The Accent Thread

[Dex]

A chat with Ulpian in the Rumours forum inspired this. Hopefully it won't die a quick death because I'm genuinely interested.

Accents! People love them. People hate them. People fetishize them. Everyone has one, no matter what they might insist to the contrary. And in many cases they are really tied up with a persons identity. Let's talk about them.

What accent do you have? What accents do you love? Do you think people make assumptions about you based on your accent? Go!

I'm from a rather linguistically boring part of the world (Western Canada) where everyone sounds pretty much the same for a good 1000 miles around, so I never developed much of an "ear" for accents. I've been very guilty of using those hated phrases "British accent" and "Southern (American) accent" in the past, as if I'm speaking about very specific things and not a wide and diverse accent group, as is the reality. I like to think I'm learning quickly, though.

The better half has a West Country farmer-ish English accent (think Hagrid, Harry Potter fans) that has (perhaps regrettably) been somewhat neutralised by his self-consciousness about it while living in the Southeast, and also, perhaps, by living with me. But it's so much fun when we head back to his home country and it all comes back to him. He really pronounces the ever-loving-s*** out of those r's. Perhaps its primitive of me, but to me he really does come off as somehow a different person when his accent adjusts like that (no less loveable, though). I'd like to say I don't pay attention to people's accents in that way, but I think I really do when I'm honest with myself. I guess I'm lucky to have an accent that doesn't seem to have been culturally stereotyped in any particular way as far as I can tell, but I could be wrong and it's just that nobody's told me.