The sounds of American English
Correction to the pig's ear I made of the last part of my post:
".....by all accounts that seems to be the experience of a good many British visitors to the USA, especially in those areas not really used to seeing that many international tourists in any appreciable numbers, certainly not on a level with those seen in most parts of Europe generally".
Damian, that's true. I, for one, can only distinguish the broadest differences in UK English. This is probably because we have minimal exposure to them.
Some of the dialects, however, are completely unintelligible to us, particularly the varieties that strongly feature the glottal stop. For example, that daffy dame on Absolutely Fabulous--the blond one who works in the office-- completely eludes understanding on the part of American listeners. (I for one don't understand a single word of what she says.) I'm told she's from Lancashire...
>>> Then, of course, there were also the wordings that were obviously direct translations from Spanish grammar -- you "get down from" a car rather than getting out of it, and you go to the gas station to "put gas" rather than fill up (and "put gas" is never followed by the usual "in the tank" -- it just stands alone, like "poner gasolina" would).
And here's another one-- "barely" as in "I barely got here" or "I barely had lunch", which in Chicano English means "I just recently arrived" and "I just now had lunch". This ungrammatical use of "barely" is a direct translation of "apenas", which has two meanings in Spanish: 1. something that almost didn't happen; 2. something that happened recently.
<<For example, that daffy dame on Absolutely Fabulous--the blond one who works in the office-- completely eludes understanding on the part of American listeners. (I for one don't understand a single word of what she says.) I'm told she's from Lancashire...>>
Do you mean Bubble, or the one who works in Patsy's office? At first Bubble was hard for me to make out, but I got accustomed to her accent so I was able to understand her after a few listens. The one who I could never make out was Magda (Kathy Burke's character).
Guest, I'm not sure--it's been quite a while since I've seen an episode.
The one to whom I'm referring works in the office, however. She has blond hair that she often wears on the top of her head, looking like a rooster.
In any case, I cannot understand one single word of her dialogue.
>> mind - I doubt very much indeed that the average local citizen on the streets of St Louis or Omaha or Chicago or wherever would be able to pinpoint ANY British accent <<
That's true. The reason is that the only thing that we really notice that is different about British English is the lack of the final -r. Other than that, to the average North American, it sounds just like American English, with some odd word or expression thrown in very occasionally. Since many of us use the same vowel in words such as bother-father-cot and caught, the distinctions made in British English are lost on us, and we don't really hear a difference in how we say it vs. how they say it. The only possible exception is the "caught" type words, which sound overly rounded. The other thing that we notice is the fact that the sound that sounds like the "a" in "cat" often sounds like the "ah" in "father". Thus can't sounds like "cahnt". (When we try faking a British accent, we often change all our "a" sounds to "ah"--thus cat->caht, mat->maht etc.)
The only other thing we notice is how the accent seems. Basically there are only 2 options: we can't really distinguish regional accents of England, Australia, and New Zealand. It either sounds one of two ways to us: upper-class, old, stuffy, and dignified (yet we love to hear them); or it sounds sort of comical and friendly like the Beatles. The typical middle class accents tend to come off to us sounding the same as the upper class ones. The lower class accents tend to be *slightly* hard to understand, whereas the upper class ones sound as clear and distinct to us as General American minus the -r's.
>> This has changed amongst younger people, as many middle class younger people have switched to speaking something that is essentially a compromise between the two in that it is phonologically very much like the traditional working class dialect here (and in some ways actually more progressive than it) but is syntactically and morphologically more like what their parents speak (particularly in that it lacks many more deprecated English syntactic and morphological features). What I myself speak at home is essentially an extreme form of such, in that it phonologically extremely progressive and un-GA-like, and very much akin to the traditional working class dialect here, and yet syntactically and morphologically it has only relatively limited differences from standard spoken NAE, mostly with regards to preposition and adverbial usage and some variation in preterite and past participle forms.<<
It's amazing how many sociological factors there are in Milwaukee that affect phonology. In Seattle, the overall pronunciation of English doesn't differ all that much when it comes to things like age, gender, and class, from what I can tell. I think that the dialect here is very conservative compared to nearby Canada and California in the way that everyone speaks. Other than some people having a retracted /{/ (and this actually affects males more than females), and using a rounded c-c vowel, I've heard very little traces of the CVS here. I can usually pick out a Canadian or California accent when I hear the CVS--especially when /I/ is shifted to [E]. Even teenage girls don't tend to have much of the CVS--phonologically they tend to be very conservative, compared to Canadians and Californians. In fact whenever I do hear a strong CVS, I always ask where the speaker is from. So far, they have always turned out to be originally from Canada or Oregon or California, never from here. People here just tend to sound the same. People that speak AAVE sound a little different, but there are very few of them, and every one of them that I've met said that they were originally from the South.
The biggest thing here is that it seems that amongst white people, the variation in prestige with respect to syntax and morphology has been retained, but with less prestigious forms being progressively lower in status over time, while the variation in prestige with respect to phonology in everyday life has lost, with forms which only a generation ago had been the norm amongst middle class people now being restricted to specifically higher registers even amongst their children. Amongst white people here, I can easily pick out someone social position if they are around my parents' age by listening to their pronunciation, but amongst younger people I can only do so by listening for certain syntactic and morphological shibboleths, and even then most people who are not specifically lower class largely lack them today even if such would have been widespread amongst working class people here a generation ago.
<<And here's another one-- "barely" as in "I barely got here" or "I barely had lunch", which in Chicano English means "I just recently arrived" and "I just now had lunch". This ungrammatical use of "barely" is a direct translation of "apenas", which has two meanings in Spanish: 1. something that almost didn't happen; 2. something that happened recently. >>
I don't know; that seems to me to jibe pretty well with the same usages of barely in English, as in "I barely made it" and "We just barely got here."
I've never heard the substitution of "al" for "el" in New Mexico, but I occasionally hear "sh" substituted for "ch" and vice versa (you might eat fried "shicken" and do your clothes in the "watching macheen") , as well as final Z-sounds being turned into S's -- surprise becomes "surprice".
O's at the ends of words get truncated instead of drawn out into the usual slight diphthong, too.
"" From my experience, American men, especially young ones, mumble a lot, slurring their words in a seemingly dull monotone. ''
Thats the reason that it's more fun even for Americans to listen to men with a British accent giving a speech, than American ones, because American men tend not to vary their pitch very much, making a speech that could be quite fascinating, sound quite boring.
British men sound either gay (RP), redneckish (Cockney/Estuary) or difficult to understand (Scouse/Geordie)
You say that like it's a bad thing
<<British men sound either gay (RP), redneckish (Cockney/Estuary) or difficult to understand (Scouse/Geordie)>>
Where would you place the Scottish and Welsh accents?