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Why do yanks compare American southern accent to English
Well i'm from newfoundland and i can't ever tell if were ripping off hicks when we speak or if were pikeys(brits). So i think that might make you think.
Are accents gotta be Angloceltic, but with american tv and all it really is strange
American from Mississippi here.
The commonalities of southern American and southeastern English are several, although there are a lot of variations worth noting. The Tidewater accent strikes most Americans as very, very strange - see if you can find some samples of Smith Island and Tangier Island speech for the extremes of this. Its most obvious features are that it is non-rhotic and that "out and about" sounds like "oat and aboat". Here in the Gulf South, we have some little quirks - I do not yod-drop, so that "tune" and "toon" are distinct; the Southern "o" has a faint tinge of sounding like the French "eau"; long I is pronounced just a little bit like "ah" (this is a characteristic that is magnified tremendously in most Texas accents); and I'm part of the small community of Americans who pronounce "wh" as "hw" rather than "w" - so that "white" and "wight" are distinct, as are "what" and "watt". All of these touches are things that you find in RP, which probably accounts for the relative ease of intelligibility between Southerners and those who can speak RP.
I don't think Southerners sound anything like the English, but the old fashioned southern accents do lack the final R, so maybe that's a vague similarity.
Vinlander wrote :
>>Well i'm from newfoundland and i can't ever tell if were ripping off hicks when we speak or if were pikeys(brits)>> It seems the main accents of Newfoundland (birthplace of my mother and three sibs, grandfather G. G. Byrne of the Blue Puttees First 500, great-uncles the painters Robert Pilot and Maurice Cullen) are considered a suite of speech from County Kilkenny in Ireland, with some influence from County Waterford on the coast as well (where many Irish sailed off for St. John's). My old schoolmate Brendan from Kilkenny tells the story of how he went to medical school in Dublin and there met two fellows whom he greeted warmly as "countrymen" ~ for he had immediately recognised their distinct and "unmistakable" Kilkenny accents, as he thought. When they looked very puzzled and informed him solemnly they had just arrived in Ireland from Newfoundland for their studies, and what's more had never heard of Kilkenny, much less seen that part of the world, he thought they were pulling his leg and became a bit ruffled ~ even incensed at the cheek of his supposed hoodwinkers. Apparently it took Brendan's mind a few days to cope with the reality of this "parallel universe" phenomenon, once proven and confirmed :This pair were Newfoundlanders born and bred.
Could you imagine a post-acopocliptic world where the north American accent comes to be reprecented by the Tidewater or Newfoundland accent! I imagine Newfoundlanders and Tidwater communities surviving in small pockets a nuclear amagedeon more than your average right wing Montana survivialist weirdo. Can you imagine all those British rockstars who for some reason sing in those standard American accents singing in Tidewater or Newfounderlander north american accents instead!
It's interesting to me that my favorite American dialect--Virginia Tidewater--is being discussed.
My first exposure to it came from an elderly Southern belle, born circa 1910, who was from "naw-fick", Vuhginia (Norfolk, VA). I has the pleasure of listening to this soft, gentle, lilting dialect for several hours as we travelled together on a Greyhound bus many moons ago. "That's the prettiest English I have ever heard", I thought. However, this dialect differed from RP in one key aspect--it was ruggedly non-rhotic, even in the middle of words and phrases. She had to rest her legs "foh a spell"; similarly,she would have pronounced "Dorothy" as "Doh-uh-thee". By contrast, RP has that grating, jarring linking-r, in which Vanilla Ice Cream becomes "vaniller ice cream". So you have the oddity of one American dialect that's considerably less rhotic than RP. Anyway, after my travelling companion rested her legs "foh a spell", I asked her how she was feeling. She replied, "Sahm bettuh." What a beautiful tongue. This experience has stuck with me for almost thirty years...
The Tidewater, Virginia accent sounds intriguing - from what's been said about it I reckon it must be similar to the rather UN-American type of accent I heard on a recent TV program over here in the UK in which Stephen Fry drove a converted London taxi through every single one of the 50 States of America.
