Your Accent!

The University of Kansas has a great accent archive.

http://www.ukans.edu/~idea/index2.html

Boston accents:

http://home.earthlink.net/~lnkn/accent.htm

Thank you, Julian, for the second link.

The last time I checked UKan's IDEA, there was no recording of a Boston accent. I am a frequenter of the Scotland page of the IDEA site, given my inexplicable appreciation of Scottish accents and dialects.

Great website mjd. :-)

some more links
http://www.michigannative.com/michiganaccent.shtml
http://www.slanguage.com

Random:

I could give you a further insight into Scottish accents and dialects if you wish without using web links. I am scared of boring people though.

btw: I believe that there is a strain of Scottish in the accents of local people in Nova Scotia. Is that true? Well, the name itself suggests that may be the case. What about other provinces in eastern Canada?

Speaking of different accents - it is a very difficult thing to learn it without a special person or a good guide with examples of sounds.

Once I tried to get an accent of a rather famous American singer - Croce (West-South) and listened hundreds times to his songs but could not decipher some places. Now his songs are available on Internet, but I still don't hear some parts.

I think this is because some sounds almost disappier, another are in between and so on.

take a look once more at
http://www.antimoon.com/temp/ashley.wav

"The Little Hangletons all agreed that the old house was 'creepy.' Half a century ago, something strange and horrible had happened there, something that the older inhabitants of the village still like to discuss when topics for gossip were scarce."

To my Russian ear some words look like another standart words:

The->to
all agreed->are created
ago->goes
older->odour
inhabitants->inhabitated
for->of

But listening and reading many times leads to tuning of the ear.
What do you think?

In my humble opinion, the wav file above is a good example of the inability of certain (or actually, many) young native speakers of English to read fluently. Children all over the UK and the US are prone to trip and stumble over very simple texts.

Fortunately, the University of Kansas rounded up a group of fluent native speakers of English (mostly university students or professionals) for its recordings of American, English, and Scottish accents.

Damian, I would be delighted to receive further insight on how the people of Edinburgh (Edinburghers???) usually talk. I don't think I really need to learn the entire dialect of your region, but only the elements of it that are incorporated into everyday speech. Thank you very much!

Random:

Richt...I'll see what I can do, freen! I hae tae go oot noo....bit o' Sawbath nicht dafferie an a wee dram mebbe. See ye the morn.
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Ok...I'll see what I can do, friend. I have to go out now...a bit of Sunday night fun and a little drink maybe. See you tomorrow.
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Thank you very much for the first "lesson", Damian. One question: Is that the way you usually talk to your friends and family?

Back to the Spanish pronunciation of English initial S's:

Initial S is not precisely the context in which the tendency is to prefix with an E, as in "espanish", "eschool", etc.

Initial S followed by a vowel presents no problem for the Spanish speaker; it is initial S followed by a consonant that causes the distress.

Well, the word "standard" exists in French, "sporsare" in Italian, and "stadt" in German so tough luck on the Spanish speaker.

Random:

Quite frankly....no, not at all really ......just a watered down version. I just used that to give you an idea of the real Lallans (that's the casual term for Lowland Scots). To be honest, not many people talk like entirely....just odd words here and there when talking with friends and family. We just talk English in our Edinburgh accent of course, but using local words for various things as people would from whatever area or region you come from.

I will give you more of an insight into Scots accents and dialects later but I have to go to work shortly. As elsewhere in the UK there has been a general standardisation of language and dialect for several reasons, although local accents remain. As I have said, "Estuary" has crept in to speech even here to a certain degree. Bad inni'?

Random:

I love any form of humour....seeing the funny side of life ....it's a British way of coping with things even if they are awful and tragic. I read a book on the humorous side of WW2 and how Britons coped with the blitz and bombing raids then. Your name Random reminded me of one extract.

During the blitz on Britain by the Germans security was paramount for obvious reasons, and any town or city bombed was not named in news bulletins by the BBC as the Germans would pick it up and use it for propaganda. For instance if Liverpool was raided, it was just referred to as a "seaport in NW England".

One night the BBC reported that "Bombs were dropped at random in Southern England during the night". The Germans picked this up, and later announced on their radio: "Random in Southern England was bombed during the night."

You can imagine puzzled Germans looking for mythical Random on the map of Southern England.