CringeFest 7: I don't have an accent

Travis   Mon Sep 01, 2008 5:07 am GMT
>>[Well, Katie Holmes is from Toledo, and she uses her NCVShifted accent when she acts, obviously Hollywood accent coaches don't find NCVS worth ''correcting''. One more thing, wouldn't be easier to hire an actress/actor from this area for GreatLakes based stories? Meg Ryan needed to put on a Detroit accent for ''Against the Ropes''? Katie Holmes or Kathy Griffin could have been a better choice.]

Apropos the first point, that does generally seem to be the truth--I don't know why. I have noticed more recently, however, that the dialect difference is beginning to be written into story lines. For example, when Dennis Farina joined Law & Order, he was introduced as being a detective from Chicago. Speaking in his natural Chicago dialect, this was a completely believable plot device.<<

One thing here is that to most Americans today, NCVS-affected dialects are, overall, considered strong accented but are *not* truly deprecated (aside from the commonplace reference to their being "nasal") in the way that Southern dialects often are.
Guest   Mon Sep 01, 2008 7:00 am GMT
-People here don't even want to go metric.-
Unless they wanna be doctors or scientists.
Damian in Edinburgh   Mon Sep 01, 2008 8:26 am GMT
We have been using Celsius temperature readings here in the UK now for very many years.......Fahrenheit now looks like something out of the Ark. Only the old people now think in degrees F. Among the very many publications I have to read - for instance the official productions of the Royal Meteorological Society, all measurements of any kind are entirely metric.

If they refer to the distance between the cities of Edinburgh and Glasgow they will tell you that is is 71km.

Unfortunately (for now) the mileage signposts on the M8 motorway tell you that it's 44 miles. The filling stations on the motorway tell you that you have to pay £1.14 for a litre of fuel and in the foodstores on the service station you have to pay £1.09 for 250g of unsalted butter. That Edinburgh recorded a maximum temperature of 21.6C yesterday but poor old Glasgow only saw 20.7C. It was dry in Edinburgh but poor old Glasgow saw 12.9mm of rain fall in a one hour thunderstorm.

The guy at the till in the service station will probably boast that he is six feet two inches tall but his doctor will record it as 188cm or 1,88m, and so will the bloke down the gym.

As imperial measures are now officially defunct in the UK it's high time they were all put on the back burner as being part of history now, as no kid in any British school is taught in old fashioned, commercially useless measuring systems any more. That was certainly the case with me. That's why many British companies now find that dealing with their American counterparts is a wee bit of a problem from this point of view....conflicting systems of measurements.

We tend to think of the British as being conservative but I think the Americans beat us hands down on that score, but if they are happy with all that then who are we to pass comment! They seem to be getting along just fine nonetheless!

Britain is under far more pressure to be 100% metricated than is the United States anyway for obvious reasons. We belong to a 100% metric club, they don't. We belong to a linguistically diverse club - they don't.
An American   Tue Sep 02, 2008 4:48 am GMT
Well, I think it depends on the unit. As an American, here is the extent of my knowledge of measurement systems that I learned in elementary school: This covers both the metric system and the standard system. I learned and could easily deal with inches, feet, yards, and miles. Centimeters and meters were perfectly easy as well. Centimeters were found on our rules on the other side of the inches. There were 30 cm on a ruler. Yard and meter sticks are almost the same size and when visually estimating distances without using rulers yields exactly the same result. Miles and kilometers are of course to big to measure with the eye. They are both "big" units. I didn't know how to convert between miles and kilometers. I knew there were 2.54 centimeters in an inch. I also knew how to convert between mm, cm, decimeters, meters, dekameters, and kilometers. I knew that there were 2000 pounds in a ton, and 1000 kg in the metric version. I knew my weight in pounds, but not kilograms or stones. We bought milk in gallon jugs (or small quart sized containers), pop in 2 liter bottles, (or small 1 liter bottles). Gasoline was purchased by the gallon. As for temperature, my knowledge of what Fahrenheit temps felt like was much better than that of Celsius. Here are my benchmarks for estimating temperature. If it's comfortable outside it's about 60 degrees. Room temperature is in the 70s. The typical summertime (high) temperature is about 75. If it's in the summer and it's raining then it's about 65 degrees. If it's in the morning and it's summer then it's probably about 55-60 degrees. 80 degrees is rather hot. 90 degrees is extremely hot. 212 degrees is when water boils. At midnight in the winter, it's in the 30s. During the day it's around 40-50. If it's bitterly cold out it's probably in the 20s or 30s. If it's snowing it's around 32. So, as you can see I could easily guess the temperature outside in Fahrenheit. Now, celsius is a different matter. I only knew 4 things about celsius. One is that at -40 degrees, Fahrenheit and celsius are the same. Water freezes at 0 and boils at 100. So 0 degrees C is bitterly cold, and 30 degrees is very hot. Also, I knew how to convert celsius to kelvin, but not how to convert either to fahrenheit. (273.15) Not that that is especially useful to know (in elementary school). So, anyway I could use Fahrenheit with great ease, but not celsius. I understood and could visualize measuring cups as well. I can clearly see how much water is in say, 1/3 of a cup. I had no real understanding of mL, or pints, or fractions of an inch. I actually preferred measurements in mm than in fractions of an inch. My pencil graphite (for mechanical pencils) was measured in mm. 0.7mm for the big kind, 0.5mm for the smaller kind. I knew that there were 1000mL in a liter, but found that almost impossible to visualize. Grams were rather baffling to me. Kg were also rather hard to comprehend (although I knew that one of my teacher weighed 66 kg--we always liked to know our teacher's age and weight, although they never seemed to liketo volunteer either.) I didn't know my own weight in kg though.

