Try to copy my accent

br   Thu Feb 26, 2009 3:14 pm GMT
Anyway, I didn't think that the North central or Northwest were known for their CVS.
a   Fri Feb 27, 2009 3:50 am GMT
Hey, I bet Travis or Lazar would be able to completely speak like this person, because they know a *lot* of stuff about language, and plus they already speak a very similar accent to this one.
Travis   Fri Feb 27, 2009 4:07 am GMT
Do not count on that, actually - I myself find it hard to accurately emulate many other English dialects just because certain parts of the phonology of my own dialect are so heavily ingrained. Hell, I cannot accurately speak General American for an extended period of time due such requiring consciously overriding my internalized phonology, which takes a lot of effort for me in practice.
a   Fri Feb 27, 2009 4:24 am GMT
You should try it anyway. I bet you could do a better job than most people--besides people from the North Central of course.
Jasper   Fri Feb 27, 2009 8:30 am GMT
A:

I wouldn't necessarily count on that. Convincingly emulating a regional accent requires a certain talent for mimicry, as well as a certain level of knowledge of the target dialect. Good actors can do it to some extent, but those of us without that certain talent come across ridiculous without extensive training.

It's not as easy as it sounds.
Travis   Fri Feb 27, 2009 9:31 am GMT
The hard part for me at least is not being able to produce particular sounds or even speak entire words in an exact fashion on demand - I probably am better than the average English-speaker at that, precisely due to being aware of the phonology of English and of how to pronounce specific sounds (as written down in, say, IPA). The hard part is actually being able to speak in an extended fashion where one is not merely copying sounds that are already written down in IPA, and even if they are, that does not guarantee that one will get the prosody and intonation right one bit. To me at least that is near impossible, honestly, as the only English varieties whose prosody and intonation I am familiar with at all are my own dialect and the local variation upon General American (the counterparts of such in Chicago are close to what I am familiar with, but I still would not be able to accurately pronounce them specifically if asked).
Regina   Sat Feb 28, 2009 4:34 am GMT
I know some people who sound just like you.
I don't, but some of my friends do.
@r   Sat Feb 28, 2009 5:24 am GMT
@Regina,

And where are they from?
br   Sun Mar 01, 2009 3:25 pm GMT
@Travis,

Is the prosody and intonation that important in distinguishing dialects? Does your dialect differ all that much from the North Central/Northwestern dialect?
br   Sun Mar 01, 2009 3:58 pm GMT
with respect to the prosody and intonation?
pat   Tue Mar 03, 2009 3:07 am GMT
Lol. This is a fun thread. After 69 posts, nobody has actually attempted to copy the accent. And the accent sounds like a plain old American accent--rather unaccented in my opinion. Everyone must be "chicken" that they can't get it 100% perfect. I'd definitely try it if I had a microphone. It sounds like a newscaster style accent. I wonder how long it'll be before someone tries it.
Travis   Tue Mar 03, 2009 3:40 am GMT
>>@Travis,

Is the prosody and intonation that important in distinguishing dialects?<<

No, but it is necessary to reproduce them reliably.

>>Does your dialect differ all that much from the North Central/Northwestern dialect?<<

Actually, yes. My dialect is an Inland North dialect and, especially in more progressive forms, shares very many innovations with Inland North dialects extending far to the east from here (and not just the NCVS either). It almost certainly has more in common with the Chicago dialect than North Central dialects, which are generally far more conservative than it.

However, it does have a number of features that it clearly shares with North Central dialects, such as a strong tendency towards monophthongal tense vowels and the use of /ja/ for "yeah", but this is more due to the substratum features found throughout the Upper Midwest and especially Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, and the Upper Peninsula. Likewise, it does have other Upper Midwestern-ism that it shares with the North Central dialects, even though I would not say that such make it that much closer to them.
pat   Tue Mar 03, 2009 4:05 am GMT
Is it true that the North Central US dialect is the closest US dialect to the Canadian dialect?
Uriel   Tue Mar 03, 2009 5:41 am GMT
<<After 69 posts, nobody has actually attempted to copy the accent.>>

Dude, not everybody has a built in microphone.
Travis   Tue Mar 03, 2009 4:24 pm GMT
One should remember that getting good spoken sound quality in a recording without a real audio production environment (studio or not) or at least a really good amplified microphone and off-board sound card is *hard*. And if you believe otherwise, that is because you clearly have not done so.

When I have recorded anything, it generally takes a lot of takes and subsequent massaging of recorded sounds so they sound good. And mind you that I am using a cheap unamplified consumer desktop mic plugged into my on-board sound hardware and that the software I have access to are merely the likes of Audacity.

All the takes are because the unamplified microphone I am using has a hard time consistently picking up sound of a high enough quality to permit its being released, as often what it records is too loud or too quiet in parts. Unfortunately, beyond a limited degree of being too loud or too quiet, such variations in volume cannot be corrected, due to noise being amplified to undesirable volumes along with the desired sound, to the point that such cannot be removed with Audacity without severe artifacting.

Of course, such noise is largely due to my cheap on-board sound hardware introducing extra noise upon sound input, most likely due to interference (it also introduces noise upon sound output as well). Unfortunately, Audacity just is not good enough in its capabilities to reliably clean up such noise, as even when things are cleaned up well enough overall there is clear artifacting from the noise reduction, especially if amplification has also been carried out.

Due to all this I often find myself recording anything longer than the shortest speech sample as multiple parts and then separately correcting them and piecing them together with Audacity, as then I do not have to rely upon getting an entire recording perfect on one go. Even still, this adds a degree of overall clumsiness to the whole matter, along with the need to actually be uniform in how one speaks across multiple parts.