The KEY to unlocking any accent

What makes an accent an accent? And how can you learn to understand the whole system?
Click my link to get started with Lingopie with 70% OFF the lifetime plan: learn.lingopie.com/LanguageJones
CORRECTION: at 8:21 the IPA should read /j/ and not /y/
Edited with Gling AI: bit.ly/46bGeYv
#linguistics #accents #accent #dialects #languagelearning #acting #polyglot

[@blotski]

I heard someone explaining that he had learned Swedish to a very advanced level and he once asked a Swedish (male) friend to assess his accent. His friend said the accent was near native but he sounded strangely female but couldn't work out why. Eventually, they worked out that in Swedish they have a certain pitch or tone called pitch/tone 2 in which the voice goes up in pitch at the end of certain words. Females generally do this in a slightly more noticeable way than males and the learner had nearly always had female teachers and practised with females. So he'd ended up with a female sounding pitch.

[@languagejones6784]

This is so common, especially with Japanese!

[@TaseenTaha-jb6kc]

@@languagejones6784 Yeah, I’m studying Japanese, and it’s like “Damn, it sounds pretty good, but I don’t sound like the dudes.” 😂 I’ve been switching over to male voices to make it better.

[@peteymax]

That’s really interesting. I would love to know how I sound in Spanish.

[@tylermacneill3820]

Sounds like Lamont from Days of French n' Swedish

[@wypimentel]

Yeah, interesting, I always share Kató Lomb's speaking about this on "How I learn Languages": " I would just say here that, in general, women’s speech tends to sound more protracted, more drawn-out. One of the reasons for this is the doubling of vowels. This style of double emphasis invests words with a strong emotional content." "[...] Another feature of feminine language is the shift of all consonants towards sibilants /ſ, s, z/ that gives a slightly affected tone to speech. I think these phonetic changes play the same role as fashion: to emphasize femininity. The male voice is deeper, due to men’s anatomical makeup. " So, this happens in almost every language, there is some kind of shift... Kató Lomb said that even though there is a modern tendency to have an unissex accent, girls "instinctively start to twitter at a higher pitch when a [handsome] guy appears on the horizon".

[@HO-bndk]

Understanding it theoretically is one thing. Actually speaking in that accent is a whole other ball game.

[@languagejones6784]

I find that I can get started once I have the theory, but otherwise I'm just lost. Some people have a gift and can just do the accents without consciously knowing what they're doing. I'm definitely not one.

[@ghosthunter0950]

@@languagejones6784 it's not necessarily a gift. you just have to actually pay attention and take the effort to remember how they pronounced certain words. then once you have enough material to see some form of pattern extrapolate from there. It's probably also a lot easier to do an accent if you're the one picking the phrases than given random ones. or at least given time to listen and pay attention to the words in the phrase you were given. it's kinda like learning another language's vocab /phrases except it's the same as yours in everything but the way they say the words.

[@stevecarter8810]

​@@ghosthunter0950when you argue that something is not a gift "you just have to", consider whether you also have the gift. Whenever you "just" do something you're talking about something you find obvious/easy. Maybe it's neither obvious nor easy to others

[@stormi8029]

@@ghosthunter0950 I believe the gift that he's referring to in this instance is exactly what you're describing: good pattern recognition skills. Not everyone has that "gift," and everyone goes about learning things differently because of what skills they do have.

[@thomaspruchinski385]

It's not the theory, it's being able to recognize the differences when hearing them. Once you recognize the differences when hearing, it follows naturally (through some practice) to produce them when speaking.

[@sadsugar-b5f]

I had to pause the video to collect myself on learning that Russian speakers can come across as rude when asking questions in English. I am a native Russian speaker and moved to an Anglophone country as a child. Before moving, I was often told by adults that I am a polite and considerate child. I was proud of this, and it meant that I could have positive interactions with adults. After moving, English speakers reacted poorly to me, and other children would sometimes tell me, often angrily, that I speak rudely to people. I didn't change the way I approach people that much since then, but my accent is barely perceivable now, and no one calls me rude or reacts poorly to me anymore.

[@sovietbear1917]

My wife has a habit of picking up a few tones wherever we wind up living. After a decade in Minnesota, she has long Os, regional idioms, and other bits of Minnesota detritus in her conversation. We were at a diner in California a few years ago before we caught our flight and the waitress asked where we were going. My wife said 'Back to MinnesOta (with the long O), and the waitress replied she figured as much because of her accent. Never seen her so mad, and she claimed the entire ride to the airport that she doesn't have a Minnesota accent. She really doesn't realize how many 'Oh fer' s and 'Holy Buckets' that populate her speech now. I find it pretty funny. I took Russian in college, and am learning Spanish now, and I have to unlearn my default pronunciation of things. My Spanish sounds like I'm a Russian tourist.

[@PuffyWalrus]

I was in Tennessee once for Bonnaroo, a multi-day concert they host there, and someone asked me if i had a ladder. I looked at them like they were crazy and responded with "a ladder?" They said "Yeah, a ladder" and looked at me like I was crazy for questioning them. I just responded with "Why the f*** would i have a ladder??" to which they responded by doing the universal hand gesture for flicking a lighter as they once again repeated "a ladder." "Oh, you mean a LIGHTer" I said as i passed him my lighter. After that we both broke out laughing. We actually ended up talking about how I thought they had a crazy accent and they thought I had a crazy accent. They then proceeded to teach me how to ask for a lighter in a good ol' southern drawl. To this day, one of my all time favorite interactions I've ever had.

[@jpwood9082]

I'll give you two of my (kiwi) accent not being understood 1. Working in London in a wine shop and not understanding why the customer did not wanting to buy the wine that I had said was better, when she explained she did not like bitter wine 2. On a wrestling tour to the States and Canada had crossed into Canada on foot and then returning sitting in no mans land waiting for my party to catch up I was approached by a US boarder guard who asked what I was doing 'Oh don't worry I'm just waiting for those guys to come through', he went to is radio and asked for a Polish translator.