So, anyway thats about what I knew in the 4th and 5th grade. Now of course I've learned more about both systems, but not significantly more. Most of the time the metric system is used is in science classes, but usually the temperatures or distances involved it doesn't really matter which system is used. I can no more visualize 100 billion kilometers than a 100 billion miles.
Jasper   Tue Sep 02, 2008 5:49 am GMT
[We bought milk in gallon jugs (or small quart sized containers), pop in 2 liter bottles, (or small 1 liter bottles)]

Pop?

You must be from the Midwest.
Guest   Tue Sep 02, 2008 5:55 am GMT
<<<Newscasters Newfoundland English is the least accented Canadian network English accent. It's similar to conservative Californian accent, the low back merged vowel is still LOW (and not raised) and still unrounded (even in words like DOLL, DOLLAR)...>>>


I'm sorry, you lost me at "...Newfoundland English is the least accented..."
I don't know what it means to have the least accented accent in Canada. Every region has it's accent that may seem strong to someone else.
Guest   Tue Sep 02, 2008 6:58 am GMT
Well, a Newfoundland newscaster would sound fine to listeners in Chicago, NYC or LA, that's what I meant.
An American   Tue Sep 02, 2008 2:49 pm GMT
>> [We bought milk in gallon jugs (or small quart sized containers), pop in 2 liter bottles, (or small 1 liter bottles)]

Pop?

You must be from the Midwest. <<


The Northwest actually.
Travis   Tue Sep 02, 2008 3:31 pm GMT
>>>> [We bought milk in gallon jugs (or small quart sized containers), pop in 2 liter bottles, (or small 1 liter bottles)]

Pop?

You must be from the Midwest. <<


The Northwest actually.<<

It should be remembered that the use of the word "pop" extends all the way from the Midwest to the northern parts of the west coast of the US, with the exclusion of the regionally delimited use of "soda" in eastern Wisconsin and the St. Louis area.
Guest   Tue Sep 02, 2008 3:59 pm GMT
>> I'm sorry, you lost me at "...Newfoundland English is the least accented..."
I don't know what it means to have the least accented accent in Canada. Every region has it's accent that may seem strong to someone else. <<

Closest to the accent known as General American, a vaguely defined conservative Midwestern accent, that people that are trying to lose their regional North American accent tend to strive for in tv and radio. The closest dialects to General American spoken today are those in the Western and Midlands US and Western and Central Canada (according to Labov's ANAE). Newfoundland English itself is not very close to General American, however newscasters from that area use an accent that is close to General American--and thus sound less accent to people from all around North America. If that is true, the reason could be that they undergo more accent reduction than people from say, Chicago, or Toronto, or Seattle who don't think that they have a strong regional accent, and thus undergo little or no accent neutralization.
Guest   Tue Sep 02, 2008 4:03 pm GMT
I don't think that General American would be perceived as the least accented accent all over though. For example, if two people went to say, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, one that was trained to speak conservative General American, and one who was from Seattle, I think that the speaker with the Seattle accent would seem less accented than the speaker of conservative General American to the people there.
Travis   Tue Sep 02, 2008 5:11 pm GMT
>>Closest to the accent known as General American, a vaguely defined conservative Midwestern accent, that people that are trying to lose their regional North American accent tend to strive for in tv and radio. The closest dialects to General American spoken today are those in the Western and Midlands US and Western and Central Canada (according to Labov's ANAE). Newfoundland English itself is not very close to General American, however newscasters from that area use an accent that is close to General American--and thus sound less accent to people from all around North America. If that is true, the reason could be that they undergo more accent reduction than people from say, Chicago, or Toronto, or Seattle who don't think that they have a strong regional accent, and thus undergo little or no accent neutralization.<<

At least here in Milwaukee, there is a drastic difference between how newscasters and like for even local stations and how the general population speak, with newscasters normally speaking in something quite close to conservative General American (where even middle-aged and older middle class here generally have non-negligible non-GA features in their speech even when they overall speak something quite close to GA). It is particularly noticable when one hears newscasters in juxtaposition with local commercials, when very often are not in GA at all but rather are in the dialect here (to the point that I myself can very easily tell local commercials apart from national ones just by hearing the person speak).

