Conference thebay::joyoflex

    I enjoy listening to a "Maine" or "Yankee" accent.  Closely associated
with country humor.  "You can't get they-ah from hee-ah."

    Re: "dialect" vs. "accent"  If push came to shove, I'd say that a dialect
is a variant of a language, including unique words and/or phrases.  An accent
would strictly be a (unique) way of pronouncing words, syllables, diphthongs,
etc.  In common (provincial American) usage, though, I think they are used
almost interchangeably - "dialects" being almost exclusively a foreign matter,
and "American English" having a few "accents", including Maine, Suhthuhn,
Brooklyn, New Joisey, Balimore, Bahston, Lon Gisland, et al.

    I hate the Yankee accent and the longer I live here, the more
    I don't like it.  It's harsh, grating, and used mostly for
    advertising these days.

    Other than that, I don't have much feeling on the matter.
    
    --bonnie

    I would say that the most popular accent in the U.S. is the Midwestern
    "Hi, I'm from nowhere" accent that most news programs get people to
    speak. It's the de facto American R.P. 
    
    I loathe a Boston/Massachusetts accent, but I rather like the northern
    New England Yankee accent. I agree with Bonnie that it's getting
    increasingly difficult to find it except in an exaggerated form for
    advertising. I recently was at an inn in northern New Hampshire and was
    disappointed to find that the inn-keeper had a "Hi, I'm From Nowhere"
    accent and hailed from Tennessee. Sigh.
    
    I like the north-midwest accent that you hear from Minnesota, Montana,
    Alberta, and Saskatchewan. Garrison Keillor has a good one, if you've
    heard him, as does Bonnie, if you've heard her. I especially like
    the very flat pure-vowel "o" it has. 
    
	Jon

    I have heard tell that when foreigners are taught English (American?)
    they learn it with an "upper New York State" accent, which is probably
    saying that it is the least offensive of them.  I like a light southern
    drawl, myself - or a soft Maine accent.
    
    As for foreign accents, Pierce Brosnan (Remington Steele) has a
    light, pleasant accent.  I think accents serve to set people apart
    from the norm - and it's amazing how many people of the opposite
    sex are attracted by an accent.  My father (an actor) had a book of 
    dialects at home, and I was trying on a french accent one day in
    the supermarket - just for fun.  After a few aisles of it I got
    kind of bored and began talking normally.  My boyfriend gave me
    an alarmed look, and said, "No, no, go back to the accent." in a
    hushed tone.  I said, avec accent, "What, you want people to think
    you are shopping with une femme fatale francaise?"....
    
    He answered, "yes."
    

    chacun a son gout.
    
    -Jody
    

    I have been lucky enough to have lived in many parts of the USA
    and where I haven't lived, I have traveled to for business and pleasure
    with very few exceptions.
    
    Re: a few generalities.
    
    Southern Accent:
    
    There are many.  If you know what to listen for, you can tell the
    difference between, teh different regions.  Texas for example is
    usually very exaggerated.  I guess if you are from Texas, you want
    people to know it.  I currently live in Georgia, and there is a
    difference between North GA southern and South GA southern.
    
    The ever popular midwestern Accent:
    
    It is a little difficult to tell the difference between Chicago,
    Minneapolis, Milwaukee, and Detroit (and surrounding areas), but
    it is quite different than the NEWSPEAK we hear on the networks.
     That is more like the Saint Louis or Des Moines IA accent.
    
    The Northeast is loaded:
    
    Boston and New York for example.  Within sections of those cities,
    the accents change.  The Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens each are distinct
    not to mention Long Island.  BTW, there are parts of Florida that
    sound as if you were in Brooklyn or Long Island.
    
    We don't hear much about the Nevada accent, or the Seattle WA accent,
    or the Montana accent (does anyone really live in Montana?)  I have
    been to all those places and there doesn't seem to be much of an
    accent of any kind.
    
    Is there an Alaska accent?  I've never been there
                              
    

    Re accents:
    
    From young childhood, and due to my father being an Army officer,
    I've traveled extensively.  So much so that all the regionalisms
    in my speech have canceled out.
    
