- Joined
- Jun 4, 2012
- Reaction score
- 19,521
- Age
- 65
- Location
- I'm liek, in Cali, dude.
- Lifestyle
- Vegetarian
Even when we say we don't have an accent, we really do. The way we speak reflects both where we've lived and who raised us. I'm curious about how you guys and gals sound as I have only met a few of you in person.
My father grew up in Philadelphia, PA, and my mother grew up in Trenton, New Jersey. I was born and raised in Los Angeles, so I supposedly have a flat, broad, general American accent, but, and I have noticed this myself, my parents' accents often creep in when I speak. Also, people have asked me if I'm from Boston because they think they hear a Bostonian accent (with the ah in the middle or on the end - pahk your cah in Hahvahd yahd - but I'm too embarrassed to tell them that it's actually a speech impediment. I've had some speech lessons to try to fix that, but it only helped a little bit. Also, when I was growing up, my dad coached me and my siblings to speak in a certain way to sound educated, putting more emphasis on consonants, for example. I think he was especially concerned about me because I had certain speech impediments.
I also thought this was interesting:
My father grew up in Philadelphia, PA, and my mother grew up in Trenton, New Jersey. I was born and raised in Los Angeles, so I supposedly have a flat, broad, general American accent, but, and I have noticed this myself, my parents' accents often creep in when I speak. Also, people have asked me if I'm from Boston because they think they hear a Bostonian accent (with the ah in the middle or on the end - pahk your cah in Hahvahd yahd - but I'm too embarrassed to tell them that it's actually a speech impediment. I've had some speech lessons to try to fix that, but it only helped a little bit. Also, when I was growing up, my dad coached me and my siblings to speak in a certain way to sound educated, putting more emphasis on consonants, for example. I think he was especially concerned about me because I had certain speech impediments.
I also thought this was interesting:
- The accents of some languages are unknown enough to appear this way, especially if there are phonetic features not found in English such as vowel harmony (you can pronounce a lot of vowels but not in the same word).
- Move somewhere with a drastically different accent from your birthplace. Live there for a year. Travel to a third location and watch most people be completely baffled.
- Cary Grant spent the first few years of his life in England, then moved to America aged at age 16, leaving him with a peculiar accent that seemed to be stranded halfway across the Atlantic. In Some Like It Hot, Tony Curtis does a perfect impersonation of Grant's strangled vowels, only to be told to stop being ridiculous, because 'nobody talks like that'. He made up that accent, a sort of generic upper-crust accent, as he was originally from Bristol, England and picked up a Cockney accent in the music halls in London during his early acting work.