of intonation) that people tend to miss. Maybe even the context that I tend use these statement-ified questions. I'm still not even sure what I'm doing wrong / different at times, but this video was an ah-ha moment for me. I'll be asking myself a lot of questions in the next few days.
Thanks!
Thank you!
I went to university in Boston and once spent 10 minutes trying to understand a Scottish family that were looking for the “Cheese Bar.” Just as we’d given up and were walking away from each other it hit me and I ran to catch them and point them in the correct direction of the bar from the sitcom “Cheers.”