I am a firm believer that there is no such thing as a standard accent, even when it is official. What do you think?

well the only way would be if there was only one country/city

I am a firm believer that there is no such thing as a standard accent, even when it is official. What do you think?

I'd say there could be if you are in one country only. It could only have one

accent that all of the people speak with.

Everyone speaks with their particular regional dialect of their spoken language. Some people can speak more than one dialect. My husband can, or claims he can speak two different german dialects. If you try to speak a new language as an adult you will very likely speak that language with an accent.

Trust me, even within Australia there's dialects and accents.. The country.. the getting close to country and the city...

I am a firm believer that there is no such thing as a standard accent, even when it is official. What do you think?

Nope, not completely true. You've obviously not spent much time in the American mid-west. Kansas, Nebraska, etc. Most people there (natives) have no discernible accent at all - and that's exactly why many of the national TV channels used to pick them to be news anchors.

i was taught its the pronunciations how to speak at early ages like school
and sum people have problems wording or speaking and they get messed up with pronunciations and others catch on and do the same like a chain reaction one sneezes they all do and they cut short long words like the simple word the used to be the biggest longest word and to have a conversation with one was long and tiring so people use shorter words that represent the same meaning and it causes different pronunciations say outback peoplesay gidday mate and the city people sy hello how are you instead of how ar ya ........like that

oh hforget to say babies every baby in the world speaks the same language not one is different nor their colour stops em

gidday challenger u australian same here if u are am in brissy

Nope, not completely true. You've obviously not spent much time in the American mid-west. Kansas, Nebraska, etc. Most people there (natives) have no discernible accent at all - and that's exactly why many of the national TV channels used to pick them to be news anchors.

Their "lack" of an accent is an accent ( General American (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_American) ). A fellow Californian told me that when he and his good friend were in the Army in Georgia, the Georgians told them "Y'all talk like the people on television."

Everybody hears an accent in people not from their area.
Accents are in the ears of the beholder.

People do speak with accents. After working in an Essex (UK) company for 15 years I was told by someone from "up North" that I spoke with an Essex accent (though I'm a Londoner).

There was a case of a man with a brain injury who suddenly started speaking English with a strong Italian accent. Does this mean our accents are formed by us rather than built into us from our parents?

A Jamaican guy I worked with said when he went back home, as soon as he opened his mouth they knew he did not live on the island so prices went up for him.

Everyone speaks with an "accent" and, unless they've spent many years trying really really hard, no one speaks the standard dialect.

There's nothing inherently superior about a standard dialect (when it exists in a language), it's just an accident of history.

I don’t have an accent, I speak quite posh but I don’t believe that is an accent. Im quite proud as I live in herefordshire and havent picked up the farmer accent!

gidday challenger u australian same here if u are am in brissy

Yeah, I'm in Sydney,home of the Chaser.

But i have a curious way of pronouncing things though, comes from learning english from books, Still speak better than my parents though.

You know, personally, most of the intellectual stuff I know in English I taught myself, so I've never had the chance to eg hear the words spoken by a native speaker.

Of course, if I were to approach a random English native speaker and start talking about "autosegmentals", "morphosyntactic alignment", and "subjunctive moods" they would run away screaming... However, when the opportunity has presented itself to speak with someone about stuff using eg programming jargon I generally tend to sound authorative, but of course at the time I don't realise that the person I was speaking to never noticed anything wrong with my pronunciation.

In my native Sesotho, it's another matter entirely. Since our retarted orthography does not indicate tones and uses only 5 letters to indicate 9 phonemic vowels, I often read and learn words without knowing exactly how to pronounce them, although when I finally accidentally hear them I generally recognise and understand them exactly. Since I'm too poor to buy a decent (read: written by linguists and correctly marking tone and vowels) Sesotho dictionary (does anybody here want to donate US$100 to a poor African?), I often have to simply rely on my ingenuity to figure out the pronunciations of words, such as trying to find possible cognates in any non-Sesotho dictionaries I can find (due to vowel shifts, the languages often end up with slightly betten orthographies than Sesotho, and I use redundancy to fill in the blanks; they're generally also not written with tones either, though), or even attempting to find its possible proto-Bantu forms and searching for them in the online Bantu Language Reconstructions (which correctly marks vowels and tones)! These tricks often work, by the way.

