Loud.
SORRY
Hey there, buddy, I don’t mean to be impolite, but we Canadians now consider other English speakers using “Sorry” to be cultural appropriation. I hope you and your pals have a good day, friend.
DO YOU SPEAK ENGLISH?
I’m a Tarheel, I’m pretty used to most of them, including my own piney woods rhotic drawl. If you’ve lived here long enough, which most people living here haven’t, you could tell within a county where I’m from if you heard me say this paragraph aloud.
Fun story: back when I was working as a flight instructor, a couple guys flew their plane down from Long Island to have us work on their plane, we were the dealership they bought it from so they brought it to us for a service. I had nothing to do with the maintenance department so I wasn’t on that project, I was there tending to my own flight students and these two yankees were also there.
Round about noon, I walked into our classroom to use the computer in there to check the weather, and from behind me I hear a very aggressive “Hey, you wanna sandwich?!” And I reflexively ducked. Because if a southerner had said that with that inflection, that sandwich was already on its way through the air toward the back of your head, and its thrower is probably coming over the table.
I turned around to find this guy holding out an Arby’s roast beef sandwich with a smile on his face. Turns out a Long Island accent…just sounds like that.
I’m from Connecticut and used to work in a call center taking insurance claims nationwide. I once got a call from a guy in rural North Carolina, who had a super thick accent. He was explaining that the damage to his car came from the tar blowing up and I was trying to figure out wtf he meant by this (sometimes customers are nuts or lie- it was okay to take down a story that definitely didn’t happen, it just needs to be clear and true to what the caller claimed). I kept asking what caused the asphalt to explode and he was totally uninterested, saying it was old, sometimes that happens, isn’t that our job to figure out?
Anyway, I was having a tough time understanding this guy, but my coworker went to college in Tennessee, so I roped her in and transferred him.
His tire exploded, not the tar. He just pronounced tire the way that I pronounce tar. For me, it’s two syllables and indistinguishable from the word for one who ties.
Naw, not the tar, the tahre, the black rubber thang 'roun uh wheeyul, s’fulla ahr? It jus plum blew ayout. Ah tell ya i’us sygogglin downna road 'are for a minnit, but ah gotter stopped. y’all gonna seyun sumbuddy ta fix’t?"
A major component of a tarheel accent is the “eye” sound comes out as “ah.” Ah’m goin tuthuh stower to bah sum ahce creem. “Tire” beceomes “Tahre”, which is not identical to how we pronounce “tar.”
I’m from a particular area where it is sometimes useful to speak like a native, and sometimes it’s useful to speak like not a native. Naturally my accent isn’t very thick but I can put more on or take it off, even mid-sentence. Which is useful mostly for mocking people.
Australian here.
You sound like a cross between a duck lure and a dog stuck in reverse.
when I was in Australia, they told me I sounded Canadian. What do they sound like?
Polite
Like they’re talking into a pickle jar.
sarry
Sounds like you have a huge chewing gum in there while talking.
It sounds like English. It’s the Brits and Aussies that I hear having accent - not Americans.
That’s actually true, the American accent (excluding the southern accent) is the closest thing to the original English accent we know of.
The modern British accent and the Aussie accent that derived from it came to be in either the 19th or 20th century, I forget which.
I know I’m not really who’s being asked, but as an American, I can’t help but butt in anyway.
As an American with a very nonstandard accent who had to practice to be able to sometimes eke out an approximation of an American accent, a ‘standard’ Midwestern accent is like talking out out of the side of your mouth, rounding out all the vowels while trying to hit every consonant with an aluminum baseball bat, especially the ‘s’ sound.
Aluminium
Aluminium
Don’t make me get the baseball bat, tea drinker
There are multiple American accents. I consider west coast and to some extent Midwest unaccented… New York or Boston, yeah, and southern drawl, yeah. Alabama is like a new England who drank lead for 120 years. But obviously thats just my perspective. It was hilarious to me to hear my Australian friend do an American accent from her perspective.
In port cities that had lots of similar immigrants during the 1800’s, you can often tell what neighborhood someone is from by their accent. NYC (and other East Coast cities to a lesser extent) and New Orleans have some overlap because they happened to be the biggest port cities at the time and some neighborhoods had similar demographics. (Obviously, both cities have unique accents where demographics were different but there’s a lot of overlap due to that time period.)
The “neutral American accent” is supposedly originally from the Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa part of the Midwest, apparently by an accident of history. Walter Cronkite (a popular news reader as national TV broadcasts became ubiquitous) was from Kansas. Other national TV personalities happened to be from the area and it basically became the “TV” accent.
There were different historical reasons for it but it’s sort of like how “BBC English” became the accent people consider the default in England and Beijing Mandarin became “standard” Mandarin instead of Shanghainese. It’s just who was on TV/radio when media went national.
Shanhainese would be 吴语, rather than the 汉语 of Mandarin. And the choice of Beijing Han as the linga chinois was an active choice, not an accident of broadcasting.
Likewise, the first BBC broadcasts were deliberate in their choice of RP as the chosen voice. It had to be “respectable”. If you didn’t speak it, you weren’t allowed on the airwaves until much later.
Thanks. Those are the “different historical reasons” I was alluding to but I couldn’t remember many details. Thank you for adding them.
I’m glad to have been able to add more details.
And thank you for the polite reply; I may have been unduly brusque as I misunderstood your “just who happened to be on” comment.
