Peculiarities/anomalies in your accent

While my Aussie accent is 98% the same as 'general Australian' there are a few peculiarities, words and phrases I notice I say a bit differently than most...

Sometimes I don't pronounce the 't' and replace it with a glottal stop in words like 'important' - much like 'Estuary' English.

A tendency to not pronounce the 'i' in words like 'finish' or 'expensive' - fi-n'sh, or expens've. More Kiwi or Irish or Scottish than English.

Certain words like 'plant' I say it both ways: the 'flat' and 'broad' way, grahnt and graent. While 'graph' is always the flat way and 'grant' always like 'grahnt.'

<<Sometimes I don't pronounce the 't' and replace it with a glottal stop in words like 'important' - much like 'Estuary' English.>>

I think pronouncing /t/ as a glottal stop, when it's followed by a syllabic consonant, is typical throughout British and American English, and not characteristic of Estuary in particular.

You hear variations on the T's even in American. I've heart both import'ant and impordant. (Which sounds a little weird to me, but okay....). Just as you will also hear interesting said both as intresting and inneresting, depending on how individualy speakers choose to break up the syllables. I use a glottal stop in button, kitten, and eaten, but I have heard other Americans clearly say the T's.

I have plenty of anomalies in mine, as well, I'm from Gaysachusetts.

My dialect is close to what many think of as 'standard' (specifically, Californians saying they don't believe I'm from Texas because I "don't have an accent"). Some things I say/do that typically aren't considered features of SAE:

The big thing is I say "ya'll" and "all ya'll."

Where one would say /u/ in SAE, I say something like a /}/.

Especially in syllables beginning with the letter "r" I pronounce it more retroflex, which I think is a feature of Southern American English (my California friends pointed this out to me when I said a friend of mine got in a traffic 'wreck' instead of an 'accident').

I only have a /O/ before /r/.

That's all I can think of. My idiolect is not exciting.

My dialect, on the other hand, is apparently utterly bizarre for a North American English dialect, to the point that I've had people seriously question whether I was a native English speaker. I will not go into detail here, but such includes things such as uvular /r/s, strong NCVS with raising of historical /æ/ towards [ɛ] with sporadic realization as [i̯æ] when voiced but with no unrounding of historical /ɔː/, monophthongal historical /eɪ̯ oʊ̯/ and sporadic laxing of historical /eɪ̯/, final fortition of many lenis obstruents, weak to no voicing of all lenis obstruents (with historical /dʒ/ being voiceless in all positions), severe elision of /t d n/ and less consistent elision of /v ð b/, Canadian Raising with new but inconsistent innovative cases resulting in phonemic splitting, strong /l/-vocalization, extremely frequent initial /h/-dropping in more common words, sporadic initial /ð/-dropping in certain grammar words, quite consistent phonologically-conditioned initial /d t/-dropping in certain grammar words, degenerate allophonic vowel length (degenerate in that the allophony is sometimes hidden by other sound changes) with a strong tendency towards "remembering" the correct vowel lengths where such may not be immediately obvious, strong assimilation of certain consonant clusters, palatalization of certain consonant clusters, inconsistent affrication of stressed palatalized /t d/, realized pitch accent, and preserved quantity in assimilation resulting in non-morphological long consonants. I could go into further detail, but the above is probably plenty of detail to begin with.

The irony of all of this is that my dialect is actually quite close to General American genetically; the difference between the two cannot be any greater than approximately 170 years, and likely is more on the order of 150 years or less. Furthermore, practically all the non-GA-like features of it can be defined essentially as innovations away from GA rather than features present independent of it. Of course, at the same time, there is actually dramatic variation in how people speak here even when excludes AAVE and English spoken by recent immigrants, with many middle-aged and older middle and upper-class speaking in a far, far more GA-like fashion than what I described above.

It so amuses me that my dialect has so many phonological innovations compared to any standard variety of English that one could naively assume it to be a separate Anglic language for all practical intents and purposes - and yet its morphology and syntax are unambiguously more progressive yet quite standard colloquial North American English with only a few differences from such...

I speak in a mixed Southern/Western dialect, that gets more or less Southern seemingly at random; sometimes, it's very noticable, and sometimes hardly at all.

My lexicon is probably of more interest because I still use words that are becoming archaic in the US, even in the South, e.g., "spelt", "dreamt", "ruint","learnt", etc., and sometimes when I'm not watching I say "a-wrahng" for "wrong".

Threads like me sort of amuse me in a certain kind of way. Other people's ideas of significant, well, pecularities/anomalies in their speech sound like insignificant details to me, while the laundry list of things that show up in my posts leave me wondering whether I really speak English at all and only happen to just read and write in it...

>>Threads like this sort of amuse me in a certain kind of way. Other people's ideas of significant, well, pecularities/anomalies in their speech sound like insignificant details to me, while the laundry list of things that show up in my posts leave me wondering whether I really speak English at all and only happen to just read and write in it... <<

Haha yep... you're not wrong! "Laundry list" is a good description.

I have to admit I always thought you were a dull, unimaginative robot, and I barely skimmed over your posts. At least you admit it. So I'd have to agree with you in this instance.

Cheers.

I'm not a southerner myself, but I picked up "ya'll" from my southern relatives as a kid and still use it as needed. It's a pretty handy word.

Being from Dallas, so my accent was less "Southern" than most. As a result, or so my dad tells the story, my brother and I picked up "you guys" from watching TV (he blames the Ghostbusters cartoon specifically), and he had to train us to use "ya'll." I'm glad he did, no offense lol. "ya'll" and "all ya'll" are more descriptive than a simple "you," and less conflict-prone than "you guys."