[@justcomments335]

My girlfriend and I once got to know a nice man who was selling food out of the boot of his car to try to save up enough to open a restaurant. While he was always apologising for his bad English, I tried to assure him it was very good, but he couldn't understand a word I said and my gf would always have to "translate" me into RP.

[@dragoncurveenthusiast]

In high school my friend had a Russian classmate. Once his mum called and it led to a very intense but brief conversation in Russian. His classmates were worried and asked what's wrong. He was surprised about the question. Nothing had been wrong. They had talked about what's for lunch when he gets home. This happened in Austria, so all the classmates mentioned were (mostly native) German speakers.

[@applesushi]

I moved from Germany to Tennessee in high school. I thought my English was good enough but then I had to take “Civics” with the basketball coach. If he had not written homework assignments on the board, I would not have turned anything in for weeks, his accent was that impenetrable.

[@Parodox306]

I work for a trucking company where I interact with long-haul drivers on a daily basis. I'm not only exposed to American regional accents but also Hispanic, Bosnian, and even in some cases African, Caribbean, and New Zealand accents. I don't quite know *how* this video will help me, but it's absolutely fascinating learning about what makes up the differences in speech patterns and intonations. Also, if you could do more videos of random accent facts that'd much appreciated. Thanks!

[@languagejones6784]

I'm planning one a month or so

[@ambienceandmusicstudios]

I actually forced a change of accent when I was 8. I had a very strong regional South Yorkshire (Northern English) accent. But I hated how it sounded, so I practiced speaking in RP. It worked very well. Northeners never think I'm one of them, although Southeners can tell. It ended up making me sound very posh, and has changed how people percieve me. Strangers treat me with more distance now, but people pay a lot more attention to what I have to say. I feel like an impostor talking to actually posh people though. The accent only gets you so far, because class divisions are very obvious.

[@sub_bacchus]

Did you move out of South Yorkshire or go to private school or something? I'm assuming you're older as RP has so much less prestige than it used to - I think nowadays having a soft regional accent is if anything a benefit(though some, like West Country are still stigmatised) makes people sound more authentic and soft ones are common on TV and news

[@sigmaoctantis1892]

For me, the key to any accent is finding what it feels like in my mouth, then speaking while maintaining that feeling. I think that finding that feeling must be more complicated that I think it is because I can't describe exactly how I do it. I was once demonstrating my Italian accent (speaking English) to an Italian girl I had recently met. She exclaimed, "Calabrese!" The people who I was copying were mostly from Calabria, so I must have it pretty good.

[@evercuriousmichelle]

I’m learning Italian and am so curious to learn more about the Italian mouth feel!

[@sigmaoctantis1892]

@@evercuriousmichelle To describe the feel of my mouth is to describe how it feels different to my normal accent. If you can imitate Hugh Jackman speaking in his native accent, you will have an idea of my starting position. I can tell you that my soft palate feels wider and sibilants seem to occur just behind the alveolar ridge but I don't think that's going to help much. I got my Italian accent by imitating an exuberant Italian bus driver, "Never fear. Johnny's here!" What I suggest is you listen to someone you would like to sound like and pick a single sentence and practice it until you get the sound and rhythm. You might try doing an exaggerated comic accent, then toning it down, "Hey you! Shut uppa ya face." Learning German I found some sound changes difficult. I would stumble over the word. I kept saying the word and allowing my tongue to take different positions. Eventually I found a way to smoothly change from one sound to the next. In this way the word come out sounding like a German word and not an English rendition of a German word. Hope this is helpful.

[@evercuriousmichelle]

@@sigmaoctantis1892 Thank you!! ☺

[@JemRochelle]

My French is pretty poor to start with (I am currently trying to improve it!), but when I went to Brussels back in February, I met a man who lived there and spoke French, but was originally from Mauritius, so he had what sounded to me like an Indian accent. It was SO hard to understand what he was saying, which was especially awkward when, at one point, I realized he was asking me if I wanted to go back to his place to sleep with him. I responded by saying "sorry, I'm married," and his answer to that was "that doesn't matter, you're on vacation." 😅😬

[@barrysteven5964]

Oh, wow! As a northern English speaker I have frequently hard about the bath/trap and the foot/strut splits in the UK. I had no idea those words were part of the Wells lexical set.

[@tompflug5726]

I'm from the south of England and sound like it. Growing up, I used to visit family in a working class area of Liverpool. Some of my family up there had accents, but the local kids were a different story. One time, I was playing in the gardene and a neighbour kid popped his head over the fence and said hello. He had a thick accent, but I managed to understand him until he said "oo dyoo spoor". He must have repeated a dozen times before my Dad has to come out and explain he was asking me who "who do you suppport?". I asked him what sport he was referring me and at that point the cultural gap proved too great, and he retreated to his own garden.

[@kyrakia5507]

I’m also southern, but was able to figure out without too much trouble what ‘oo dyoo spoor’ meant. I’m not even into football

[@EdwardLindon]

​@@kyrakia5507It gets easier with age and experience.

[@nateonmission]

As an East Tennessean who lived in Louisville KY for 20, I can testify to the difficulty of trying to moderate my native dialect. I worked in a call center and people in Illinois could not understand me.

[@Salsmachev]

This is great if you want to break down an accent, but I think there's a huge omission. Accents have an embodied internal logic to them, and if you can get a physical sense of that logic, then the accent becomes trivial and intuitive. The key is oral posture. People with different accents hold their mouths in different positions by default, which makes some sounds easier to pronounce than others in different contexts. French has an oral posture that's very front, relaxed, and round. Once you learn to shift to that posture, all those front round vowels, velar Rs, and (if you're speaking English with a French accent) Zs instead of THs become natural. Arabic is almost the opposite, with very tight, unrounded lips. The reason why my French pronunciation has always been decent is that one of my first French teachers taught us French oral posture. Sadly, she was the exception and I've never had another teacher try to show me the oral posture for a language. It's also unfortunately difficult to learn about online; it seems like relatively few people talk about it, at least for the languages I've tried to look into.