    I guess you might say I've a "signal-averaged" accent. :-)
    
    Steve Kallis, Jr.

    re: .5
    
    I'm from Montana -- wanna hear my rebel yell?  How 'bout if I sing
    "Get Along, Little Dogie?"  

     There is a local software specalist that I would have sworn was
    from around Georgia. Turned out she was from Missouri. The accent
    was really nice to listen to. Sort of a mellow Georgia twang.

    My hubby reminded me that when we went west a couple of years back
    to visit my family, he noticed that the people in Wyoming had a
    considerably different accent than the people in Montana. The
    Wyoming natives have a standard cowboy drawl, similar to Texans
    though not quite as pronounced.   (Historical factor:  in the
    cattle-drive days, cattle were often driven from Wyoming to Texas
    or vice versa, so there was a lot of movement and settlement from
    one end to the other.) 
    
    The Montana accent is somewhat less pronounced and somewhat
    softer.  It relaxes me just to hear it.  I am told that there's a
    fairly heavy Scandanavian and Central European influence on
    Montana pronunciation, intonation, and vocabulary.  Even though
    agriculture is a major industry, it was always farming (the
    central Europeans) and the lumberjacks (Scandanavian) and the
    miners (central European, again) who settled it. 

    --bonnie

    I find I really don't have a preference with American accents.
    I get amused by some of the extreme ones. When friends and I
    go to Maine, we often affect Downeaster accents for the amusement
    value.
    
    Last year, when I was driving through Ontario, around the Great
    Lakes, it was almost all I could do to keep from laughing when I
    discovered that there really *were* people who sounded just like
    the Mackenzie Brothers. Some friends from Winnipeg have a light
    "Canadian, eh" accent that sounds kind neat without being extreme.
    
    For UK accents, I like some light British accents. Irish accents
    are nice, too, though my favorite is Scots. When I first saw the
    Bill Forsyth film GREGORY'S GIRL, Dee Hepburn's thick accent almost
    turned my knees to butter.
    
    --- jerry

    I prefer the standard midwestern newscaster dialect, which is also
    my own (:^)).  A lot of the television news personalities come from
    the midwest.  It's easier than having to teach them how to speak
    correctly (double :^)).  
    
    I find that a lot of dialects make people sound less
    intelligent to me and it takes me a while to get past that.  I'm
    probably offending someone terribly.  
    
    I think the Chicago dialect sounds cute but not particularily educated.
    The dialect you hear in central and southern Illinois sounds like a
    bad imitation of a southern accent; VERY annoying.  A real southern
    accent is very soothing.  Someone with a southern accent could be tell
    me to jump off a cliff and I'd probably just smile and nod.  I find
    some of the east coast dialects very hard to understand.  I asked
    a Frenchman about whether he thought that too, since I automatically
    assumed (perhaps wrongly so) that he'd learned "unaccented English".
    He said he didn't really notice the difference.
    
    As for the difference between a dialect and an accent.  I learned
    that a dialect was a different way of pronouncing your native language
    (negro dialect, southern dialect, etc.).  An accent is the way someone
    speaks when they are not speaking their native tongue.  Therefore,
    a French accent would be the result of a French person speaking
    English.  An English accent would be the result of an English person
    speaking English in America :^), etc.
    
    I think some foreign accents are very charming.  We had a house
    built by an Irishman last year and I wonder how much extra leniency
    we gave him because we were so charmed by his Irish lilt.
    
    Spd

    	One of the nicest accents is Herefordshire. It is West England
    enough to be slow and relaxing, but near enough to Wales to have an
    interesting lilt.
    
    	(Just been arguing with my son... Devon and Cornwall are Wester
    England, but then they are so far West that they are almost foreign).

    One of the nicest Scottish accents to listen to is the Inverness
    variety. It is said to be one of the best in the country from a
    pronounciation viewpoint.
    