Necessity is the mother of all invention...

I am a firm believer that there is no such thing as a standard accent, even when it is official. What do you think?The word "standard" by definition implies at least a consensus and at most the ruling of an authoritative body, which is just a complicated way of saying it's a matter of opinion and perspective.

England has a strong tradition of respect for authority, and most Britons would agree that "Oxford English" is "standard British" speech. Which is ironic since it's an artificial dialect that was invented around a century ago as a way to exaggerate the difference between "upper" and "lower" class people. (This is what I've been told and to date no British members have said I'm wrong.) The Japanese and Germans are also very deferential to authority and you'd better believe there are "standard" dialects of both their languages.

France and Spain actually have official Academies that rule on the inclusion of new words in their dictionaries.

Other language populations are more democratic or simply more practical. The Spanish of Mexico is rapidly achieving the status of a standard throughout Latin America: TV actors and announcers everywhere are coached in it. In America it's also the force of TV that's forging a standard, a synthesized Midwestern dialect without the peculiarities of Chicago, St. Louis, Minneapolis, etc., and as a result sounds just as authentic in Seattle, Los Angeles or Phoenix.

As later posts illustrate, these days "standard" tends to mean "the way they talk on TV."
Everyone speaks with their particular regional dialect of their spoken language. Some people can speak more than one dialect. My husband can, or claims he can speak two different german dialects.Most Americans can fake a Southern accent quite well. It must be the easiest of all our dialects because it's the one that British actors favor when they're forced to "talk American." You might even get away with it because there's quite a range of diversity within the South. A Mississippian might be positive that you're not from Mississippi, but he might assume you're just from North Carolina or Arkansas.
If you try to speak a new language as an adult you will very likely speak that language with an accent.Often when people speak of accents they mean foreign accents. English has a huge number of phonemes and most foreigners have difficulty differentiating between closely related ones, especially vowels. Many languages only have cardinal vowels so their speakers don't hear "sit" and "seat" or "get" and "gate" as two different words. Many languages don't have aspirated consonants, so when they say "pin" without the plosive P (the little puff of air that the P in "spin" doesn't have) it sounds like "bin" to us.

So since Britons and Australians are, technically, foreigners, we Americans will talk about English, Scottish or Australian accents.

We talk about the "Southern accent," but rarely about a New England accent, which is just as strong, much less an upstate New York accent, which isn't. I suspect that's a legacy of the North-South animosity that led to the Civil War and has not quite disappeared yet.
Nope, not completely true. You've obviously not spent much time in the American mid-west. Kansas, Nebraska, etc. Most people there (natives) have no discernible accent at all - and that's exactly why many of the national TV channels used to pick them to be news anchors.That is strictly a matter of perspective. A Down Easter (person from Maine) or one from Georgia would absolutely not agree with you that Midwesterners don't have an accent. In fact they go to dialog coaches to study Midwestern dialect.
A fellow Californian told me that when he and his good friend were in the Army in Georgia, the Georgians told them "Y'all talk like the people on television."Exactly. Although it's more useful to call it a dialect rather than an accent. It encompasses choices between two "standard" pronunciations like A-pricot and AY-pricot or PEE-kan and p'-KAHN. It also encompasses vocabulary, most famously the Southern reinvention of the second person plural pronoun "you all," which resonates so strongly with our Anglo-Saxon need for the differentiation that it's even got its own possessive form, "you all's". (Commonly pronounced y'all and y'all's.)
Everybody hears an accent in people not from their area. Accents are in the ears of the beholder.Well said.
There was a case of a man with a brain injury who suddenly started speaking English with a strong Italian accent. Does this mean our accents are formed by us rather than built into us from our parents?Someone mentioned this a year or two ago. Since I haven't heard the speech myself, all I can do is offer teo hypotheses. One is based on the fact that in the electronic age we all hear other dialects of our language routinely. Most of the Americans in this subforum who are interested in linguistics and pay attention to such things could probably do a very good job of mimicking one or more foreign accents, especially Spanish, Italian, French and German, because they're often used comically. We have those sounds rattling around in our brains and after an injury there's no reason why they couldn't be rearranged and come out in place of the native sounds. I wonder whether a linguist would think the man was actually speaking English like an Italian or more like a movie actor portraying a Mafia don? I wonder if anyone who's suffered this injury woke up speaking like the Swedish chef on the Muppet Show?

