Your Accent!

So silly! Surely someone should swiftly start sorting stupidly strange semantics.

For me:

"caught" and "cot" are distinctly different.

"dawn" and "don" are different

Marry/merry/Mary - all identical.

I used to pronounce "route" and "root" identically, but after people here literally laughed at me, I changed to their pronunciation.

I'm in the U.S. Pacific Northwest, but was born in California. My family on both sides is foreign, so perhaps that accounts for my original route/root pronunciation; I can't remember how others pronounced it in southern California.

I have travelled around a fair bit, which somehow resulted in a sort of RP accent, I suppose just a lack of any regina accent. I've been back in manchester for a while now, and, depending on whom I am speaking to, I range from a ridiculously broad central Manchester accent to a sort of faint RP (my phone voice, I can't help it).

There's a vowel before every single "s" in Spanish?

NOT so in Italian!
- Sposare (to marry)
- Sospirare (to sigh)
- Sforzando (in music, a sudden accent)
NOT so in French!
- Saigner (to bleed)
- Une soirée (an evening)
- Un salaud (a bastard)

So, in this case, Spanish is the exception, not the norm.

I, myself, have never had any trouble pronouncing any foreign consonants or vowels. All on the first try, I pronounced the French "u" (as in "rue"), the German "ch" (as in "nacht"), and the Russian word "zdrastvuyte" (ZDRAST-vwee-tyeh) complete with rolling "r" and all other consonants.

As for the accent with which I speak English, it has tinges of the following...
1. Estuary English
2. Mysteriously and unintentionally, Cockney (don't know why I tend to drop t's and/or replace them with glottal stops; I wasn't even aware of it until I heard a recording of a presentation I gave.)
3. Scottish (insane but natural urge to roll r's and pronounce the vowel in "goat" the way the Scots do)
4. Californian (I haven't caught any specific traits of the Californian accent in my speech but after living here for three years, I must have picked some up)
5. French, German, and Russian accents, sometimes for fun, sometimes unintentionally.

Dearest Random Chappie,

You are simply divine!

Toujours,
Addison DeWitt

Uh?

Mon cher Monsieur DeWitt, je crains que je ne vous comprenne pas.

Tonjours,
Random Chappie

I'm told that, when I'm not at home, I speak with a Japanese-influenced Bostonian accent (due to working and living with Japanese throughout my university life in Boston, much to the amusement of most of my professors). If I'm around family, it's some combination of a Louisiana river accent and a New Orleans accent (/r/ rolling, primary stress, intervocalic voicing of consonants, strong nasalization before nasals only, dropping of some unstressed schwas, etc.), though I was told by my family that I still sound "too New Englandy" when I came home in May. (I personally think that I enunciate clearer than most New Englanders and definitely don't have as high of an "a", but who am I to argue?)

If I'm speaking with someone who has a particularily interesting accent, I often unconsciously start picking it up (especially when French cousins come to visit or when my favorite Russian baker is working the same shift). Most of the times I'd just rather listen, though, and try to pick out all of the features of the speaker's accent.

Route= root (most of the time) in Northern California. It's also the first pronunciation provided in my American English dictionary. So "raut" must be a regional pronunciation of the Pacific Northwest.

And back to the Spaniards' difficulty in pronouncing the English "s"...if you try, you can do anything that at least a billion others can do.

Vive la Russie! Vive l'Espagne!

Around here route is also pronounced as root. My Spanish teacher last year was from Argentina and she could never pronounce the letter "s" when it started a word... "eschool," "estars," ect. I like that accent though, don't know why :)

I have a question for those who are more familiar with the various British accents. In the movie Master and Commander what accents do the various characters speak with? I'm able to detect differences between many of them but don't know what those accents are. Thanks!

Could you identify my accent?
http://www.webcenter.ru/~garans/waltz.mp3

No, not really. It might be easier if you were reading something or speaking rather than singing. Besides, people's accents tend to change when they sing. Good song though :)

That gave me a good idea. We should make recordings of our accents. I'll be happy to host the files for those without webspace. Tell me what you all think and I'll set something up.

Steve, good idea.

Steve,

I am Russian (Moscow).
I think that a little singing while speaking may make our accents less noticable.

I think I have the typical American Accent, with a slight Southern influence since I live in central Florida.

Random Chappie

"""Uh?

Mon cher Monsieur DeWitt, je crains que je ne vous comprenne pas.

Tonjours,
Random Chappie""""

If you pretend speaking french, you need to work more...