What's your accent (in your native language)?

[Winner]

Do you speak with a regional[1] accent or perhaps even a dialect[2] in your native tongue (stupid question, almost everybody does)? How strong is it? If there is an unique dialect in your region, can you speak in it? What do you think about the other accents/dialects of your language?

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[1] There are also social, ethnic, and other forms, but I am asking here about the regional variations.
[2] Accent in this sense (I don't mean word stress) mostly only affects phonology, that is, pronunciation, while dialect includes also unique lexical and grammatical elements. I recognize that the boundary between the two is often blurry, so in this thread I won't distinguish between them. Of course, I mean accent/dialect as a contrast to the "norm", i.e. what's the accepted "high" form of the language. In many countries (including mine) nobody speaks the "high" form, so everybody speaks "accented" varieties or dialects.
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I speak what I'd call "standard Moravian Czech" Although there is a unique urban dialect in Brno, almost nobody can speak it today, and I only know a few words and phrases. I can do the accent just fine, but that's about it.

The funny thing is that you don't really realize the differences from "standard Bohemian Czech" until you meet some Bohemians and speak with them The Bohemian students here in Brno sometimes tell me that they have to adopt some elements of the Moravian variety of Czech in order not to feel like idiots when they open their mouths The same thing happens in Bohemia in reverse, of course.

In Czechia, the strongest dialects exist in parts of Moravia, though they are slowly disappearing. Bohemia has further regional varieties as well, but they're less pronounced. Northern Moravian/Silesian accent is quite marked, and there are some transitional dialects between Czech and Polish. People in Prague also have a very pronounced accent, one which to most other people sounds gay - and I don't mean it in the pejorative sense, sometimes (not always) it really sounds like the kind of very camp gay speech. (I know that even some native English speakers notice that.)

The standard high form of Czech, or "literary Czech" (spisovná čeština) is taught in schools and used only in writing and partially in TV/radio broadcast. Nobody speaks it in real life. However, Bohemians sometimes say that Moravians sound more "correct", because in some aspects "standard Moravian Czech" is closer to the norm.

 

[emzie]

American midland, or TV news anchor voice. Not surprising since I'm from that area of the country (central Ohio). I am told I have a slight accent here.

Month ago I posted this with me speaking in the background

 

[Arwon]

There's not really any true regional variation in Australian English aside from some vocab, it's more that there's a spectrum along sociocultural and rural-urban lines. Plus there's ethnocultural varieties of course.

I think I speak General Australian as opposed to Cultivated or Broad. I used to have a much broader (more country) accent having spent most of my time living in a medium-sized town, but living overseas and then in Sydney kinda changed that.

 

[Winner]

American midland, or TV news anchor voice. Not surprising since I'm from that area of the country (central Ohio). I am told I have a slight accent here.

I suck at recognizing North American English accents. It all sounds the same to me, aside from the Southern accent which is just cool and funny. I am told Texas has a recognizable accent which I can sometimes catch, and the New Yorkers speak... fast. Also, I heard that in some parts of New England, there are regional accents that are non-rhotic and thus sound closer to British English.

There's not really any true regional variation in Australian English aside from some vocab, it's more that there's a spectrum along sociocultural and rural-urban lines. Plus there's ethnocultural varieties of course.

I think I speak General Australian as opposed to Cultivated or Broad. I used to have a much broader (more country) accent having spent most of my time living in a medium-sized town, but living overseas and then in Sydney kinda changed that.

Which of them does Julia Gillard speak?

 

[Arwon]

She's quite broad. But since it's a stigmatised variety, she has attempted to reduce that, with varying degrees of success.

 

[rugbyLEAGUEfan]

Standard Strayn

 

[Winner]

She's quite broad. But since it's a stigmatised variety, she has attempted to reduce that, with varying degrees of success.

I always thought she flaunted it in order to attract lower class votes. In any case, I use her speeches to demonstrate to Czechs what Australian English sounds like

 

[W|M]

I speak a mixture of Cockney (Londoner) and Standard English when I speak in English, and in a Carioca (Rio de Janeiro) accent when I speak in Portuguese.

 

[Arwon]

I always thought she flaunted it in order to attract lower class votes. In any case, I use her speeches to demonstrate to Czechs what Australian English sounds like

She gets mocked here. Use somebody with a more typical accent! Hugh Jackman's actually a good example.

Or maybe Paul Kelly?

Edit: For a crazy weird accent you could try Resources Minister Martin Ferguson (aka "Mahn Ferson")

 

[Winner]

She gets mocked here. Use somebody with a more typical accent!

It's actually useful to use someone who's "overdoing it" if you want to demonstrate how the Australian English sounds like to intermediate-level students. I mean, you're a native English speaker so your ears are attuned to recognizing various accents in your language, but people who're only just learning English and don't speak it that well often can't hear it.