My other hypothesis is based on the fact that we have a stylized idea of what an Italian accent sounds like. If the brain injury resulted in a few prominent changes in cadence and a simplification of the vowel paradigm, in the right direction, we might identify the sound as an Italian accent even though it lacks 90% of the attributes of one.

Speaking of neurological conditions causing people to speak funny. I know this one English woman with M.E. (chronic fatigue syndrome) who began her downward spiral with two nervous breakdowns, the second being rather peculiar. She was directing a photo shoot in France when suddenly she was only able to speak in German (obviously she knew both languages).

The first happened 3 years earlier when she was a teacher in Zimbabwe, but she has yet to tell me exactly what happened. She blames her condition and the second breakdown on forcing herself to work while ignoring the effects of the first one.

Nope, not completely true. You've obviously not spent much time in the American mid-west. Kansas, Nebraska, etc. Most people there (natives) have no discernible accent at all - and that's exactly why many of the national TV channels used to pick them to be news anchors.

Yes they do. They have an AMERICAN accent.

If you're speaking english, it's generally considered that "RP" is the only accentless way to speak it.

lol well don'y know what you are all saying i got the worst accent birmingham.. a brumy lol.

lol well don'y know what you are all saying i got the worst accent birmingham.. a brumy lol.

ash the worst accent has got to be the west country accent

Speaking of neurological conditions causing people to speak funny. I know this one English woman with M.E. (chronic fatigue syndrome) who began her downward spiral with two nervous breakdowns, the second being rather peculiar. She was directing a photo shoot in France when suddenly she was only able to speak in German (obviously she knew both languages).

The first happened 3 years earlier when she was a teacher in Zimbabwe, but she has yet to tell me exactly what happened. She blames her condition and the second breakdown on forcing herself to work while ignoring the effects of the first one.

I have heard of something like this before - an american women all of a sudden started speaking with a british accent and it had stuck!

Yes they do. They have an AMERICAN accent.The differences between British English and American English are profound. Speakers of any dialect of either regard any dialect of the other as a very "strong accent." Some of the most obvious differences that make the first word or two out of someone's mouth easily identifiable as "foreign" are:The entire paradigm of vowels is different, e.g. British "call" sounds like our "coal." Most British dialects are non-rhotic (R after a vowel is silent). Intervocalic T and D is a flapped Spanish R in America. We palatalize T and D before an unaccented long U, e.g. "gradjual"; whereas if the long U is accented it loses the diphthong, e.g. "toon" instead of "tyoon" for "tune." British is spoken more quickly with many unaccented vowels elided.To the casual American listener, Australians sound like Britons. How do they sound to Britons?
If you're speaking English, it's generally considered that "RP" is the only accentless way to speak it.Please enlighten the colonials. What is RP? Is that what we call "Oxford English"?

, e.g. British "call" sounds like our "coal.

Sorry to be pedantic fragglerocker(and I am increasingly an admirer of your knowledge) but I think it's the other way around. when the English say "call", it sounds like call, same as fall, wall ( corl, forl, worl) Americans sound like carl, warl farl.(BTW, Farl as a season only exists in USA and canada, everywhere else it is Autumn).

I'm a bit far removed from USA and England at the moment but if "call" sounds like "coal" I dread to think how you say Colin Powell.
Oops that's right! Colon Powell, as in small intestine Powell, It's Colin... Colin, not Coal'un or colon!

p.s Fragglerocker, can you explain intervolic flapping spanish, I'm lost on that one, thanks, Spud.

About the flap.

"Butter": many Americanos do not pronounce the "tt" the same as the "t" in "talk." It sounds almost like a d, but it isn't...

On the other hand, some British people would pronounce it as a glotal stop (like the haitus between the two syllables in "uh-oh").

Sorry to be pedantic fragglerocker(and I am increasingly an admirer of your knowledge) but I think it's the other way around. when the English say "call", it sounds like call, same as fall, wall ( corl, forl, worl) Americans sound like carl, warl farl.Hey, I did say it sounds like American "coal," as a reference point for American members. I'm not implying that one is "right" since that would conflict with my previous dissertation on "standard" dialects.

