Irish accent

Damian in Edinburgh   Fri Oct 28, 2005 7:22 am GMT
**I learned that she had indeed spent six months studying in Watford a few years ago, and had eliminated her French accent and picked up the local accent in the process.**

You mean Estuary..Watford style? Or Northern maybe.....doesn't "The North" start at Watford? Or do I mean Watford Gap?.....I'm confused.

Come to think of it she could have ended up with a realy cool hybrid accent...a wee bit of French still retained..... mixed with Watford Estuary.....a hint of RP from London commuter territory.....and to finish off ....just a tad of Northern. Nice.
Rick Johnson up North   Fri Oct 28, 2005 6:19 pm GMT
<<doesn't "The North" start at Watford?>> Only for people in London. The real North/South divide is somewhere around leicester as far as accents are concerned, although people in Leicester would complain that they were midlanders.
Mxsmanic   Fri Oct 28, 2005 7:29 pm GMT
I don't really know anything about Watford, other than that it is apparently near London. To me, her accent reminded me somehow of London, and it sounded "young" if that makes any sense. It was not unpleasant.

The interesting point here, of course, is that there are any differences at all in accent in the Greater London area. In most metropolitan areas of the United States, everyone talks the same way. Indeed, that's true of entire states, and arguably of large fractions of the continent.

I also listened to a promotional tape for the TOEIC during an idle moment a few days ago. The tape was narrated in French. The French sounded odd … perhaps foreign. I asked a native speaker if she heard anything unusual in the narration, and she simply said that it sounded quite deliberate, but it did not sound foreign. I had heard _something_ different, and I had imagined it to be a foreign or regional accent, when in fact it was just a temporary style of speaking. The alleged differences between different pronunciations in the U.S. are of similar magnitude.
Rick Johnson   Fri Oct 28, 2005 8:50 pm GMT
A Watford accent is essentially part of the London group of accents. Most accents in Britain spread outwards from the nearest large city.

<<In most metropolitan areas of the United States, everyone talks the same way.>>

The easiest comparison to make is NY, where even I know what a Brooklyn accent sounds like and how this differs from the neighboring boroughs.
Uriel   Sat Oct 29, 2005 1:28 am GMT
NYC is actually a fairly unusual city. Its situation is not typical of most other large US cities. The book "Nine Nations in North America" actually listed it as one of a handful of anomalies -- not that that's proof of anything, of course, but it was an entertaining read.
Brennus   Sat Oct 29, 2005 5:42 am GMT
New York is indeed an unusual place and it's one of the few places in the United States that leaves a strong cultural and linguistic imprint on the people who live there. The same is true of Texas. The state seems to turn almost everyone who lives there into a Texan regardless of their ethnic origins complete with drawl, spurs and boots. Finally, you can almost say the same thing for California too. Californians seem to have a certain way of looking and talking which just says "California". Maybe they don't realize it in their home state but us yocals up here in the Pacific Northwest notice it.
Uriel   Sat Oct 29, 2005 5:57 am GMT
(rolling eyes) Lord have mercy. I live twenty minutes from Texas. Not everyone there drawls or wears the hat. And not everyone who DOES is FROM Texas -- you'll find plenty of that breed all over New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, etc. And for God's sake, it's Wyoming that bills itself as "The Cowboy State", not Texas!

And I've never seen spurs on ANYONE. Not even actual equestrians.
Brennus   Sat Oct 29, 2005 7:51 am GMT
Well, of course, Uriel, there has always been a trickle of Yankees coming into Texas. The first came from Kansas and the Dakotas during the Great Depression. The most recent ones came mostly from the Northeastern states during the 1980's & 90's - part of the sunbelt migration - but little by little they will all be "Texanized (Spanish tejanizado ?)."
Guest   Sat Oct 29, 2005 8:05 am GMT
Not that there's anything wrong with drawling and wearing the hat.

http://www.jupeal.com/Actores/Tommy_Lee_Jones/Tommy%20Lee%20Jones.jpg
Brennus   Sat Oct 29, 2005 8:13 am GMT
Nice pic , Guest. Yes, he's the quintessential Texan alright.
Mxsmanic   Sat Oct 29, 2005 11:28 am GMT
I watched _Raising Arizona_ not long ago—a really bad movie, by the way. It takes place in Arizona, supposedly. I was very surprised to hear everyone in the movie speaking with a marked drawl that I would normally associate with eastern Texas or even the South. Apparently people in Hollywood mistakenly believe that Arizonans have some sort of southern accent, but they actually speak GAE, just like everyone else.

One nice thing about teaching English is that one works with other native speakers who have all sorts of pronunciations. The differences aren't large, but there's a lot of variety. It helps to prevent one from fossilizing with a particular English pronunciation, because just about every native speaker one encounters speaks very slightly differently from all the others. I deal with native Anglophones from at least ten countries, and after a while I think it induces one to develop a sort of World Pronunciation of English.
Guest   Sat Oct 29, 2005 10:50 pm GMT
"One nice thing about teaching English is that one works with other native speakers who have all sorts of pronunciations. The differences aren't large, but there's a lot of variety. It helps to prevent one from fossilizing with a particular English pronunciation..."
--- Mxsmanic

I agree here. I thionk it would be kind of a boring world if we all talked and sounded the same (still just an opinion though). The differences in pronunciation between the different Englishes of the world don't seem so great when I look at the different pronunciations of words in the various Greek dialects like say Salerno (Southern Italy), Athens (Greece) and Cappadocia (Eastern Turkey). Yet even Greeks seem to be able to all understand each other regardless of dialect except for some occasional words, often the loanwords from Italian, Slavic or Turkish.
Uriel   Sat Oct 29, 2005 11:33 pm GMT
Gotta love Tommy Lee Jones!