[@michaelmarks8443]

20-30 years ago, when I did some acting, we had tapes on various accents and this was a key the instructor on the tape always used. How you hold your mouth and where the "center" of your sound was informed the vowel sounds, and to some extent the consonant sounds, and made the accent more natural. IIRC, Irish was "centered" in front of the mouth, while Cockney was nearly in the throat.

[@Salsmachev]

@@michaelmarks8443 Dang I wish I had those tapes that sounds awesome! That sounds about right for Cockney and Irish.

[@michaelmarks8443]

@@Salsmachev Looks like it was "Acting with an Accent" by Dr. David Alan Stern, looks like some products are still available.

[@SingYourStory]

I’ve been utilizing “Accents: A Manual for Actors- Revised and Expanded Edition” by Robert Blumenthal to teach dialects to actors for the past 20 or so years. Lots of work on mouth shape, jaw placement and tongue level. Love this video, Dr. Jones, BTW 😊

[@Salsmachev]

@@michaelmarks8443 Thanks!

[@Harmonikdiskorde]

re: intonation -- my favorite is listening to flight attendants rattle off the entire spiel in English but with their primary language's intonation. I should try to figure out the lexical set (?) of the various generations of Chinese-English speakers...

[@jbejaran]

In addition to the consonants, vowels, and intonations, I might add idiomatic features of some accents. This can be the coastal "soda" vs. the midwestern "pop", the American "chips" vs. British "crisps", the Canadian propensity for "eh", or the South Asian propensity for pronouncing this symbol (@) as "at the rate of" even in things like email addresses. It's fascinating to see the varieties from everywhere. ...As for other accents, I've heard it said that the difference between Metropolitan French accents and Canadian French accents is heard with what they do with English's "TH". In France, they mostly turn it to "Z", but in Canada, they mostly turn it to "D". Would love to hear more about that.

[@pint-o-taffy3521]

I'm from New Jersey and I had a friend from North Dakota visit me recently. She kept pointing out how thick everyone's accent was but to me they sounded completely normal. It was really funny how blind to it I was

[@languagejones6784]

vocal posture is so demanding. You just reminded me of a time, years ago, that a friend said that I was overdoing it making French faces while speaking French. I was just making the front rounded vowels right

[@stevecarter8810]

​@@languagejones6784 I am a chancer in French, I guess at vocabulary and grammar all the time. But I often get qualified compliments while on France, like "your french is not right, but I understand it" or immigrants to France telling me I speak like a local. I'm convinced this is because I make the body and mouth posture and adopt the philosophical attitude of the French. I e. My communication is mostly shrugging and gurning, and boff and Ben.

[@mydogisbailey]

Dr Jones you have a great sense of humours haha, and you are brilliant. bravo

[@languagejones6784]

Thank you so much! I've learned it's not for everyone, so I appreciate those who appreciate it

[@davidhumphreys3028]

​I've always loved this style of humour & lean in this direction myself. Not many people find me funny though 🤔

[@KeolaDonaghy]

Mahalo Taylor, I really needed this. About 20 years ago my wife and I were in Donegal studying Irish. In the month we were there, I got pretty good at identifying what general area the Irish were from based on their accents (that has since faded). But there was a fellow from Scotland there (not sure what part) whose English I could not understand at all - I picked up maybe one word out of fine. There was a lot of nodding and laughing when he laughed. I think that's the only English accent. Conversely, I know folks on or from the continent who have an incredibly difficult time with Hawai‘i Creole English (we call it "pidgin"). We have a hard time convincing visitors and blow-ins that it's not just "bad English." 🙄 My current work involves several closely related Polynesian languages, and I'm working out the accent differences as well.

[@RobespierreThePoof]

People have a strange attitude about accents very often. I've noticed that some people have a greater tendency to unconsciously pick up (parts of) the accents of others around them. (I've often wondered if there is any socio-linguistic research into this, in fact.) In some cases, this can be quite practical - for all the obvious reasons - if there's a larger gap between your own accent and the accent of wherever it is that you now find yourself living. Example: Put an Australian in the Scottish Highlands and watch the confusion. However, there are MANY people who attach a lot of significance to accents as some kind of permanent identity marker - as if your accent is some core part of your soul (or something.) I've had the unpleasant experience on multiple occasions of seeing American tourists be profoundly offended when meeting an American expat in Britain who has, for whatever socio-linguistic reasons, acquired some portion of some English, Welsh, Scottish or Irish pronunciation. Honestly, I think they perceive it as either some kind of betrayal of identity or "pretentious" or what-not - when, in fact, the poor guy or girl has just been living his life trying to communicate. For the life of me, I really don't understand this and I find these exchanges far more confusing than I probably should. Perhaps this is because, at the young age of 18, I did consciously try to change a handful of sounds in my childhood accent (because people where I had moved would always comment on it) and then later in life, I suddenly realized that my pronuciation had changed in OTHER ways without even consciously noticing. This might be unrealistic of me, but I find the cultural politicization of speech patterns to be distasteful. If someone acquire accents quickly - far above average - how is that a bad thing, when we would consider it an talent if it were another language.

[@languagejones6784]

Yes! It's called "accommodation" in the academic literature. It's still not super widely understood, but it seems like it's a (not always conscious) move toward building rapport.

[@88klac]

I can assure you there is a whole pile of sociolinguistic research on this area. It's called accommodation theory and people do indeed move their own accent towards or away from their interlocutor's accent. My wife used to claim she could tell when I (a British English speaker) had just come home after speaking to an American colleague for a while, as my accent had moved westwards across the Atlantic a bit.

[@cahorowit]

​@@88klac I had an older friend who had been here in California since the 1940s. She had a very English accent even after more than 50 years. She was so excited visit her sister in Golders Green. She returned and said she must be completely stateless! While everyone here said she sounded British her sister & friends kept telling her she sounded SOOO American!

