Can you change a heavy accent??

I wouldn't try to learn American English off of CNN. You might end up with that weird newscaster intonation.

Reminds me of the old John Cusack movie "Better Off Dead", where he describes two Asian immigrant brothers: "One speaks no English, and the other learned to speak English by watching 'Wide World of Sports' with Howard Cosell. Now you tell me which is worse."

Sure enough, the Asian actor busted out with How-wad Cow-Sell's awful speech patterns...through a bullhorn....

>>You can listen to CNN and emulate that accent. Most people on the U.S. edition of CNN speak with general American English accents.<<

What "General American" means is so vague as to be practically useless, Mxsmanic. You can say that practically anything spoken in English-speaking North America away from the East Coast which is not either AAVE or Southern American English is "General American" simply because it is so fucking vague.

And just for the record, CNN is probably not the best of sources when it comes to actual everyday language usage, but then, you're kind of person who probably thinks that if one were to learn English English, one ought to only learn horribly marked conservative RP and nothing else.

>>The notion that there are "multiple accents" in the U.S. is a bit misleading for ESL/EFL students.<<

You seem to think what YOU subjectively think is important for ESL/EFL students is all that matters, and of course you practically always speak of such as if it were objective.

>>There's one accent that covers practically the entire country and a good part of Canada. The very minor variations within this huge swath of the continent are insignificant to ordinary speakers, including native speakers—only phoneticists notice or care about the variations.<<

So why do people from Chicago, for example, often think that people from Milwaukee sound weird (they say we pronounce vowels as "really long", amongst other things), even though the distance between Milwaukee and Chicago is about just 80 miles, which really is not that far, considering the overall scale of the US? You may, in your own highly subjective manner, say that such things don't matter, but obviously other people *do* notice them.

>>This means that you can use almost any native speaker from this large area as a model. Just verify with other Americans that he doesn't have an especially peculiar accent (e.g., New York, Boston, etc.), and he should be fine.<<

One important matter, though, is that one does not totally not acknowledge such differences, as it may sound weird if one ends up having a weird mixture of aspects of different dialects which are not consistent with each other, that is, which would not normally be found together in the same actual dialect. For instance, /u/-fronting from California English combined with Northern Cities Vowel Shift would sound quite odd together, and if one were not aware that such is not something that shows up in an actual NAE dialect, well...

>>It's not at all like England, where accents vary so much even from one neighborhood to another that people can place you (and prejudge you) based on your accent alone. And thank goodness for that.<<

Yes, it is true that there is definitely more dialect variation over less distance in England, but it definitely is not true that such is nonexistant in English-speaking North America, even when one removes the Eastern Seaboard, the South, and Canada from the picture.

Well, people from Milwaukee _don't_ find people from Chicago weird, in my experience. Some might notice something, some might not. But the differences are very trivial where they exist, and they are certainly far to trivial for ESL/EFL students to worry about.

Most ESL/EFL students have such strong foreign accents that they'll never need to worry about which nanoaccent of English they are learning, especially since even the natives don't notice or care.

General American English is accurate precisely because it is vague. A great many Americans have "accents from nowhere," meaning that they've moved around enough to not have any trace of any particular regional accent at all. The arguments about angels on the head of a pin that so interest linguists are irrelevant to the population at large, both native-speaking and ESL/EFL. Talking about trivial differences in pronunciation is seriously misleading to ESL/EFL students because it creates the impression that there are real, important regional accents in the U.S., in the same league as those one hears in England … and that's just not true.

The average American cannot identify the region in which another American lives by pronunciation alone. American pronunciation is just too similar over too large an area. Apart from a few really significant regional accents (such as those of the South and those of a few very localized areas like New York or Boston), nobody knows where anyone else comes from, and nobody cares. And most of all, nobody hears any kind of "accent."

Where I teach, we have American teachers from many different areas of the U. S.: Indiana, Illinois, Colorado, California, Massachusetts, New York, Arizona, Oregon, etc. Their accents are all interchangeable. Even the ones from Boston and New York have no noticeable regional accent. Any student could learn pronunciation from any of them and still speak a very neutral General American English. The idea that they all speak differently is mostly a construction of linguists who spend their lives _trying_ to hear differences. Nobody else hears anything, and nobody else cares. Indeed, individual idiosyncrasy in pronunciation is often much more significant than any regional influence, for American speakers.

>>Well, people from Milwaukee _don't_ find people from Chicago weird, in my experience. Some might notice something, some might not. But the differences are very trivial where they exist, and they are certainly far to trivial for ESL/EFL students to worry about.<<

Hmm... my mom's from Kenosha, which is closer to here than Chicago (albeit rather close to Chicago), and I can clearly notice some key aspects of the phonology of her speech that indicates that she's not originally from the Milwaukee area, even though she's now lived here over a couple decades, and has acquired some aspects of the speech here which I know she did not originally have (such as the use of the word "yah", which I have heard her say, even though she herself says that it isn't used in the dialect in Kenosha).