He was in Boston, MA and chatting with some very old people and they reminded me of some of those really old black and white American films in which the actors, and especially the actresses, spoke in a strange mid Atlantic type accent.....I think Katherine Hepburn was one such, and I think Bette Davis was another. They must have come from that part of America. Surely nobody under 70 or 80 years old speaks like that now even there? The American version of the excruciatingly precise and exaggeratedly clipped RP accent of the British equivalent from those days, which now sound so weirdly dated to us now. That intrusive "R" here in the UK..it's true that many people here enjoy a "vanilla ricecream" and that the lovely "Laura Norder" is maintained on the streets thanks to the efforts of the police....she does fall down on the job though now and again in spite of the coppers' best efforts. Anyway, English English accents - as an Edinburgh Scottish English accented lad I have mixed views on the various English English accents -some I like, some I more or less abhor, and normally I'm not too much of a fan of extreme Estuary - especially the kind spoken in some parts of London. Who can forget the horrendous accent of the now sadly late Jade Goody. However, down in Kent, to the south east of London, the Estuary type accent becomes more muted and more pleasant, and I really like the accent of the TV chef Richard Phillips, who is a Man of Kent (not a Kentish Man - a Man of Kent and a Kentish Man come from two areas of Kent divided by the River Medway). He appears on many TV cookery programs and he now runs a very successful restaurant in his home county of Kent - in the wee village of Tenterden. Here he is opening that very same restaurant - his accent is so typical of Kent, the most south-eastern part of the UK and the closest to the Continent: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIhRXqvJnPs
Damian: A pretty good impression of Georgia Tidewater (a close cousin of its Virginia counterpart) can be heard in the movie Midnight In The Garden Of Good and Evil. Listen to the voice of the second-lead character of the Southern millionaire who's accused of murder.
Surprisingly, the movie can be seen in its entirety on YouTube. (Is this legal?) Damian, as an added bonus, there's a drag queen character that will bring you much amusement.
Are there Brits who have a drawl like Southerners, i.e. "cahyit" instead of "cat", "rahyit" instead of "rat", etc.?
>>Kent, the most south-eastern part of the UK and the closest to the Continent>>
And I believe, after Yorkshire, Kent would have been the part of Britain with highest Norse settlement in the Viking Age.
Jasper - plenty of people keep on referring to the lovely Laura Norder here in the UK - she seems to be everywhere but she never appears in person....such an abstract entity she surely is and difficult to control at times. Even the Prime Minister refers to her on occasions.
The Norse settlements in Britain were mostly confined to northern and norh eastern parts of these islands, Quintus - especially here in Scotland. The Orkney and Shetland islands in particular, off the coast of northernmost Scotland and the UK's most northern region, were heavily influenced by the Vikings, and still remain so to this day. For instance - Lerwick, the main town of the Shetlands is geographically closer to Bergen, over in Norway, than it it to us down here in Edinburgh. Kent on the other hand, right down in the opposite end of the UK, in the far south east, is separated from Continetal Europe by just a narrow 21 miles wide of water, and it was the Anglo Saxons that invaded Kent once the Romans had left in 410AD, and not the Norsemen. Very often it's the place names in the UK which give a clue to the earliest influences of any particular race of people who had invaded this country over the centuries until c. 1000AD or so. I'm not too sure about places such as these though: Horsey Windpump - in Norfolk, England Foul End - in Warwickshire, England Spital-in-the-Street - in Lincolnshire, England (I suspect there may well be a link to some kind of medical establishment there). Let'shope the present day residents of Spital-in-the Street do not do what the name implies. Quaking Houses - in County Durham, England.....not too far from another place called Pity Me......we'd pity anyone living in a quakling house I reckon. Not far from where my grandparents live - in Herefordshire, England - is a very pretty little village called Flyford Flavell...I just love that name and enjoy saying it. Not far away is another gorgeous little place called Hanley Swan, and beyond that, a few miles away, is another village called Shelsley Beauchamp - the last bit of which must be pronounced as "BEECH-umm"). So many places in that part of England and also in other parts seem to have double barrelled names, all for historical reasons. And back up to Scotland here - Thrashbush - in Lanarkshire. There must be some kind of history attached to that one.....
>J, not all Southern dialects have a drawl.<
You're right Sir. A Southern drawl is the mark of being an Aristocrat, a Southern twang is blue collar, this varies of course on which regional Southern accent is used. By the way, Uriel was refering to the aristocratic drawl. Virginia & South Carolina. Example of aristocratic drawl, albeit a short one Sir. (1:33 - 1:44) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZAQvmiW9sw |