    I must emphasise that although Scotland is small, there is still
    tremendous regional variation in accent. I come from Fife, and when
    I went to university in Aberdeen (95 miles north of my home) it
    took me almost a week to be able to understand what the woman in
    the hall of residence shop was saying. Broad Aberdonian is something
    else entirely! For example, instead of "How are you?", and Aberdonian
    will say "Fit like?". An American friend, James A Davlin the fifth(??)
    used to love saying "Fit like?" to the locals.
    
    
    Ian.

    re: .11
    
    You're not exactly offending me terribly, because after all these
    years I'm somewhat used to it, but I've had people tell me I
    shouldn't have been awarded a master's degree in English (with
    honors on my thesis, no less) until I learned to "speak properly."
    
    Another difficulty I've had with my native manner of speaking is
    that in Montana, there is a wide gap between the colloquial --
    what is accepted in speaking -- and what is written.  My normal
    speaking patterns include a lot of slang, deliberate
    mispronunciations for humor ("that was a real swave move,
    clumsy"), and less careful grammar (I'll say "he don't" when
    speaking even though I'd never write it that way). 

    People judge you on that.  I've had to learn a whole new way
    of speaking just to gain acceptance from Harvard- and
    Smith-educated peers.  They tend to not even hear your idea
    if it isn't properly packaged.  
    
    --bonnie 
    
    p.s.  Now that I think about it, the Yale and Dartmouth grads
    are worse.

    Bonnie - 
    
    Come to think of it, I think some of those east coast dialects are
    kinda snobby.  :*)
    
    Susan

    re: .15
    
    I always say, if you're going to offend somebody, you should
    go ahead and do a good thorough job of it.  
    
    :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) 
    
    --bonnie, not really offended

    When I was a lad, I went to school in Endicott NY for six months.
    My fellow students had a great time teaching my brother and me the
    local accent - milder than NYC, but with the same nasal quality. Pretty
    nasty. At the end of our time there, we travelled down the East coast.
    People we met heard our accents, and asked "Are you from the South?"
    "Nope." "Australia?" "Uh-uh." "New Zealand?" "Keep trying."
    Strangely, as we moved south, the first question became, "Are you from
    the North?"
    
    The (Boston academic?) accent of Carl Sagan (Carrrul Sayguhn) has
    me in stitches, especially when he starts talking about "Yooooman
    Beins" or "The Coze-moss".
    
    Andy
                                                               

>    The (Boston academic?) accent of Carl Sagan (Carrrul Sayguhn) has
>    me in stitches, especially when he starts talking about "Yooooman
>    Beins" or "The Coze-moss".

NO, NO, NO, NO!  As a native Bostonian, I think I can safely speak for
the entire city in disclaiming anything to do with Cosmo-Carl's accent. 
What you're hearing is pure California.  My guess would be Berkely, or 
not far from it.
					>>>==>PStJTT

    reply .18
    
    <buzzer> Wrong-o. We Californians don't claim him. He for sure is
    no Bezerkley-ite(Berkeley). Maybe Los Angeles will claim him, they
    don't belong here either.

    My husband lived in the Endicott NY area (Johnson City, actually)
    for several years, and acquired a layering of the local accent on
    top of his native Queens.   Mine is, as I mentioned, Montana.
    
    When we were travelling in Australia last summer, nobody guessed
    we were Americans.  They all thought we were from some other part
    of Australia -- when we were in Cairns, they guessed we were from
    Perth,  when we were in Perth, they guessed Sydney, and when we
    were in Sydney, they guessed Queensland. 

    They were always greatly amused and surprised to find out we
    were from New England -- most of them didn't even know where
    New England was.  But that's another story.
    
    --bonnie

    I think Carl Sagan is from Brooklyn.  His accent is probably the
    result of self-pygmalionism.
    
    Bernie

    If memory serves, Mr Sagan's antecedants are:
    
    	New York City (Brooklyn seems right)
    	Stanford or CalTech
    	Cornell Univ.  (Ithaca NY)
    
    -dave

    Just what has everybody got against Carl Sagan anyway? I find his
    accent most entertaining and amusing. 8^} 8^}
    
    Ian.
    