>>Most ESL/EFL students have such strong foreign accents that they'll never need to worry about which nanoaccent of English they are learning, especially since even the natives don't notice or care.<<

I don't think things like having the Northern Cities Shift or the California Vowel Shift or being "cot"-"caught" merged versus not being so merged count as "nanoaccents".

>>General American English is accurate precisely because it is vague. A great many Americans have "accents from nowhere," meaning that they've moved around enough to not have any trace of any particular regional accent at all.<<

You *completely* misinterpreted how I used the term "vague". I meant that it it is vague in that its *definition* is so broad as to be useless for actually describing anything.

>>The arguments about angels on the head of a pin that so interest linguists are irrelevant to the population at large, both native-speaking and ESL/EFL.<<

Now you're just appealing to antiintellectualism and your own narrow *opinions* of what the general population thinks.

>>Talking about trivial differences in pronunciation is seriously misleading to ESL/EFL students because it creates the impression that there are real, important regional accents in the U.S., in the same league as those one hears in England … and that's just not true.<<

Well, there are, despite how you dismiss such things. Have you heard of things like the Northern Cities Vowel Shift and the California Vowel Shift? They are in no way trivial, being near-Great Vowel Shift-scale vowel system changes, albeit having not reached their likely final states yet and having not yet expressed themselves fully throughout a full range of registers in the dialects so affected by them.

>>The average American cannot identify the region in which another American lives by pronunciation alone.<<

Well, I can't, but that's primarily because most people I do have contact with in Real Life are from the Upper Midwest or are foreign students here at UW Madison, so I cannot always really mark things down to a place well except very generally (I can tell if someone is from the South or Texas, for example). However, I can definitely tell if someone is from the Milwaukee area, or is from southeastern or southern Wisconsin in general, or that they are not with ease (provided they are not AAVE-speakers, where then I really would not be able to say such, simply due to lack of everyday contact with speakers of such).

>>American pronunciation is just too similar over too large an area. Apart from a few really significant regional accents (such as those of the South and those of a few very localized areas like New York or Boston), nobody knows where anyone else comes from, and nobody cares. And most of all, nobody hears any kind of "accent."<<

Well, I can definitely hear such, for people who are not from southeastern or southern Wisconsin; it may not be pronounced, and may be just limited to a few words not "sounding right", but I still can often tell that someone is from elsewhere than here with relative ease, even if what distinguishes them is something as simple as /aI/ not being raised where it "should" be, /A/ before /r/ + an unvoiced consonant not being realized as [V], or /st/ palatalizing as [stS] rather than [StS].

>>Where I teach, we have American teachers from many different areas of the U. S.: Indiana, Illinois, Colorado, California, Massachusetts, New York, Arizona, Oregon, etc. Their accents are all interchangeable.<<

Including across all registers? Or are they only indistinguishable when consistently speaking in a rather formal register?

>>Even the ones from Boston and New York have no noticeable regional accent. Any student could learn pronunciation from any of them and still speak a very neutral General American English.<<

Does that only mean the pronunciation they use in class when teaching, or also that that they use outside of teaching at school?

>>The idea that they all speak differently is mostly a construction of linguists who spend their lives _trying_ to hear differences.<<

Hmm... half the time, it's just that people not from here don't sound "right" to me, rather than actually trying to find differences per se.

>>Nobody else hears anything, and nobody else cares. Indeed, individual idiosyncrasy in pronunciation is often much more significant than any regional influence, for American speakers. <<

Sure....

Argh... not the "angels on the head of a pin" cliche again. *rolleyes*
BS works better when you vary it.

<<The average American cannot identify the region in which another American lives by pronunciation alone.>>

That's certainly not always true. I have been identified as Californian multiple times (when not in California ) due to my speech, and I wasn't even laying it on thick or trying to sound "different" (altho you'd accuse linguists of trying to find or even make differences or exaggerate the scope of which ones do exist), but talking in what I thought was relatively unidentifiable speech.

<<American pronunciation is just too similar over too large an area. Apart from a few really significant regional accents (such as those of the South and those of a few very localized areas like New York or Boston), nobody knows where anyone else comes from, and nobody cares. And most of all, nobody hears any kind of "accent.">>

Haha. That's also definitely not true in many cases. Even average people here definitely can identify, say, a Midwestern or especially northern Midwestern accent simply because there are true differences between speech there and here and they're large enough to be noticeable to people who aren't linguistically trained or looking for minute differences. I've mentioned them before, but I have a couple friends about my age who moved out here recently from Minnesota and their accents are very noticeably different even to the average person here (and novel and almost comical to people here who are not used to hearing that accent on a normal basis). In social situations with them and other Californians here, I've noticed several times that a few people smirk or fight to hold back chuckles when the transplanted Minnesotans say certain things (I just smile in my mind--I don't want to make them feel self-conscious). I'll say again, they're not linguists but just average people who definitely can tell a large difference for what you would write off as negligible or nonexistent. Not true by any means.