[@EdwardLindon]

It was one of the things that made my family moving house when I was 10 so difficult. We only moved about 100 miles, but the accent and dialect were completely different. I was seen as "posh" or "from London" (which was out by about 150 miles) and there was a lot of mutual misunderstanding.

[@sebve9399]

I don't know if you've done it already, but you should make a video about the difference between an accent and a dialect. I personally think they're the same, but in German-speaking cultures there's a lot of emphasis on dialects whereas in English there are huge differences between the way people speak, but we tend to call them accents.

[@claraphillips7900]

I'm constantly telling my cats not to look at me in that tone of voice. I have a mild Deaf accent, and in sign language, my friends and I talk about saying or hearing things the same way a blind person might say "I see what you mean"

[@marvinhumphrey4723]

Where do people find complete reference IPA sets fully describing accents? Searching informally, what turns up are a zillion incomplete introductory commentaries (including this video) which note a few items about one or more accents. These are helpful, but if you’re new to this, when you’re practicing it’s hard to know whether you’re unconsciously neglecting certain sounds and persisting with howler mispronunciations from your native accent because there are sounds you don’t even know that you need to pay attention to. Leaving aside other aspects about fully inhabiting regional accents such as slang and idioms, as I try to learn various accents it would be helpful to know more or less all the sounds there are to learn. I’d be happy to pay for such resources, but I don’t even know where to look. There are courses, there are sometimes dictionaries for the most popular accents like RP or standard American, but what I think I’d be happiest to find are succinct IPA sets for a wide variety of accents. My main goal is to be able to read books aloud with colorful and convincing characterization, so I’m especially interested in regional accents of native English speakers e.g. Dublin, Glaswegian, South Boston, South Carolinian…

[@tmcantine]

When i first started studying Japanese in university, I found it helpful to practice my pronunciation by trying to speak English as if it was written in katakana. Essentially I was speaking English with a Japanese accent. That way I didn't have to worry so much about Japanese grammar and lexicon, and could just focus on the pronunciation, how to hold my mouth, how to partition syllables, etc.

[@lilith8610]

When I was 18 I went to Glasgow to spend a few days with a korean friend of mine who was studying there, I was very confident in my english speaking and understanding skills (I'm french) yet when I left the airport and got in the bus, the bus driver asked me something... I still have no idea what he said to me, he repeated his sentence many times but I simply couldn't understand anything and he just ended up getting mad at me... Basically, the first few hours I spent in scotland, I was crying my eyes out and the first thing I told my friend upon arrival was " I don't f*cking speak english" Edit : My friend just casually responded "no, I think THEY don't"

[@aerynrowe5574]

Intonation was one of the key aspects of begginer russian for me, and honestly it doesn't really click until you are more immersed in hearing native speakers Intonation

[@sniffrat3646]

This content is right up my street thanks doc

[@ripdimebag42]

The "Yall might not believe this but I used to have a real thick Tennessee accent" had me belly laugh hard enough to shed tears dude 😂😅

[@cyberherbalist]

You mentioned John C. Wells! Wow, upvote just for that! He's a British Esperantist, whose book _Concise Esperanto and English Dictionary_ I own.

[@michaelvcelentano]

Great video! As an opera singer, we study this thoroughly and intensely in music school. Especially within our German study, we tend to also study some differences between Hoch Deutsch and Viennese Austrian pronunciations, or moments, like in Fledermaus, when a character needs to speak German with an “Hungarian” accent

[@bbyball16]

This is a brilliant video, and makes so much sense when explained in that way. What trips me up in learning a Mexican Spanish accent, is I can’t trill my R’s yet.

[@michmash7888]

I grew up in Central Connecticut (1970s/80s) and was teased relentlessly in elementary school for “having an accent”…but I never understood why. (My parents and grandparents were all raised in Central CT too, and they all spoke English as their first language.) Most of my classmates were pretty much in the same socioeconomic class and ethnic background as my family, so I still don’t know why my accent stood out so much to them! After college, I moved around to other parts of the US and people often ask me where I’m from, “because it’s not from here!” Anyway, I find this topic fascinating and am looking forward to the rest of the series! Thanks!

[@catomajorcensor]

What lexical sets don't address is different accents grouping some words under different lexical sets. For example, while "dog" in the New York accent is a part of the THOUGHT set, in British English it's in LOT/CLOTH (which have merged). There are also diachronic variations, such as older RP speakers saying "off" like THOUGHT but modern southern Brits like LOT/CLOTH again.

[@languagejones6784]

Agreed. But that's a rabbit hole I really didn't want to go down in a YT video. Maybe Geoff Lindsay could do it justice

[@vampyricon7026]

And that the lexical sets were based solely on GenAm and RP! Welsh English distinguishes yew and you and ewe, and those are all in the GOOSE set.

[@dennismurphy9957]

The best advice I got from my stage dialect coach was that each accent has a focal point. Standard American at back of tongue, Received Pronunciation (UK) in the lips, Jamaica heavily in the lips, etc. When he would say a word in his accent then repeated the word in the target accent, it often sounded like two different people. This not only helped me get the accent but also to come up with a voice for the character I was playing. Of course, I still had to learn about letter substitution etc.

[@beezany]

i've been working on vocal feminization and so i've been learning a lot of the gender differences in American accents. for example, women tend to have a wider range of intonation as well as higher pitch, although there are exceptions: a lower pitch with narrower range is perceived as "sultry." women also typically speak with the tongue more forward than men, although again there are exceptions like "gay voice" when men speak with a relatively forward articulation.

[@chrisbooker3349]

Thank you very much for making this video. I found it interesting and I hope you continue to do so. Have a nice day and I hope your dinner tonight is good.

[@cyberherbalist]

I can speak German, due to living in Germany for two years using it every day. When I returned to the US my Dad was interested in how well I spoke it, so he asked a work colleague who was native German to call me on the phone to assess my ability. He later told my father that he could tell I wasn't a native speaker, but couldn't tell what my native language was. I've been learning Spanish lately, and when I tried having a conversation with a native Mexican Spanish speaker, she said that my accent was not American at all. You'd think that I could speak English with a German or Spanish accent, but I can't do it. It's weird.