    P.S. But then, he is definitely not from Inverness.

There are very few 'natural accents' that really grate on me, except those
which are  so distorted that it is difficult to recognise the original language
For example: Deepest Geordie, Scouse, Cockney etc where the accent is overdone
to exclude outsiders..

What I don't like to hear is actors faking accents - and not doing it well.
Remember Dick van Dyke in Mary Poppins? I believe he was pretending to be
English. There are similar problems faking Irish Scots etc. An accent is a
total use of language - and even one slip bursts the bubble.

I also hear a lot of English popstars singing in what they think is an
American accent. What does that sound like to Americans?


	Steve

>>I also hear a lot of English popstars singing in what they think is an
>>American accent. What does that sound like to Americans?

    It depends - some are very good; Tracey Ullman does a better set
    of American accents than most American singers/actors, for instance.

    I think most pop stars do a pretty good "American".  It always 
    surprises me to hear Mick Jaggar talk.  (Wow! he sounds English!)
    
    Spd

    When I used to work in the US (1969 - 1971, Maynard) I used to travel
    to Pittsburgh once a month. Somebody once asked "say, you from New
    England?"

    Well everybody's beaten me to it, so there's not much point in replying
    except for the question at the end.  I was going to say that the
    accent I find most amusing is [most] Americans trying to put on
    an English accent, especially Cockney (viz. Dick van Dyke).  I was
    also going to say that when in California, people assumed I was
    from the East Coast.
    
    The question: what accent does Bette Davies have?  As far as I know
    she's American yet sounds British to me.
    
    Jeff.
    
    PS: My favourite American accent?  Well, I was called recently by
    a young lady in the Digital office in Charleston, S.C.  Made my
    day.

    > The question: what accent does Bette Davies have?  As far as I know
    > she's American yet sounds British to me.

    She has what some call a mid-Atlantic accent ( no it doesn't mean
    she was raised in the Sargasso Sea ).  It's the sort of accent that
    is an upper-crust "Hi, I'm from nowhere" type of thing.  A couple
    of examples:  Peter Jennings on ABC news,  Pierce Brosnan, actor,
    almost every well educated Brit.
    
    BTW, my personal fave is a light Aussie accent.  I recently worked
    for an OEM who did business with a component manufacturer down-under
    and the receptionist/secretary just about melted my socks.
    
    duane

    As a matter of fact, there is no single "Boston" accent.  A native
    of Worcester will have trouble understanding a native of Brockton
    (both in the "Greater Boston Area").  The most grating accent in
    the area has to be the "Attleboro" accent, closely followed by
    Cranston, RI.  When I attended college in RI back in the '50's,
    it was possible to tell when you had walked into Cranston (a suburb
    of Providence) merely by listening to people on the street; the
    accent literally appeared at the city limits.
    
    BTW, my favorite accent in the US is the lightly southern accent
    spoken in North Carolina.

    I wouldn't agree with Worcester being in the Greater Boston Area, but
    the Cranston accent is still there, and still as grating as ever. 
    
    	Jon

	Dialectally (is that a word?), I am a mess -- I was born in
	England, my mother's from Boston, my father's from Philadelphia,
	I grew up in the South, went to high school in Pittsburgh, and
	have been back down South mostly ever since.  I used to have a
	linguistics professor who liked to listen to me talk just so
	she could pick out funny things (mostly Southern overlaid on 
	my mid-Atlantic accent).  I say "y'all," "ont," "eye-ther,"
	"on-velope," "did you not," etc.