We've gotten into this before on this board. Unfortunately I can't post IPA symbols with my browser. We pronounce "cot" with the long cardinal A of Spanish, Russian and Hebrew. The same vowel as in "father." We don't transcribe that phonetically as "farther" because our dialects are rhotic and that R is not silent: "father" and "farther" are two distinct words for us. "Farther" has two clearly pronounced R's. You do nothing but confuse Americans when you try to transcribe a cardinal A as AR because we pronounce the R. We transcribe it colloquially as AH.

You pronounce "cot" and "hot" much more narrowly than "father," about one-third of the way between cardinal A and cardinal O.

I don't know the IPA symbols for the American and British vowels in "caught" and "call." Ours is much broader. Many foreigners, whose languages don't have English's plethora of vowels, don't hear the distinction between "cot" and "caught" in America, one that is easier to detect in Britain.

Your "call" is more like two-thirds of the way, closer to an O than an A. We don't have that sound, so to us it sounds like you're saying "coal." For us, the vowel in "caught" and "call" is much broader, exactly halfway between A and O.
(BTW, Fall as a season only exists in USA and Canada, everywhere else it is Autumn).I've always wondered why. "Autumn" was one of those many words you assimilated from the Norman occupiers. The Germans call it Herbst, so you'd think in English it would be Harvest.
I'm a bit far removed from USA and England at the moment but if "call" sounds like "coal" I dread to think how you say Colin Powell.
Oops that's right! Colon Powell, as in small intestine Powell, It's Colin... Colin, not Coal'un or colon!We all say KOH-l'n with a cardinal O, even newscasters. I've never heard him say his own name. It's a very unusual name for an American. I'm aware that British men with that name pronounce it with a short O, which comes out as a cardinal A from an American mouth but a little narrower in England.
Can you explain intervolic flapping Spanish R, I'm lost on that one.Well, you either know how to pronounce the flapped R of Spanish, Italian, Russian, Greek, Japanese and the majority of the world's languages, or you don't. You can probably do a trill, RRRRRRRR, which is the sound of the double RR in Spanish and also a single R at the beginning of a word. If you can do that, then try to let your tongue flap only once, instead of vibrating steadily.

I know there are a few odd British dialects that pronounce intervocalic R (an R by itself between two vowels) that way. In America we transcribe that colloquially as "veddy propah English" since that's the way we pronounce words like "teddy bear." We don't say the D in Teddy or the T in Betty. It's a flap like the Spanish R in caro. I saw a clip from a training class in India for call center workers, valiantly teaching them to speak American instead of British English. They spent a lot of time on that sound because if you actually pronounce the D or the T it's a dead giveaway that you're not an American so you must be talking from Bangalore.

What is RP? Is that what we call "Oxford English"?

Well, the simplest example of RP (Received Pronunciation) is Ian McKellan and all the Gondorians (or whatever you call them) in the LoTR films....I think they made quite an effort to have those characters speak in RP because it is considered a "neutral" accent.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Received_Pronunciation

I've always wondered why. "Autumn" was one of those many words you assimilated from the Norman occupiers. The Germans call it Herbst, so you'd think in English it would be Harvest.

It's believed to be a shorted form of the earlier phrase "Fall of the leaf" (which dates to at least 1545, if not earlier) or possibly "fall of the year."

(Partial Source (http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=fall))

Oh, almost forgot....a flapped "R" is still not a T, so no matter what pseudo-scientific pretty dress you swathe it in you americans still can't speak english properly.

On the subject of myself not speaking english properly - I get criticised a lot for using the glottle stop instead of pronouncing T's....I just explain that it's a contraction just like "couldn't" or "shouldn't" which is perfectly acceptable and since they hold themselves to such a high standard I will be listening to them and expect them to use the full version of those phrases or they're a big fat hypocrite, am I just as bad as the yankmericans in that sense?

@G. F.: it's not a "contraction" of anything. It's just that under those phonological conditions your dialect has converted the (unvoiced aspirated) alveolar plosive into a (voiced) glottal stop. Can you think of a word containing a t between two vowels where you pronounce the t "properly"?

South African English is non-rhotic and has all the vowels in PE, but some of them are pronounced in slightly different positions. There is a larger difference (ignoring length) between gourd and god, and dead and dad, than in PE (am I right in saying that Americans don't have the distinctions, pronouncing the 4 historical vowels in only 2 ways?).

