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

[Dachs]

Point Alpha?
-> That then counts as Franconian dialekt ^^ (according to this).

No, he wasn't a border guard, he was based out of one of the two Würzburg kasernes. Since he was a combat engineer, in the event that everything went boombastic on the IGB, he'd be moved up to the Gap to be the speedbump.

Before I was born, he did another tour in Germany in which he was stationed in Hanau as part of the Spearheads (Third Armored Div.), which was also assigned to cover the Gap.

Anyway. The accent. I'm familiar with Ostfränkisch, but I don't actually pronounce words that way. Most of the German I got was either on TV (because AFN sucked ass) or transmitted through the DoD school system/parents. Subsequent participation in German classes as grade-boosters for my secondary education in the United States has if anything reinforced the Hochdeutsch.

 

[civver_764]

I dunno, like Midwestern American probably. I don't really hear any difference between my accent and most other Americans'(except the more extreme regional ones).

 

[Hygro]

but some of my more Northern friends never cease to taunt me about living in Merlin near Warshinin or pronouncing "firemen" and "farming" identically

for me its
fIre-men
faRM'ng

It's like, a long solo "i" such that "fire" is almost 2 syllables, and the farm a long RM drawl. The men and the ing are pretty too. Wow, cool to learn.

@dachs and teknojock, lol. I still don't get the coke as soda thing.

Some American northern cities vowel shift with a bit of Chicagoese ("supposed to" becomes "supposedta" or "and" becomes "ahn", soda is "pop" and "sneakers" are "gym shoes") and a pinch of Cali surfer for emphasis. Also, I think specific to the town I grew up in it's Row-za-velt Road or idit Rooo-za-velt. I forget but was corrected by someone from California.

And "the wash" instead of bathroom! Actually, I think it's common in general for Chicago folks to sound a bit L.A. (or "Cali surfer") I noticed a very SoCal sound to the accent there that surprised me.

 

[ParkCungHee]

Long Island accent. Or Lon-guyland accent.

It leaves me incapable of pronouncing drawer, squirrel or water.

 

[Chukchi Husky]

I remember when my dad found out that House was actually British, he asked me how hard it would have been to lose the accent for the roll. The thing is, he wasn't a stupid man, just a sheltered American.

Where I live, there are people who can't understand how he got the role for house, because they say his accent sounds obviously fake.

 

[Princeps]

Finnish in Turku accent.

English in an odd mixture of Finnish, British and American accents.

 

[Josu]

I speak strandard Basque (batua) with a clear biscay accent. There are some words that I am not able to say properly, for example in basque Z and S sound very similar, I am not able to pronounce them properly, but I difference the sound if other one is speaking, I have same problem with TZ, TS and TX.
I speak Spanish with basque accent (not very strong), for those who can speak spanish here is an example for participles ending in -ado I say -ao, instead of "he estado" I say "he estao". Very strong accent would be "he estau"
I use (and most basque people speaking spanish) different tenses than other people speaking spanish, if something happened yesterday I use "Ayer pasó", but if happened this morning I use "Esta mañana ha pasado" instead of "Esta mañana pasó"

 

[rugbyLEAGUEfan]

You should basque in your trilinguality

 

[Josu]

You should basque in your trilinguality

Hmmmm, I don't consider myself trilingual. I can write (I am not the best in orthography) & read English, I can speak it with an awfull accent, speaking slowly and with a limited vocabulary. I have problems to understand people who speaks real english(not academic) or speaks too fast, so I do not consider me dominating the languaje.

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

If'n I called a feller a homophone on this here board I'd be throwed out sure nuff.

Aye laffed.

for me its
fIre-men
faRM'ng

It's like, a long solo "i" such that "fire" is almost 2 syllables, and the farm a long RM drawl. The men and the ing are pretty too. Wow, cool to learn.
/QUOTE]

See, complete anathema. I can't even imagine how to actually say farming that way (fire-men makes more sense since it's a compound word).

 

[The_J]

[...]

Ah, okay .
Sounds somehow normal way of going around within all the american stations in Bavaria/Hessia.
But not much languagewise, would all be Frankonian.

Anyway. The accent. I'm familiar with Ostfränkisch, but I don't actually pronounce words that way. Most of the German I got was either on TV (because AFN sucked ass) or transmitted through the DoD school system/parents. Subsequent participation in German classes as grade-boosters for my secondary education in the United States has if anything reinforced the Hochdeutsch.

Oh, you just think that's Hochdeutsch ^^. At least unless you meet someone who says that you have an accent. But like said, personally I can most times not really detect real differences, not even after living in other regions for some time.

 

[Quackers]

On the idea of "accentless" thing, I used to believe that a few years ago. Just ignorance I guess ;p

 

[kronic]

Do you greet people with "Moin" at six in the afternoon ?

I do that sometimes even though I'm not from the North. I've been working on my accent over the past years with the goal to eliminate it completely. Most people can't figure out anymore where I'm originally from.

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.

Swabian is one of the top 3 worst German dialects for me...

 

[Leoreth]

On the idea of "accentless" thing, I used to believe that a few years ago. Just ignorance I guess ;p

The situation's a little different in German compared to English, though, if you're referring to that.

 

[Jos Ballenbak]

Dutch - Native

Limburgs - Accent

Maastricht (Mestreechs) - Dialect

 

[Quackers]

The situation's a little different in German compared to English, though, if you're referring to that.

I always thought that my accent was the plain, white sheet of English and then any other deriviations of that were "accents" whilst mine was the pure un-accented form of ENG. Which is nonsense;p I dunno about the situation in Deutschland tho...

 

[emzie]

Where I live, there are people who can't understand how he got the role for house, because they say his accent sounds obviously fake.

Listen to it without looking at the screen. He has a spot-on American accent. The only reason it sounds fake is because it's coming out the mouth of a guy you remember from A Bit of Fry & Laurie.

In the same sense, Lee from Battlestar Galatica sounds like he's speaking with a fake British accent when he's on Law and Order UK.

 

[Dachs]

My sister once watched an episode of Blackadder Goes Forth and asked me why Hugh Laurie's fake English accent was so bad.

 

[duckstab]

No offence intended to anyone, but I've always found the idea of certain people "not having an accent" to be quite fascinating.

I think the only way you can't have an accent is if you don't speak at all.

However, I think it's the case that there are some accents which are, for lack of a better term, "stronger". Let's say we were to identify certain pronunciation characteristics, rank native speakers of a language in terms of how strongly they exhibited those characteristics, and do a multidimensional scatter plot of the result. You'd probably find that there'd be some kind of center of mass that represented the most standard pronunciation of the language, with some clusters of speakers being further from that center of mass.

I once met a linguistics grad student who was doing her PhD thesis around something like this and she was noting there's a strong correlation between education level and how standard one's pronunciation is. The more educated one is, the "weaker" one's accent tends to be. Her hypothesis was that education gives one more opportunity to interact with people outside one's culture of origin, so one's pronunciation tends to drift towards a common mean.

 

[Flying Pig]

I started off with a thick and pure West Country accent, but I've slightly drifted towards the 'squaddie accent' which encompasses a lot of Geordie (I say 'youse' for you-plural if I don't watch myself), a fair bit of most regional accents as well as the Queen's English, not to mention the various words and phrases that only soldiers use. People back home that I knew before I joined up always think I talk 'posh', so perhaps there's something in Duckstab's friend's idea.