	As to favorite accents, I guess it all depends on what you
	mean by "favorite."  I would say a British accent (i.e.,
	standard Masterpiece Theatre RP) still has a lot of class in
	the States.  I would think, though, that the standard-
	Midwestern-newscaster-sounds-like-they're-not-from-anywhere
	sound is basically our RP, or standard.  For those who find
	this accent boring, certain Southern accents are usually
	favorites.  I particularly like the rather plummy, almost 
	British accents you hear in places like Charleston, Richmond,
	etc.  Some Southern accents, though, sound awful twangy and can
	be really grating.  I haven't been exposed to a lot of Southern
	accents outside the Old South (Virginia, the Carolinas, etc.),
	but found Tennessee and Kentucky accents to be somewhat this
	way.  Probably the least prestigious accents in the US are
	the urban ones (New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Chicago).
	Most people say these accents tend to make the speaker sound 
	a little uneducated.  To me, however, they sound too quick and
	forceful and are a little ungracious.

		-- Cliff

    I like almost all strong accents.  Sorry, I couldn't choose one - it
    would end up being whichever I'd most recently heard.
    
    I have a slight grudge against Boston accents because I hear them
    mostly in sentences like, "Wuddafugga maddah witchyuh yafuggin idjit!" 
    On the other hand, I often think about a question I heard a few months
    ago at a Boston party, "Whehz duh beh fum?", which was first
    interpreted as asking for directions to the loo, then as some reference
    to a teddy, and finally explained as curiosity about an imported beer.
    
    Ray

I agree with those who hate fake accents. I especially hate the fake Irish
accents so often heard in American movies and TV. A typical line might be
"Sure, and begorrah! I'll be seein' the leprechauns on Saint Patty's day."

I've heard a REAL Irish accent, and it's quite beautiful.

I don't mind the fake American accents I hear on British shows, such as those
imported by PBS. (PBS=Primarily British Shows) I've never heard a real accent
like them, but I find it entertaining.

From the earlier notes, I know what they think of American attempts at a
'British' accent, as if there is only one.


Steve

    Two days in a row now, I've heard people on the news pronounce "huge" as
    "yuge". It struck me as odd, but surprised me even more to discover this
    was a pronunciation listed in the dictionary. Is there a particular dialect
    associated with that? It made me wonder about other missing "h"s. I always
    thought "an 'istorical" was just a grammatical error, but is it dialectical
    too? It's probably safe to say that American dialects in general drop the
    "h" in "herb", but what about the "h" in "homage"? I grew up in Upstate NY
    and I pronounce the "h", but I've noticed that here in California, the
    newscasters say "omage".

    John
    

    "Yuge" is probably a regional pronunciation -- it's a common
    pronunciation in New York and New Jersey.
    
    "An historical" is also regional -- many years ago, while constructing
    sets for "The Music Man," a banner used in the show said "An historical";
    when I pointed out to the scene painter, he told me that this usage was
    (and for all I know, still is) common in the Midwest (TMM is set in Iowa).
    
    "Homage" is one of those words that floats between its original French
    pronunciation and a more American pronunciation.
    
    The shift in pronunciation of words is not new, and is ongoing.  Its
    was this very consonantal shift the Grimm brothers were trying to track
    in their collection of folk tales.

    BTW, you can tell if someone is affecting the French pronunciation of
    "homage" thusly -- the French version drops the "h" and places the
    stress on the second syllable; the American version retains the "h"
    and stresses the first.

    To tell the truth, my hearing isn't subtle enough. I mean, I can detect
    a French pronunciation, but not that the stress is on the second
    syllable. I've never been able to detect stress in French. The French
    pronunciation of "hommage" sounds like two equally stressed syllables to
    me. I basically mimic the accent by abandoning altogether my
    inclination to stress syllables. It's a practice that seems to have
    served me well on my trips to France.      
    
    John

    Until recently (this century) speakers of the King's English would
    say 'an historical' as often as 'an hotel' or - indeed - 'an honest
    man'. Also 'an union' 'an uniform' etc. This was regional only
    to the extent that a region (Oxford, Cambridge, and the royal court)
    defined 'the King's English'.
    
    b

     re.-1
    
    an historical, an Hotel, e.t.c are still being taught in schools in
    England ( at least where I come from in the westcountry).
    
    The H is not totally silent though( but it does not sound like an H ).
    I was taught that you dont drop the H  - you swallow it.
    
    
    Mark.