[@diordna7]

I was visiting a friend in Grenada, and she introduced me to a friend of hers from the small town she was based in. He said something, and I momentarily froze mentally. It had to be English, it sounded fairly well-spoken, but I couldn't make out a single word. I didn't want to be a jerk, so I found some excuse to ask him to repeat what he'd said. Still nothing. Whether it was different words, accent or rhythm, or all of the above, I was lost. At this point my friend stepped in and translated. A surreal experience.

[@marvinneiss-cortez2962]

You are so entertaining 🎉. I really enjoy your videos. You are such a nerd ( in the flattering way). Mazel tov ❤

[@lmunich]

Thanks!

[@languagejones6784]

Thank you!

[@TNGMug]

I'll never forget visiting Scotland when I was 18 and having my accent commented on, followed with a comment "I don't think wee have an accent in Inverness".. .... I assure you, yes, Scottish people have accents.

[@jack2453]

Thanks for the full list of lexical sets. It really explains the concepts and usefully distinguishes from phonetics. It will be very useful in commenting on future videos. The dimenson you miss is which set any particular word falls into, which can be unpredictable. In the UK it can also be a class shiboleth e.g. "room" is a [goose] for most of us, but a [foot] for posh people; likewise "poor" can be [north] or [cure] according to class - which goes the opposite way in England and Australia. Getting stuff like this wrong is the easiest way of seeing through an accent fake.... It always amuses that the American lyricist of My Fair Lady has an upper class English character rhyme "bother" (lot) with "rather" (bath/palm/start merge).

[@DaveLopez575]

This is an excellent learning experience. I can imitate some accents from other countries here and there. Not to make fun of them but it does help speaking the language correctly.

[@cd9062]

Thank you, this will help fine tune my Spanish study.

[@SamA-xu9gy]

What method will you use to improve?

[@monicabender3943]

I am terrible with accents not using them but hearing and understanding them. I have a processing issue, so if your sound and your mouth don't do what I expect I need a lot of time to get used to your way of speaking. I always knew this but it hadn't been a problem until I lived in a city with a large immigrant population and now I work with people who are at different levels of english and hundreds of accents. I feel bad because I say "what" and "pardon" and "one more time please" these days more than anything else. It will take time I'd love to learn more languages, but it turns out I need to focus on different versions of english.

[@GeezusMcGandhi]

Training my spanish vocal posture has been a long battle of this

[@kierstynsharrow1266]

Your Chris Hall shout-out made me laugh! He totally said that to me at Joe Coffee.

[@jenniferhunter4074]

I also noticed that the sounds produced, like you mentioned about the p, move with the languages. For example, french and german... very front of the mouth sound production. Meanwhile, Spanish is more to the mid/back region of the mouth. I also felt that French was a very closed mouth language (think muttering) in contrast to Spanish which felt like a more open mouth language. Especially the lip movement and the lower jaw degree of tightness. Think adiós vs. bonsoir where, for me, the air/sound was mid/back for spanish and front/flat middle of the mouth for french. The french, to me, felt very very close to the teeth with a tighter lower jaw and a tighter nasal 'scrunch'. I do not have words for it besides scrunch. North American english feels like a more opened mouth language but not as open as Spanish. And the southern American accents.. I always hear a trace of British in how they say their vowels.

[@evasenechal8735]

I am French Canadian native, and we moved to Belgium when I was 13 or so. The school setting was much more rigid than in Quebec. We had to vouvoyer teachers of course. So I am in the Hallway, and the physEd teacher is coming my way. As I get closer, I say: Vous allez-tu bien?? He cracked up and said in a thick Belgian accent « m’enfin ! C’est notre Nouvelle Canadienne! (No he did not end his sentence with « une fois » but could have!😂

[@Pr0p1k]

I am russian and I’ve been polishing my English accent for fee years. Especially the last 2 years as I live abroad and meet all kinds of foreigners. In the last year I’ve fooled a fair amount of people into thinking I’m american/canadian. Even some americans. I think I’m super close with consonants, but the vowels… Some people even say I sound australian, because I can never keep those vowels in a fixed accent, and I just fluctuate them around. The good part is, Russian is not really poor in vowels, (unlike for example Serbian), but those appear in specific places. So sometimes when I see IPA for a word such as back-[bæk], I recall words where dictionary says it’s æ in Russian (I know I might not have that same accent as there, but it should be close). Learning other languages definitely helps also. I noticed that English speakers are more susceptible to accents than German speakers, because even with my unstable German, people might think I am German.

[@jmcwill2002]

I moved just two counties south within the same state, Ohio, and was surprised by the different accents in the area. I'd always assumed I had no accent but now I can clearly recognize the specific regional accent of my hometown area. I am fascinated by accents and enjoyed the video. 👍

[@tina-marino]

Thanks, great tips! I AM 80% NICER AFTER SOMEONE COMPLIMENTS MY ACCENT.

[@kirillsukhomlin3036]

But what about rhythm? When I asked a specialist about Scottish accent, one of key things she mentioned is the specific rhythm.

[@byronwilliams7977]

Excellent. I had a revelation when my middle eastern friends would conduct themselves in a manner considered rude, however in hindsight it was most likely cultural/linguistic differences.

[@dodiad]

I’m a native New Yorker but have lived in California most of my adult life. I still have never gotten used to “lick in the mere” for “look in the mirror,” or people on radio call-in shows identifying themselves as a “first-time collar.” On the flip side of the coin, on a visit to Paris, someone hearing my French asked if I was German. She could tell I was foreign but misplaced the accent, probably because I have pretty good uvular r’s and French u and eu vowels (like German umlauted ü and ö).