Younger local radio personalities, on the other hand, generally do not speak GA but at the same time generally do not speak as, well, "broadly" as people that one may hear in some local commercials. Rather, their speech seems to be pretty typical of more careful speech by many middle class younger people here, which while being more GA-like than the less careful everyday speech by many individuals like myself is still clearly a relatively high register of the dialect here and not a transplanted, artificially imposed national standard. For instance, the local radio talk show personalities Cramp and Adler usually pronounce Adler's (last) name as [ˈɛ̯æɰˡːʁ̩ː] or [ˈɛ̞ːɰˡːʁ̩ː] rather than the GA pronunciation of [ˈæ(ː)dɫɚ(ː)] or [ˈæ(ː)ɾɫɚ(ː)]. In this way younger local radio personalities here normally sound distinctly different from middle-aged and older local radio personalities, who often speak in a more clearly GA-like fashion.

Hence it seems that the perception of GA as being truly standard, proper, correct, and whatnot for people here has died off amongst younger people and has been replaced even in media by a more local prestige variety. I myself have always perceived GA, even before I truly knew what it was, as something in a way foreign to here, as something either brought in by media from other parts of the US or spoken rather artificially in more conservative forms by TV personalities and middle-aged and older radio personalities from here (which generally sound quite different than even more GA-like speech by middle-aged or older middle class people of the same general age from here). The more conservative media-type GA to me feels very artificial, cold, and distant, and just does not seem like anything that anyone in Real Life from here would actually speak regardless of social context, especially anyone under the age of 35 here. Likewise, I tend to perceive the more local prestige variety often spoken by younger local radio personalities as sounding far more familiar, far less artificial, and much more like something I would actually hear someone younger from here speak in Real Life.

>>I don't think that General American would be perceived as the least accented accent all over though. For example, if two people went to say, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, one that was trained to speak conservative General American, and one who was from Seattle, I think that the speaker with the Seattle accent would seem less accented than the speaker of conservative General American to the people there.<<

I would definitely agree. While there are a few features of such that would sound generally accented, such as the use of /in/ for "-ing", for the most part most modern northern US dialects, aside from probably the more extreme dialects of the far north of the Upper Midwest and the dialects just along the East Coast, would definitely sound less accented to me than conservative GA, which as mentioned before tends to come off as either being quite artificial or, when not, as sounding more like people from the rural Lower Midwest (who definitely sound quite accented to me even when they speak very close to GA).
Guest   Tue Sep 02, 2008 5:26 pm GMT
-If that is true, the reason could be that they undergo more accent reduction than people from say, Chicago, or Toronto, or Seattle who don't think that they have a strong regional accent, and thus undergo little or no accent neutralization.-

Well, in Atlantic Canada, the merged vowel is like in Western US: central-to-back low unrounded /A/.

In the rest of Canada, the merged vowel is frequently back raised rounded /Q/, unlike in Western US, and like in Pittsburgh...

Atlantic Canadians rarely pronounce DOLLAR as dQl@r. It's dAl@r like in General American. Even CALLER is kAl@r, as in traditional Californian dialect.
Jasper   Tue Sep 02, 2008 7:15 pm GMT
[It should be remembered that the use of the word "pop" extends all the way from the Midwest to the northern parts of the west coast of the US, with the exclusion of the regionally delimited use of "soda" in eastern Wisconsin and the St. Louis area.]

Travis, you are quite right! There's a map of soda/pop/Coke dialect usage on the Internet that breaks it down by county. It appears that "pop" is more widely used than "soda", overall, although I personally have heard it only among Midwesterners. To wit:

http://popvssoda.com:2998/countystats/total-county.html
Travis   Tue Sep 02, 2008 9:16 pm GMT
>>Travis, you are quite right! There's a map of soda/pop/Coke dialect usage on the Internet that breaks it down by county. It appears that "pop" is more widely used than "soda", overall, although I personally have heard it only among Midwesterners. To wit:

http://popvssoda.com:2998/countystats/total-county.html<<

The main thing, though, is that "soda" has been standardized upon in more prestige varieties spoken in English-speaking North America, even though most GA-like dialects in reality would use "pop" rather than "soda".