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

[Leifmk]

In Norway it used to be possible to determine with pretty good accuracy someone's place of origin from his dialect, down to the village or hamlet level. (Not that we really "do" either villages or hamlets, but whatever.) Not quite so much anymore after the introduction of mass media and the increased mobility of modern society, but dialects are still a very real and alive thing.

 

[Skwink]

We in the PNW often times will pronounce "caught" like we do "cot". I don't know if everyone else does this too, but everyone I know pronounces "our" like "are". From what I hear the PNW is the most basic English when it comes to accents.

 

[madviking]

We in the PNW often times will pronounce "caught" like we do "cot".

You mean there's another way to say "caught"?

 

[Skwink]

You mean there's another way to say "caught"?

Well apparently it's pronounced "kawt", but I can't even say that.

 

[Traitorfish]

Traitorfish has a Leeds accent? Damn am kinda jelly, that sounds good. W. Hague!

I'm not really sure how you'd describe it, to be honest, I'm most just going by the fact that the most common versions "are you from X?" seem to be in that part of the country. It's pretty heavily mongrolised.

 

[HannibalBarka]

I have a very sharp "old sfaxian" accent when I speak tunisian. Sfax is a city in Tunisia, second biggest, and has a special accent and many special words. I left the city and the country some 25 years ago, and now people not only recognize my sfaxian accent when i talk, but even sfaxian are amazed because i use word that were common in the 80ies and aren't any more.
I have a parisian accent when i speak french as that's where i landed when i moved to France and that's where i spent most of my "french" years.
I have a yankee accent when i speak English according to French people because that's where i got my english fluent (NYC for 3 years).

 

[MjM]

I sound like I'm from Southern California. I say 'like' and 'dude' quite frequently.

 

[Save_Ferris]

Midwestern with a hint of Mexican in some words. Maybe some California in there.

 

[Ice_Tyrant]

I have never noticed whatever accent I may have. Maybe if I left Western Kentucky and went to New Yoke or something somebody would notice it as a certain accent.

 

[shadowplay]

I sort of talk like a ninja turtle, so southern California it is.

Kidding aside, I talk like a Canadian with a slight Trinidadian accent detectable when I talk too fast.

 

[holy king]

i'm bilingual in the austrian variant of high german (read: what passes for high german in austria) and eastern austrian dialect.

i only speak real high german when talking to the mentally ********. (read: german tourists.)

In Norway it used to be possible to determine with pretty good accuracy someone's place of origin from his dialect, down to the village or hamlet level. (Not that we really "do" either villages or hamlets, but whatever.) Not quite so much anymore after the introduction of mass media and the increased mobility of modern society, but dialects are still a very real and alive thing.

same here. if you know an area, you can tell the village someone is from by the accent.

 

[Veles]

Alright, how is that all y'all people from relatively small countries have so many accents?

In Russia pretty much everyone speaks/writes the standart way. Ocassionaly, I heard some odd non-standart sounding (but perfectly understandable) words in rural areas, like 'duje' instead of 'ochen'' for 'very', or 'dobre' instead of 'horosho' for 'good', but none of the local 'dialects' are unintelligible; in fact they shouldn't even be called 'dialects'.

I speak with the standart Moscow pronounciation, and so does everyone else I know, no matter what part of Russia they are from. I find that people from Urals, people from Pacific coast and people from the South (Kuban', Lower Don), speak kinda alike, and they sorta reduce vowels (kotory-ktory, koneshno - kneshno).

There are people, who, like Czechs or Ukrainians, pronounce 'g' as 'h' (grad - hrad). This is considered very rural and unprestigious. Though, to me it sounds kinda cute, especially on girls.

There's this map of regional differences in pronounciation. Not sure how relevant it is nowadays, though.

 

[Hygro]

I have the accent of whomever I'm talking to. Foppish, hood, Southern, Eastern, Australian, Korean.... Man I started speaking English like my ESL judo instructor.

Naturally I have a very localized Californian accent. One girlfriend from another part of the state referred to it as a "Bay Area twang" so that's what I call it. It's one part Californian mainstream, one part black (for lack of a better descriptor), one part upperclass educated, another part urban-working class. In Chicago one of my fellow interns asked me why I had a Southern accent. You hear it mostly between Richmond CA and Hayward CA. Centered around Berkeley/Oakland but the San Francisco cats are close enough (not as pronounced though) that it might as well be one Bay Area sound.