[@tonybambino1445]

Nice video

[@ZackIsCody2024]

The last few people I helped with English all appreciated my “neutral accent.” That to me is the closest one can get to having “no accent,” but I know I still sound Canadian

[@Cerg1998]

The funniest story about an accent is probably the one about that one time when I was at a somewhat international presentation at my university. Even though that was in Russia, most people presenting something spoke English. So, when two Chinese girls started giving their speech, it took me a few minutes and a few attempts to read the accompanying Powerpoint slides (I have high myopia, so everything far away is blurry) to realise, that the girls were in fact speaking Russian. It got easier from there. The second funniest story also happened at university, when a guy asked my where I was from. I thought he was asking what I was studying, but it turns out, he'd assumed that I was a foreign student, which is weird, since I was local enough, for the hospital I was born in to be visible from where we sat.

[@HomesteadJapan]

Rural Appalachia, particularly in West Virginia, was the hardest for me to understand despite growing up a couple hours away. I remember that when my dad remarried, my step-mother's side of the family was from nearer the Ohio/WV boarder and just that distance was enough that I had new vocabulary (I remember pocketbook and commode as a couple of examples) compared to the rest of my family (mostly central Ohio).

[@88klac]

I quite agree with the basic vowel/consonant/intonation split as the important. But especially for foreign accents word stress can be an important factor for some languages. Hungarian speakers of English, for example, often have initial stress in words in English because this is the pattern in Hungarian. It is not so often the case that different accents in the same language have different word stress, but it can be the case for names, for example. The English north-eastern city of Newcatle has stress on the first syllable of the city's name in the standard British English accent, but on the second syllable in the local Geordie dialect.

[@lardgedarkrooster6371]

When I was in highschool, a kid from Guatemala had transferred to my school knowing no English. I was the only one around that was fluent in Spanish, so I volunteered to help him learn to play the guitar. I learned, however, that speaking and translating are two completely different skills and I suck at translation in real time. While I was mostly fluent in conversational Spanish, I knew very few musical terms like metronome, beat, string, tune, pegs, shift, pluck, etc. Furthermore, I was used to the Puerto Rican accent of my household and the "standard" Latinoamerican accent taught in school, but could not understand his thick, possibly rural Guatemalan accent at all

[@theimaginatrix7625]

As someone who wants to record podfics for certain fandoms, I really wanna master a few regional American accents represented in said fandoms without sounding like the worst mimic ever or like I'm mocking those with said accent. Also a particular Irish variant (If I try an Irish accent for too long I end up sliding toward my generic American accent without thinking and it's annoying to my perfectionist brain). I'm an Australian, so I can pull off UK-English accents fairly well, but regional US ones trip me up and I would like to not be tripped up. This series could be a _goldmine_ for me.

[@sjm42]

I realised I had an accent when I was about 12 - raised by a sole parent Anglo-Indian father, it was the fact that HE said some words 'funny' that led me to realise that I did too. He learned Urdu at school and I like to think (for reasons of sentiment not logic) that might be why when I watched the movie Ae Fond Kiss just 3 years after starting to learn Hindi I found the characters easier to understand when speaking their Urdu-Panjabi than when speaking Glaswegian English. It's also always amused me that while I'm constantly told by pretty much everyone I meet that my Hindi pronunciation is very good, I cannot imitate an Indian English accent like my cousins' at all.

[@modalmixture]

So where can I go to find the phoneme sets for various English accents?

[@1337treeckolol]

this is so useful. I'm not interested in anything in particular, I just want to support you.

[@maggieb6636]

My highschool French class had a field trip to Switzerland. One of the girls in my class was told that she spoke French with an Irish accent, and another girl had to have a classmate repeat everything she said because her American/Vermont accent was so thick that the Swiss students couldn't understand her. I thought I was speaking passable French until one of the teachers asked who my host family was. Who knew "Tanya" wouldn't translate! I still don't understand why they couldn't understand me.

[@boredincan]

"I don't have an accent" is a phrase that would only pass a Seppo's lips

[@lumbajak8739]

I'm from Montana, born and raised, both sides of my family have been here for generations. I'd say I'm an "thoroughbred" Montanan-Western American English speaker. And never thought anything of it, because I was surrounded by my fellow speakers. For a time I was living in Washington DC and had two roommates- one from Central California and the other from the Boston Metro Area. Anyway, I was absolutely horrified one day when my Bostonian/pahhk the cahh roommate told me that between myself and the Californian, I WAS THE ONE WITH THE ACCENT.

[@SimeonKristoffersen]

I'm Norwegian and I've lately been fascinated by the subtle differences between the scandinavian-english accents: Norwenglish, Swenglish and Danglish. I don't have the academic vocabulary to describe it properly, but there are distinct variations in tone and rythm between them. All three base languages are more melodic than regular English and brings that quality with them as a part of their accents. I've found basic English to be overall pretty rythmic, like you just accidentally sound like a Shakespearian sonnet sometimes, weheras the scandinavian languages are more melodic. Norwenglish seems to be the most chaotic one, swinging up and down seemingly at random to most English speakers. It sounds wild, depending on how bad the accent is. Swenglish is a little calmer but also more aggressive, like the language is leaning forward, almost forcefully. Danglish is the opposite, it leans back and the tonality comes off more lazy and slow. Danglish sounds like it's comfortably on the back-foot, building up until it falls off at the end of the sentence. Look up an interview with Norwegian rally driver Petter Solberg for the thickest Norwenglish accent ever caught on tape. Obviously, regional differences apply as well, and some have stronger accents than others, but I've had a lot of fun decoding the accents of my coworkers, who come from all over Scandinavia, but speak English as the work language. Still noticing new things every day :)

[@kerrypanes5759]

Many years ago I commented on a friend's Scottish accent. I told her I didn't have one. She then said, "You have a lovely Canadian accent." Since the internet became a huge resource I began researching accents. Pretty impressive.

[@BigDaveEnglishTeacher]

Try one on the Spanish accent found in the province of Cádiz, Spain. It's like no other Spanish around.