The English vowel system is quite crazy. Reduction, length, diphthongs, triphthongs, coda voice conditioned lengthening (whatever its official name is; it's the way the vowel in sat differs from the vowel in sad), the influence of e (at least historically, cf the "silent e" which actually changes the preceding vowel), etc. It's therefore not surprising that there is so much difference in the vowel systems of different dialects, and why second language speakers (your so-called "foreigners") usually have difficulty mastering them all.

Well, the simplest example of RP (Received Pronunciation) is Ian McKellan and all the Gondorians (or whatever you call them) in the LoTR films....I think they made quite an effort to have those characters speak in RP because it is considered a "neutral" accent.According to the Wikipedia article I'm basically correct, it is an artificial system of pronunciation for showing off one's education and disguising one's origin. Even if it's similar to Midlands, it's not natural.

That chart clearly shows the differences from Standard American. The vowel paradigm looks like a foreign language to me. We do not use the same vowel in trap and marry, nor in lot and orange.
Oh, almost forgot....a flapped "R" is still not a T, so no matter what pseudo-scientific pretty dress you swathe it in you americans still can't speak english properly.Your own reference says that variant of D and T occurs in West Country dialects so it is not uniquely American. And in any case we can punctuate English properly.
On the subject of myself not speaking english properly - I get criticised a lot for using the glottle stop instead of pronouncing T's....I just explain that it's a contraction just like "couldn't" or "shouldn't" which is perfectly acceptableYour own source says that the glottal stop is not used in RP. I thought cou'n't was strictly Cockney?
Am I just as bad as the yankmericans in that sense?Nobody's variant of a language is "bad" unless it erodes the power of the language, like rap music with its two hundred word vocabulary. Nonetheless, since RP is the only variant that has the status of a standard in your kingdom, you're hardly in a position to criticize others for violating it since you do as well.

As for us Americans (I'm from California so I'm no more a Yankee than you're an Englishman), RP has never been our standard. I think the time has long passed to accept the facts that we're no longer your colony, there are five times as many of us as there are of you, and we're established as a cultural, academic, economic and political world power. We speak our own perfectly satisfactory dialect of English which is more intercomprehensible with RP than some of your own regional dialects are, and it's rapidly becoming the English most studied by foreigners. It has one clear advantage for them: It's spoken more slowly and easier to understand.

In America we regard accents as strictly regional. Except in comedy shows or on linguistics boards they are not much of a topic of discussion and have no bearing on one's standing. An anglophone with an RP, Yorkshire, Cockney, Scots, Irish, Welsh, Aussie, South African, Hong Kong, or Bangalore accent is as welcome as a Texan, Bostonian or Torontonian to walk into a bar in Washington and drink with us, and it might be two weeks before anyone bothers to remark on differences in pronunciation.

That's something nice that you Brits could stand to learn from us.

Your own source says that the glottal stop is not used in RP

I don't speak in RP. I have an accent. Nowhere did I mention the word "cou'n't"...."couldn't" is a contraction of could not, but I imagine you knew that.


And in any case we can punctuate English properly.

You also just started a sentence with a conjunction, genius.


As for us Americans (I'm from California so I'm no more a Yankee than you're an Englishman),

You're all the same to me until your fellow yankmericans can distinguish the countries that make up the UK, so sorry if it offends you, but tough titty.


RP has never been our standard. I think the time has long passed to accept the facts that we're no longer your colony

....then get your own language and stop ruining ours.



, there are five times as many of us as there are of you,

....and whereas we forged an empire upon which the sun never set with 1/5th of your population, you can't even handle Iraq. Brag and posture all you like when you have 5 British Empires under your belt (should be easy with modern technology, right?) and a currency that isn't technically worthless.

Fraggle, I respect you and everything, but I can get pretty vicious on this subject we've strayed onto and I'd rather not, so back to the original subject maybe?

In Thailand, lots of tourists visit the bridge over the River Kwai and the cemetery there. The Thai language is tonal and how you pronounce a word decides it's meaning. The way Australians pronounce the word Kwai, it doesn't mean "buffalo" as it is meant to mean but instead comes out to the Thais as "penis".

Hey, in Sesotho kwae (tone LH) means snuff/cigarette or, colloquially, penis.

Hangul, the language of Korea, is never spoken with an accent.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul

I speak with an accent...the right one.