 

[duckstab]

I grew up speaking a Philadelphia-area accent, which is typical of southern New Jersey. I notice it mainly now when I go back to visit my family. I don't have much of it left after a quarter century in Austin.

It's hard for me to characterize what an Austin accent would be, given that I listen to it all day. But I think an outsider would probably conclude that most of us don't sound very Texan at all. Although the vocabulary is mostly southern (e.g., "y'all" as the second person plural, "coke" for any carbonated drink), there's no noticeable drawl. I think it has to do with the city's fairly explosive growth over the last 30 years. Probably the vast majority of Austinites are, like myself, arrivals from elsewhere in the US, or children thereof.

 

[Hygro]

I grew up speaking a Philadelphia-area accent, which is typical of southern New Jersey. I notice it mainly now when I go back to visit my family. I don't have much of it left after a quarter century in Austin.

It's hard for me to characterize what an Austin accent would be, given that I listen to it all day. But I think an outsider would probably conclude that most of us don't sound very Texan at all. Although the vocabulary is mostly southern (e.g., "y'all" as the second person plural, "coke" for any carbonated drink), there's no noticeable drawl. I think it has to do with the city's fairly explosive growth over the last 30 years. Probably the vast majority of Austinites are, like myself, arrivals from elsewhere in the US, or children thereof.

So for the coke thing, does this ever happen?

"do you want a coke with that?"
and you go "Yeah"
"what will you have"
"I'll have a coke"
"oh, I'm sorry, we only have pepsi, will that be okay?"

 

[Dachs]

You're German?

I was born there while my dad was serving in the Fulda Gap, and learned German there at a young age.

So for the coke thing, does this ever happen?

"do you want a coke with that?"
and you go "Yeah"
"what will you have"
"I'll have a coke"
"oh, I'm sorry, we only have pepsi, will that be okay?"

Sounds like a conversation I once had in a Mobile (AL) Pizza Hut.

 

[IdiotsOpposite]

We in the PNW often times will pronounce "caught" like we do "cot". I don't know if everyone else does this too, but everyone I know pronounces "our" like "are". From what I hear the PNW is the most basic English when it comes to accents.

Same here. I also have difficulty pronouncing, for example, the "t" in mountain. I pronounce it "moun'ain". Are you the same way?

 

[civ-addicted]

I speak with a dialect (Swabian), which is practically incomprehensible to people growing up with Standard German, and i can't remember ever saying a full-fledged sentence in German before i went to university. True story.
Writing it was somewhat vital in school, though.

 

[anandus]

I speak Dutch.
I used to heavily speak the city dialect of Leiden (born and bred there), it's a bit vulgar (not 'dirty vulgar', but 'city neighbourhood vulgar').
As I grew up I started to speak more and more the 'Standard Dutch' (Standaardnederlands).

Although I still have some typical pronounciations from my dialect (especially my 'r'), but ironically instead of vulgar, it makes me sound a bit posh actually.

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

Naturally I don't think I have an accent, but I know that there is a certain way which Marylanders speak and others don't (it's all of them who have accents!). I feel like it's mostly vocabulary, but some of my more Northern friends never cease to taunt me about living in Merlin near Warshinin or pronouncing "firemen" and "farming" identically. There are certainly worse offenders than me though. A friend back home, for example, might come home after a hard day at work and declare that "Aw've bin workin six errors numb tarred."

I speak a dialect known as "Traitorfish", a bizarre hybrid of South Yorkshire, Weirside and South-Western Scots. But mostly it sounds like a guy from mebbe Leeds using a bunch of Scottish grammar and colloquialisms for no apparent reason.

Link to video.

I'm pretty horrible at figuring out what accent I have, so I should probably delegate this to Bill, Integral, or one of the other people here who's actually heard me speak in RL. I've always thought that my pronunciation - as distinct from my vocabulary - pretty much follows "news-anchor American English" as augurey's does.

Only in the loosest possible sense am I a "native" speaker of German, and except for something of an American accent there it's pretty much standard Hochdeutsch.

You do have a very precise way of pronouncing things. It betrays no accent whatsoever.

I speak with the standart Moscow pronounciation, and so does everyone else I know, no matter what part of Russia they are from.

I was told by a Russian friend that the standard "Moscow" accent is only spoken by Muscovites and homosexuals, and speaking in such a way would make you assumed to be gay by other Russians.

I personally detected no accent between Moscow and St. Petersburg, but that's because I was concentrating on the words they were saying and not so much how they were saying them.