[@ThePhilologicalBell]

I'm British. One time I was on a date with this woman in Ireland, and she started explaining something. I understood almost nothing. She said "Oh I'm sorry I slipped into a bit of country there, I'll say it normal." She repeated herself, in a slightly more standard Irish accent. I still understood nothing. So I asked her to repeat herself, which she did, to no avail. I just nodded and pretended I understood.

[@Barfield-cg7iq]

Here's a thing. I live in the north west of England in Merseyside just outside of Liverpool. The accent is very distinctive (google it). I have a Romanian friend who has lived here for over 30 years. When she speaks 'normally' i.e. the RP English she learnt in school in Romania she has a very slight Romanian accent. But she can imitate a really strong Liverpool (Scouse) accent amazingly well and when she does she sounds 100% native speaker.

[@nicolerosen7957]

Typo: Scouse. Impressive as if southerners do the accent it doesn’t end well.

[@88klac]

Have you ever heard the Danish football player, Jan Mølby, speak English? He played for Liverpool for over 10 years and you would swear he was born and bred in Liverpool.

[@Barfield-cg7iq]

@@nicolerosen7957 Thanks. I've corrected it.

[@Barfield-cg7iq]

Yes, I know. He's still a legend in the region and he hasn't lost his accent. kzbin.info/www/bejne/aISnl52VhrWIms0si=GxD0ldv6tiTZt_67

[@Barfield-cg7iq]

@@88klac Yes, I have. I tried to put a link to a YT video of him speaking but YT deleted it as it doesn't like people posting links.

[@jldisme]

I received a scholarship to attend a prep school in Massachusetts. I quickly had to suppress my West Virginia accent because I was bullied a lot. The students were extremely wealthy and from many different locations. I'm not sure what accent I use. I noticed that I do slip in a broad A here and there. Bahk for back. When I'm speaking to people from West Virginia, my accent comes back automatically. I have to consciously keep myself from mimicking other people's accents when speaking to them. I am B1 in Spanish, and apparently my accent is so Guatemalan that people in Mexico don't like me much because they don't like Guatemalans. My grammar on the other hand...

[@KINGKAYLEB-vq2tb]

That pause got me 😭

[@josesolismusic]

Picture this, 1980s, Fort Dix, NJ, a Puertorrican just arrived from the island to start basic training in the US army gets two southern drill Seargents. one black, one white. Their accents are so think the poor kid, barely 17, who is barely learning English, cannot understand half of what either one is saying.

[@noelleggett5368]

In my accent, ‘paw’, ‘poor’ and ‘pore’ are synonyms, but ‘Mary’, ‘marry’ and ‘merry’ are quite different from each other. Many speakers of my dialect always sound like everything they say is a question. (Rising intonation at the end of a phrase is fairly common.) Apart from that, speakers of my dialect are often accused of sounding ‘flat’ and a little ‘nasal’. I pronounce th properly (interdental fricative), but ‘al’ in words can often sound like ‘ol’ (“oltar”, “olternate”). Can you guess where?

[@KevinJonasx11]

cool channel, definitely comes across as more factual than most the language channels I watch lol

[@languagejones6784]

Thank you! I love a lot of other KZbinrs' enthusiasm, but we might say it's not always tempered by fact checking. Hopefully it's clear when I'm making a joke versus talking linguistics. I'm always worried I'll say something like "Portuguese is Spanish spoken in French" and people will find a way to take it seriously.

[@KevinJonasx11]

@@languagejones6784 your joke/fact ratio is good for the genre of obscure youtube infotainment haha. now if only I can get rid of my 50% argentino 50% mexican accent mess lol

[@dws49]

Funny that you mention John C. Wells being famous for lexical sets. I only knew him as having been President of the Universal Esperanto Association, my dad worked with him there in the early 90s

[@iusearchbtw69]

For me was mimicking how the native speaker speak in Movie for example For Japanese learner, just watch Dogen videos and try to mimick him speaking I've been doing this for about 2month, it's not perfect but i can confidently say that my pronounciation and pitch-accent are way better than all my Japanese classmate

[@rufescens]

When my sister was in the army, she had a housemate from rural Kentucky. I don't know how she understood him! (We grew up in New York City.) I caught maybe one or two words per sentence. Beautiful accent, though! (And really nice guy.)

[@NekonataVirino]

Ha - when a video you are watching quotes an online acquaintance and you are like - is that really John Wells? This guy just called him a genius - I’m gonna tell him and make his day.

[@Joseph_Hovsep]

Intéressant

[@iamspencerx]

It really helps with the algorithm

[@VulcanLogic]

The human torch was denied a bank loan.

[@footballchannel1593]

Hey jones, i am native in dutch and can speak msa arabic like arabic teacher without accent because that was my first langauge if you want to know how i got it learned you hit me up. Further more i still pracitice it today. I can be funny because nobody knows on which country i live because i don't have a accent. In any arab country there is a accent in the arabic something it can feel close or even very far from the original langauge as if it is a diffrent langauge.😂

[@lyradicalunderscore3311]

Why have I never once considered the specific words I use a puff of air to say?? Mind boggling

[@CaioCodes]

I'm a Brazilian, but for the last 7 years I live in Portugal. It is the same language, but the spoken language is fairly "uncommon" for brazilians as we are not exposed to European Portuguese. During the first three months, I could barely understand things, so I would ask my colleague that used to sit in the same desk as I to translate what the teacher was saying so that I could understand. Fast-forward 5 years, and I was really confident that I could understand anything. I went to my ex-in-laws' house to the south of Portugal, and they had a t-h-i-c-k Alentejo accent. I couldn't understand shit. My ex had to translate for me. I felt like a kid again.

[@ericab3919]

Where do you find the info for these accents. Or, more specifically, where might I learn the vowel mappings for Taiwanese mandarin. There's memes about it, (yin-ying, Feng Fong, en eng) but some of the sounds I'm hearing I can't find anything online, and native speakers vehemently deny it (ta=ha, 等一下 squishing, etc). I think learning to speak the same way you hear helps your understanding, since you're not constantly translating. Anyway any tips?

