EGKangaroo
Tail-bumps for all 'roolovers!
- 398
- Posts
- 12
- Years
- Age 28
- the Netherlands
- Seen Feb 8, 2014
My accent has virtually travelled all over the globe it seems. I've deliberately changed my accent a number of times just through practicing the phonemes of a dialect I want to learn, which also helped me understand that there is no such thing as speaking accentless English (or any other language for that matter), unless you are a mute.
I used to speak with a pretty flat New Yorker/Mid-Atlantic accent, partly due to how I learnt English primarily through watching the telly and playing video games. I spelt everything like an American too. However, my English teacher got fed up with me about that, and she often mocked me openly in class for speaking the way I did. She only barely didn't deduct points off my tests for spelling colour without a u, so in that case, my accent went mid-way between American and British, AKA Mid-Atlantic. Englishmen would comment I sound American, and Americans would comment I sound British, or worse, Canadian.
Overtime, I started fooling around with the International Phonetic Alphabet, and I got into amateur linguistics. I got into conlanging a bit and tooled with grammar, phonetics, and all sorts of things. I was nowhere near as skilled with it as I am now, but it was fun. That's when I practiced phonetic realisations in Canadian English, which was only a stone's throw away from the American English I already knew. All it took was monophthongising 50% of my diphthongs and raising my "ou"s and bam: Torontonian accent. Why? Because my English teacher hated it, whatcha gonna do about it?
A couple of years ago, my interest in the Oceanic accents grew. I already knew much more about linguistics, loved Australia, and felt the need to crank everything up to 11. I tried practicing Australian phonetic realisations, then accidentally made a pit-stop at Southern English English, and dove right into a South Australian dialect afterwards. The result was that I spoke an awkward mix between Scottish, Estuary, and South Australian, though I kinda liked it. I kinda forgot how to flap my t's in intervocalic positions like Australians usually do, and my broad a's were much more open like it would be in Scottish. Presently, those British and Scottish influences have subdued, and I can't say they are that much part of my accent anymore. I do speak a very broad variant of Australian now, with every feature of Australian present in my speech. It might annoy some, it might not, but at least I don't raise my pitch yet at the end of every sentence like it's a question? Because that's more annoying than a musquito buzzing close to your ears? I've actually fooled a lot of people who thought my accent was genuine.
As for what happened to my Dutch, it's far less interesting to talk about. I was born close to the area of Rotterdam, and never really noticed how offensively broad my accent really was until I was 10, when my family moved to Tilburg, and I was teased relentlessly for my pronunciation of the r in some positions. Given that I've lived here for 8 years now, I've taken the middle route, and I ditched my Rotterdammer accent for an ABN accent. Basically, I have the perfect voice to narrate Dutch movies.
I really love a lot of accents. The thing about them is that each is so unique, and have such interesting linguistic features that it's difficult to hate any. Some of them have very interesting grammatical features, or a kind of sound to it that rings awesome to the ears (or really funny in the case of New Zealanders pronouncing six). I just love every English accent.
Except Lancashire.
That accent can burn. :3
I used to speak with a pretty flat New Yorker/Mid-Atlantic accent, partly due to how I learnt English primarily through watching the telly and playing video games. I spelt everything like an American too. However, my English teacher got fed up with me about that, and she often mocked me openly in class for speaking the way I did. She only barely didn't deduct points off my tests for spelling colour without a u, so in that case, my accent went mid-way between American and British, AKA Mid-Atlantic. Englishmen would comment I sound American, and Americans would comment I sound British, or worse, Canadian.
Overtime, I started fooling around with the International Phonetic Alphabet, and I got into amateur linguistics. I got into conlanging a bit and tooled with grammar, phonetics, and all sorts of things. I was nowhere near as skilled with it as I am now, but it was fun. That's when I practiced phonetic realisations in Canadian English, which was only a stone's throw away from the American English I already knew. All it took was monophthongising 50% of my diphthongs and raising my "ou"s and bam: Torontonian accent. Why? Because my English teacher hated it, whatcha gonna do about it?
A couple of years ago, my interest in the Oceanic accents grew. I already knew much more about linguistics, loved Australia, and felt the need to crank everything up to 11. I tried practicing Australian phonetic realisations, then accidentally made a pit-stop at Southern English English, and dove right into a South Australian dialect afterwards. The result was that I spoke an awkward mix between Scottish, Estuary, and South Australian, though I kinda liked it. I kinda forgot how to flap my t's in intervocalic positions like Australians usually do, and my broad a's were much more open like it would be in Scottish. Presently, those British and Scottish influences have subdued, and I can't say they are that much part of my accent anymore. I do speak a very broad variant of Australian now, with every feature of Australian present in my speech. It might annoy some, it might not, but at least I don't raise my pitch yet at the end of every sentence like it's a question? Because that's more annoying than a musquito buzzing close to your ears? I've actually fooled a lot of people who thought my accent was genuine.
As for what happened to my Dutch, it's far less interesting to talk about. I was born close to the area of Rotterdam, and never really noticed how offensively broad my accent really was until I was 10, when my family moved to Tilburg, and I was teased relentlessly for my pronunciation of the r in some positions. Given that I've lived here for 8 years now, I've taken the middle route, and I ditched my Rotterdammer accent for an ABN accent. Basically, I have the perfect voice to narrate Dutch movies.
I really love a lot of accents. The thing about them is that each is so unique, and have such interesting linguistic features that it's difficult to hate any. Some of them have very interesting grammatical features, or a kind of sound to it that rings awesome to the ears (or really funny in the case of New Zealanders pronouncing six). I just love every English accent.
Except Lancashire.
That accent can burn. :3