 

[Quackers]

I guess I speak standard southern English of the middle class variety. I'm just a bit too far away from the West country to talk like a pirate tho

 

[GoodSarmatian]

Native language, huh ? I have two of those.
My parents are from Yugoslavia, my father is Serbian and my mother Croatian. They're both from Bosnia and they have met in Germany. When I speak Serbocroatian -the language I used to construct my first crude sentences as a toddler- I use Bosnian with a Serbain vocabulary, vaguely Croatian pronouncation and a German accent. All of this clearly marks me as a foreigner whenever I go to ex-Yugoslavia

Now my primary language is German. I'm born here and since I use Serbocroatian to converse with my parents I learned my early German from TV and in kindergarden without any local baggage, which means I used to speak a relatively clean standard Hochdeutsch. But for some reason I seem to have acquired a Rhineland accent in recent years. I've lived here for most of my life, but some of my friends say they have only noticed a gradual change since 2008.

 

[Cato the Elder]

I speak Dutch with the accent of my town, which is similar to Dutch spoken in Mechelen. There's still a noticeable difference though, despite the fact that the distance is only a good 8 km. Belgium has an insanely varied set of dialects, both in Dutch and in French, and if someone's speaking relatively thick dialect, you can to this day still pinpoint his location to within 5 km if you know the region.

 

[Camikaze]

@Winner- but that's not what Australians sound like at all...which is why she gets mocked.

Jack Thompson is generally considered to have one of the best Australian accents/voices. Try from 2:30 onwards in particular.

A British immigration officer insisted once that I had a British accent (I had just spent a week on a boat full of 'em, so maybe there was something there), despite my protestations, and inferred from that that I must have overstayed my visa.

Listen to Polycast #83 (I think?) for my accent. Just fairly generic Australian. Falls into the category of accents that aren't easily identifiable as coming from any particular geographic area or ethnic background.

Apparently there's a difference between Melbourne and Sydney accents? But I don't really hear it.

Standard Strayn

A contradiction in terms?

 

[Radio Noer]

American midland, or TV news anchor voice. Not surprising since I'm from that area of the country (central Ohio). I am told I have a slight accent here.

Month ago I posted this with me speaking in the background

Same here, except I live in southeast Wisconsin so water fountains are bubblers. Farther north there's an accent, most evident by their pronunciation of Wisconsin as Wis-CAN-sin.

 

[Lillefix]

I have a variant of the south western norwergian. My dialect mostly conforms to where I grew up, but I have taken some from my mother(who grew up around 30km away). I was teased quite a bit at school because of that.

In the military I remember a guy who grew up in a relatively big city nearby. I asked him why he talked so strangely. He told me that people in that particular street, just talked that way. A very local dialect.

 

[Mechanicalsalvation]

I am speaking Pilsen Czech. It sounds bit like when you are trying to sing and talk in the same time
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VKEVx-ykyE

When speaking English some say I have Scotish accent

 

[Arwon]

Apparently there's a difference between Melbourne and Sydney accents? But I don't really here it.

Only on a small number of words, and only as a general tendency. This shows some of the variations

The merger of "salary" and "celery" among a lot of the youth is the main one, which is what we hear in the "Malbourne" thing from hipsters down there (or halicopter in the link above) . It's just a tendency though, and not exclusive to Melbourne as some Sydney folk do it too and my sister I think does it with "langth" and "strangth" and she's barely set foot in Victoria.

The main variation between cities is how words like "graph" and "demand" and "chance" and "branch" are pronounced. At one end is Adelaide where nearly everyone says them with /a:/ (the sound from "cart"). At the other end is Hobart and Brisbane where it's usually /æ/ (the sound from "cat"). Melbourne tends a little more toward Hobart and Brisbane, Sydney a little more towards Adelaide.

You'll also hear many Melbournians say Newcastle and castle to rhyme with hassle.

There's a few other minor things. South Australians tending to turn "l" into a vowel (my dad and grandpa say "mi-uk" instead of "milk" - listen to "hurled" in the link), West Aussies turning "square" or "fear" into a two-syllable word, a lot of older and rural Tasmanians pronouncing the "ay" sound as "Tas-Mine-ia" and "admini-stry-tion".

But these tendencies are all pretty minor and not necessarily exclusive to the place they're supposed to be from.

 

[Leifmk]

I speak a watered-down version of the dialect from where I grew up. Watered-down from first having grown up with mass media in standard Norwegian forms, and then from not having lived in that area for nearly 20 years now (first 13 years in Trondheim, and then after that near Oslo). My original native dialect is vaguely related to (but still pretty different from) the Trondheim one. It has some odd features such as having retained the dative case from Old Norse(centuries gone in standard Norwegian; I can't use it properly and most others of my generation probably can't either, but my parents can). Spoken properly/old-fashioned and at speed, it can be nearly unintelligible for many other Norwegians (this particular feature is shared by many other dialects).

 

[Joecoolyo]

I assuming I have the regular Midwestern accent, kind of like Contre but a little farther west.

I don't think I have the total Chicagoan though, it's hard to tell.