[@languagejones6784]

Taiwanese mandarin is notoriously under-resourced, in part because nobody wants to admit it's real and different. I've got a good friend in Taiwan right now, and when I ask him, he doesn't even have good resources. We sat and listened to a few episodes of a TM podcast just to try to analyze it ourselves, and the level of INTRAspeaker phonetic variation is wild, let alone interspeaker variation with influence from other languages.

[@ericab3919]

@@languagejones6784 That's frustrating. The variation you notice I think is an attempt at code switching, since Taiwanese are taught "proper" mandarin with full retroflex consonants in school, then only attempt them in formal situations. Anyway for what it's worth, using pinyin, the stuff I've noticed living here that I can't find online is 1. dental consonants (d t c and ch(ch is pronounced c in Taiwan usually) are often simply dropped entirely , especially in common words, at the start of the sentence, or when the vowel on either side is the same. Ex "把他 ba ha, 計程車 jiong ce, 今天 jiyhian, 2. If 等一下 is used as a time word, it can be linked together, sounding like "dei a" or "deiya", but when used as a command, can't. 3. Nasalized terminal n, not sure the patterns, but n before m or b is always dropped, before vowels (ex反而 fan er）is Nasalized (or mouth-alized? They close the nasal passage) Finally the word 就 is almost always shortened, especially for 就是, usually sitting as a clitic in front of something. The other issue I have is I can't tell if these are normal, and mainland does them too, or if they're Taiwan specific.

[@ericab3919]

Also zh ch sh get put back in if the preceding word is j q x. 小時 is xiao shi but 時候 is sihou.

[@artugert]

The points you mentioned are not exclusive to Taiwan, and are all common in southern China, as well.

[@timseguine2]

I can't do a modern British accent because I think it is funnier to do a super exaggerated old fashioned RP (Full disclosure: I probably also do that poorly) or have fun replacing as many sounds as possible with glottal stops which inevitably turns into me doing less of an accent than an impersonation of Hagrid.

[@languagejones6784]

I LOVE a super exaggerated RP accent. Stiff upper lip and so forth

[@WestTexasCustomPC]

I’m originally from a small town kinda between Saint Louis and Memphis and it’s completely acceptable to say things “Ahm gah’n don tew Tha star I Hurd thems got some park Ron’s on sale don thurr”. I sound “country” but not really “Southern”. I’ve been in west Texas for a while though so it’s started to soften due to the Texas Twang being completely different and people not understanding me.

[@Veriflon88]

I'd be very interested in the "boring"/"neutral" midwestern accents and what makes people perceive them as neutral. And thanks for the video, it's great

[@newenglandgreenman]

I'm a native Northeasterner (greater New York City, but from a class background resulting in very limited regional pronunciation and something much closer to "standard" US pronunciation, with some formative years in New England and California, and now a longtime resident of New England, so that I end up with a "standard" US pronunciation with occasional mild regional features from the places I've lived). Okay, having given that background, I have to say that I don't find midwestern accents "neutral". I've been to different parts of the Midwest. Like everywhere else, people higher on the class scale have accents closer to the US standard, but blue-collar people from every part of the Midwest have strong regional accents, to my ear. In fact, there isn't any part of the US where blue-collar people do not have a regional accent, in my experience (and I've been to all but a few states, with the exceptions mostly in the South where accents are least "neutral").

[@DawsonWilson-hf9pw]

Random question that occurred to me while watching ; as an English speaker who studied Spanish in school I was taught that Spanish has five vowels that correspond to the letters aeiou. But when I listen to native speaker I perceive differences especially with the letter e. In the word “jefe”. The two e’s sound different to me. Am I miss hearing or is there really a difference?

[@chris_troiano]

My favorite story to tell as a sign I’d end up studying language variation was asking my first grade teacher in Staten Island why the worksheet said dog and frog were rhyming words. We were told us not to count on the spelling but to listen to the sound, so I did!

[@chris_troiano]

Trying to find discussion on how the sounds in these two words diverged (or if they even started out in the same place to begin with), I came across a NYT article that was too on the nose, from July 21, 1985. “New Yorkers have developed yet another set of pronunciations, some of them so peculiar to their city that only people who grow up with them can get them right every time. What outsider, for example, would know that choral is pronounced coral, but that coral is CAH-rel? Or that frog is frahg, but dog is doo-AWG; that on is ahn, but off is oo-AWF?” Quite an interesting piece. Labov and Shuy are both quoted extensively.

[@jtfritchie]

Years ago my family moved from Louisville, Kentucky to Columbus, Ohio. My parents are originally from Northwest Ohio and we moved south when I was in 5th grade, so I didn't grow up with a Kentucky accent and half of my neighbors were also transplants without the local accent. 10 years later when we moved back to Ohio, we didn't have the nasal short vowels of before. I was talking with a guy at the car dealership where I was working that summer when I heard the nasal vowels in his speech and commented that I noticed his accent. He was shocked and replied, "What? I don't have an accent!" with his nasally short a sounds. That's when it clicked for me.

[@eliezra83771]

To me this experiment is impossible because i am not consistent with those categories 🥲 I just speak randomly. Im italian living in france speaking english to french and british people and mostly to my indian boyfriend. I have genrally a mix of italian/indian cadence and pronounce vowels totally randomly depending on the moment but hey we understand each other pretty well so yay 🥰🥰🥰 I definitely have an accent but ...which one is it???😈🕵️‍♂️

[@Daniel-wi6sk]

Great topic ! Although sometimes I wish you could go a bit slower, so that we can have time to reflect on the point you just made… What’s fascinating is that there is a point where an accent in your own language becomes so strong that you lose immediate understanding. For me it happens sometimes with Canadian French (I’m not talking about joual). If, like me, you speak « standard » French, I.e. more or less the one spoken between Paris and Tours, the one that’s on French TV news most of the time, you can get in situations where you would need « subtitles » to understand French spoken in Quebec - not for a few minor differences in vocabulary, but really because of the accent !