Once again, I agree that ESL/EFL students should master basic vowels first before ever needing to learn about the ever-complex detail of the dialect continua which form North American English. However, you can't discount the fact that significant differences do in fact exist, even excluding accents like New York, Boston, or Southern speech. They're not constructs made up by linguists who just like to exaggerate things. That's one of the most ridiculous arguments you consistently use and it makes absolutely no sense.

<<Argh... not the "angels on the head of a pin" cliche again. *rolleyes*
BS works better when you vary it.>>

Hehe, that's kind of what I was saying in my message. If he's going to paint linguists as overdramatic overzealous people who actually seek out to create and/or exaggerate linguistic phenomena, he could at least change up the wording every once in awhile.

My colleagues are indistinguishable even when speaking normally.

The differences you discuss are interesting to people who devote their lives to linguistics. They have no effect on the use of language for practical, everyday purposes of communication. It's like Macheads trying to argue about which model of Mac is best, or car enthusiasts arguing about which chrome detail identifies which production run of a particular model of car. These differences are apparent only to those who look for them. They are completely invisible to the rest of the universe. It's not anti-intellectualism—there's nothing intellectual about an obsession with a handful of esoteric details. It's just the realization that not everyone lives and breathes languages, cars, or Macs.

My students need a tool of communication called English. They just need to communicate. All their instruction is aimed at this objective. Worrying about trying to distinuish Kenosha residents from Milwaukee residents could scarcely be more irrelevant to them. They'd ask for their money back if I tried to talk to them about that.

>>My colleagues are indistinguishable even when speaking normally.<<

Of course, the question is, is that only when you aren't listening for the features which would distinguish them?

>>The differences you discuss are interesting to people who devote their lives to linguistics. They have no effect on the use of language for practical, everyday purposes of communication. It's like Macheads trying to argue about which model of Mac is best, or car enthusiasts arguing about which chrome detail identifies which production run of a particular model of car. These differences are apparent only to those who look for them. They are completely invisible to the rest of the universe. It's not anti-intellectualism—there's nothing intellectual about an obsession with a handful of esoteric details. It's just the realization that not everyone lives and breathes languages, cars, or Macs.<<

No, this is *exactly* antiintellectualism, in this case being argued on the basis of some kind of empty populism. You are essentially saying that something doesn't matter because most people don't happen to care about it. Well, just because most people don't care about something doesn't mean it doesn't matter. The ignorance of the general population with respect to a given subject does not make such ignorance good.

>>My students need a tool of communication called English. They just need to communicate. All their instruction is aimed at this objective.<<

The thing is that "English" is not a monolithic, absolute construct, as much as you would like it to be such. Also, your students aren't all that matters in the world, either, so just because *you* think such doesn't matter to your students doesn't mean it doesn't matter.

>>Worrying about trying to distinuish Kenosha residents from Milwaukee residents could scarcely be more irrelevant to them. They'd ask for their money back if I tried to talk to them about that.<<

You missed the whole reason why I mentioned that. The reason why I mentioned that is that is just to make the point that there are definitely noticable differences on a "small" (for North American English) scale, provided you actually listen for them and know what features to listen to. (In the Kenosha example, that would be whether pairs of words like "car" and "cart", "par" and "park", "mar" and "march", and so on are realized with vowels of the same quality or not. It's a minor detail, one might say, but it is enough to be noticable, provided you know it's happening in the first place.)

<<The thing is that "English" is not a monolithic, absolute construct, as much as you would like it to be such. Also, your students aren't all that matters in the world, either, so just because *you* think such doesn't matter to your students doesn't mean it doesn't matter.>>

Also, no one ever said that topics like these were only relevant in the context of ESL/EFL.

<<Worrying about trying to distinuish Kenosha residents from Milwaukee residents could scarcely be more irrelevant to them. They'd ask for their money back if I tried to talk to them about that.>>

Same as what I said above.

Since this Web site is all about ESL/EFL, it's a relevant consideration.

No, I don't listen to features that would distinguish my American colleagues. If I have to listen to them to hear them, then clearly they are not significant. Significant differences are those that I hear without making any particular effort to discern them. I hear southern accents. I notice differences among UK, US, and Australian speakers. It's hard to recognize speakers from Ireland or Scotland much of the time. A lot of non-rhotic accents sound very similar.

All in all, the differences are very tiny. Our students of English usually don't hear them, and often when they claim to hear them, they're wrong (proved by the fact that they will consistently misidentify speakers as being from one region when in fact they are from another). Additional proof comes from the fact that I find it difficult to remember and recognize differences between, say, Australians and people from the UK—whereas distinguishing truly separate languages, such as German and Spanish or even Italian and Spanish, is so easy that it's possible even if one doesn't speak the languages in question.

So here again, I have to say that worrying about tiny regional differences in pronunciation is a waste of time in the context of ESL/EFL. If linguists want to do it, fine, but they should not try to create the impression that it's important for ESL/EFL students and teachers, because it's not.