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.

Understanding it theoretically is one thing. Actually speaking in that accent is a whole other ball game.

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 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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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'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.

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." 😅😬

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.

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.

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.

As a New Yorker, I found the way you said 'caught' funny. I had to replay a few times to hear the difference.

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 😂😅

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.

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.

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 KZfaq 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

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"

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 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'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.

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.

This content is right up my street thanks doc

Dr Jones you have a great sense of humours haha, and you are brilliant. bravo

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.

As a Californian, thank you for teaching me that "cot" and "caught" are actually pronounced differently by some people.

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 KZfaq, 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.

Thank you very much for making this video. I found it interesting and I hope you continue to do so. Have a nice day and I hope your dinner tonight is good.

this is like my new favorite channel

This guy is amazing ❤

Interesting, thanks

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...

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).

You are so entertaining 🎉. I really enjoy your videos. You are such a nerd ( in the flattering way). Mazel tov ❤

Training my spanish vocal posture has been a long battle of this

Thank you, this will help fine tune my Spanish study.

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

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

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.

Wow. Very interesting channel. Liked and subbed.

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 😂

When I was 18 I went to Glasgow to spend a few days with a korean friend of mine who was studying there, I was very confident in my english speaking and understanding skills (I'm french) yet when I left the airport and got in the bus, the bus driver asked me something... I still have no idea what he said to me, he repeated his sentence many times but I simply couldn't understand anything and he just ended up getting mad at me... Basically, the first few hours I spent in scotland, I was crying my eyes out and the first thing I told my friend upon arrival was " I don't f*cking speak english" Edit : My friend just casually responded "no, I think THEY don't"

Thanks!

This video is so mind blowing

This is an excellent learning experience. I can imitate some accents from other countries here and there. Not to make fun of them but it does help speaking the language correctly.

Your Chris Hall shout-out made me laugh! He totally said that to me at Joe Coffee.

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.

That pause got me 😭

Very good

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.

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

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

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. 👍

So glad I found your channel 🤞🏾🫶🏾😂 You're great plus funny‼️

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

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 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.

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.

You mentioned John C. Wells! Wow, upvote just for that! He's a British Esperantist, whose book _Concise Esperanto and English Dictionary_ I own.

My native dialect is a lowland middle Appalachian. I can speak standard US. Moons ago, I worked in a grocery store. One New Year's Day, two women came to me at a register and said: "Where is the [something unintelligible ]. Five native English speakers from Northern Virginia took 15 minutes to figure out that the garbled-to-our-ears word was oatmeal. I have no clue what they said, but somehow it was oatmeal. Pointed them to it. They called a bunch of drooling idiots on the way out. They were from the middle part of the AL/MS line, and who knows what they did to the word oatmeal that made it unintelligible.

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

this is so useful. I'm not interested in anything in particular, I just want to support you.

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 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.

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

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.

Intéressant

cool channel, definitely comes across as more factual than most the language channels I watch lol

In my career I worked with people from all over the world and I got pretty good at understanding accented English. The most impossible accent I heard was that of a guy from Viet Nam and I couldn’t figure out why he was so much harder to understand than others from there. Then someone explained to me that he learned English in Mississippi, the first place he lived in the US (we were in California). Knowing that, I suddenly could understand him better. I could hear both accents, which was fascinating. Then there was the Kurdish guy from Iraq who lived in Scotland for a while. That was another interesting mix of accents.

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.

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.

FOTC and Ashford & Simpson. Very cool.

It really helps with the algorithm

Nice video

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 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.

I'll never forget visiting Scotland when I was 18 and having my accent commented on, followed with a comment "I don't think wee have an accent in Inverness".. .... I assure you, yes, Scottish people have accents.

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…

Rural Appalachia, particularly in West Virginia, was the hardest for me to understand despite growing up a couple hours away. I remember that when my dad remarried, my step-mother's side of the family was from nearer the Ohio/WV boarder and just that distance was enough that I had new vocabulary (I remember pocketbook and commode as a couple of examples) compared to the rest of my family (mostly central Ohio).

I have friend at work who speaks fluent Swedish. I don't remember if he was born here or came here when he was very young. Everytime he talks to an immigrant he automaticly switch to immigrant accent he doesn't notice but we who know him does. I live in southern Sweden and have a broad Scanian accent. I went out in Denmark. Began talking to a girl and she couldn't understand what I was saying but I understood everything she said. I had to speak English with her. When I speak to people here I don't notice an accent but the moment I hear it on TV it's so noticeably.

I'm from New Jersey and I had a friend from North Dakota visit me recently. She kept pointing out how thick everyone's accent was but to me they sounded completely normal. It was really funny how blind to it I was

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

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!

Years ago my family moved from Louisville, Kentucky to Columbus, Ohio. My parents are originally from Northwest Ohio and we moved south when I was in 5th grade, so I didn't grow up with a Kentucky accent and half of my neighbors were also transplants without the local accent. 10 years later when we moved back to Ohio, we didn't have the nasal short vowels of before. I was talking with a guy at the car dealership where I was working that summer when I heard the nasal vowels in his speech and commented that I noticed his accent. He was shocked and replied, "What? I don't have an accent!" with his nasally short a sounds. That's when it clicked for me.

Try one on the Spanish accent found in the province of Cádiz, Spain. It's like no other Spanish around.

I love the singy songy intonation of the Spanish from the Caribbean. Specifically the Dominican Republic. 🇩🇴

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.

Great topic ! Although sometimes I wish you could go a bit slower, so that we can have time to reflect on the point you just made… What’s fascinating is that there is a point where an accent in your own language becomes so strong that you lose immediate understanding. For me it happens sometimes with Canadian French (I’m not talking about joual). If, like me, you speak « standard » French, I.e. more or less the one spoken between Paris and Tours, the one that’s on French TV news most of the time, you can get in situations where you would need « subtitles » to understand French spoken in Quebec - not for a few minor differences in vocabulary, but really because of the accent !

I am French Canadian native, and we moved to Belgium when I was 13 or so. The school setting was much more rigid than in Quebec. We had to vouvoyer teachers of course. So I am in the Hallway, and the physEd teacher is coming my way. As I get closer, I say: Vous allez-tu bien?? He cracked up and said in a thick Belgian accent « m’enfin ! C’est notre Nouvelle Canadienne! (No he did not end his sentence with « une fois » but could have!😂

I'm Norwegian and I've lately been fascinated by the subtle differences between the scandinavian-english accents: Norwenglish, Swenglish and Danglish. I don't have the academic vocabulary to describe it properly, but there are distinct variations in tone and rythm between them. All three base languages are more melodic than regular English and brings that quality with them as a part of their accents. I've found basic English to be overall pretty rythmic, like you just accidentally sound like a Shakespearian sonnet sometimes, weheras the scandinavian languages are more melodic. Norwenglish seems to be the most chaotic one, swinging up and down seemingly at random to most English speakers. It sounds wild, depending on how bad the accent is. Swenglish is a little calmer but also more aggressive, like the language is leaning forward, almost forcefully. Danglish is the opposite, it leans back and the tonality comes off more lazy and slow. Danglish sounds like it's comfortably on the back-foot, building up until it falls off at the end of the sentence. Look up an interview with Norwegian rally driver Petter Solberg for the thickest Norwenglish accent ever caught on tape. Obviously, regional differences apply as well, and some have stronger accents than others, but I've had a lot of fun decoding the accents of my coworkers, who come from all over Scandinavia, but speak English as the work language. Still noticing new things every day :)

Ha - when a video you are watching quotes an online acquaintance and you are like - is that really John Wells? This guy just called him a genius - I’m gonna tell him and make his day.