Most of us have trouble with accents. Whether we’re putting on a comedy voice for friends or trying to adopt a Parisian French accent, it’s a bit of a struggle.
Meryl Streep has done Australian, Italian, Danish, and a host of other accents over her career, and describes it as “the easiest thing I do”. She adds “the kid part of it is copying a voice I’ve heard”. Can language learners take tips from her?
To some extent: Imitation is a good way of starting off your accent efforts. Perhaps try watching a movie with your favourite actor talking in their native language and emulating them. After a while though, it will be time to develop your own voice in your target language, so stop imitating and just talk!
Which state are you from? Do you love your accent?
CNN recently asked people around the country to read out a standard text so that their accent could be evaluated. The common myth is that regional accents are becoming homogenised in our global media age, but linguists and the report seem to disprove this. CNN’s report also asked people to comment on their perceptions of their own accent and how they think others view it.
Some of the strongest opinions came from iReporters with “country” accents: Southern or Western. These accents are among the most stigmatized in the United States, and people who possess them have a wide range of views, from pride to annoyance.
“I hope that when others hear me speak, they hear me, not my western twang,” writes iReporter Sarah Beth Boynton, who was raised in Salt Lake City
Boynton grew up singing with her family and got sick of hearing that she should only sing country music because of her accent.
“I have made a concerted effort to speak with as little ‘western twang’ in my accent as possible,” she revealed. (Source: CNN.com)
Sadly it seems that discrimination against some regional accents still exists and also extends to international accents. A 2010 study from the Unviersity of Chicago found that people speaking with a ‘standard’ American accent were seen as more credible than those speaking with a ‘foreign’ accent.
An interesting article on Slate.com looks at whether the new iPhone’s speech recognition software can handle different accents.
The question is particularly important since the phone has the capability to be used in any country in the world. And the answer is yes, due to programmers ‘training’ the system. This is done by feeding in lots of audio and then typing in what is said – the software then ‘learns’ to recognise different forms of pronunciation.
From the article:
Take, for example, the plosive consonant T, which sounds one way in the word tree and another way in the word plate—and that’s just in one dialect. When software engineers are working on a product that will be used by people around the world, they include recordings in different dialects and from non-native speakers of English in the training. To stick with the T example: British people tend to pronounce the T sound in butter much more clearly than Americans, who swallow it. Eventually, the program establishes a kind of bell curve for the phoneme, and it will interpret any sound whose frequencies and other physical characteristics fall within the parameters of that curve as a possible attempt to produce that phoneme. (Source: Slate.com)
The software then uses the curve to guess what a word is when it is not pronounced clearly. Pretty cool huh?
Having praised British actors for their convincing American accents a couple of posts ago, now I’m going to highlight a slideshow that mostly criticises American actors for their terrible ‘British’ accents.
First of all, I’d like to point out that there is no such thing as a ‘British’ accent. What people generally mean by ‘British’ is English. There’s wide variation in English accents, just as there is with American accents, but that’s another post. I think Americans (in particular) tend to think of two different types of English accent – either the type spoken by the Royal Family, or a Cockney, as attempted by Dick Van Dyke. Which, incidentally, is apparently the worst accent of all time.
Take a look at the slideshow – which American actor do you think has the best accent? My vote goes to Renee Zellweger for Bridget Jones. But special mention should go to the lovely James McAvoy – he’s not American but you’d never know that he’s Scottish from his perfect English tones.
Over at the Dialect Blog they’ve listed their top 10 American accents done by non-Americans. The post is based on an article at USA Today which looked at American accents by non-American TV actors.
The two lists are united in choosing Hugh Laurie (House) and Idris Elba (The Wire) as having excellent American accents. Having never seen The Wire, I can only comment on Hugh Laurie’s accent, which I find a little odd. To me it sounds American-adjacent; I recognise that it’s supposed to be American but for me it’s just a bit too odd sounding. I do agree with the Dialect Blog though about Laurie’s portrayal of a different type of American, it’s refreshing to see this in amongst the bland and stereotypical characters we see on a lot of shows.
Having occasionally tried an American accent myself, I can attest to the difficulty of switching from your native accent (good thing I’m not a professional actor!). Who do you think does a great job with accents?
A woman in England has woken up to find she now speaks in a French accent.
Kay Russell lay down while suffering from a chronic migraine, and upon waking found she spoke with the new accent. The condition is known as foreign accent syndrome (FAS) and is extremely rare.
Ms Russell says the loss of her native English accent has affected her badly – losing confidence and her sense of identity.
“A lot of people come up and say: ‘What a lovely voice you have,’” said Russell, who has lived with the condition, of which there are only 60 recorded cases worldwide since 1941, since January. “You lose your identity and an awful lot about yourself. I feel like I come across as a different person.
“It’s not just my voice I miss. I would love to have my old voice back obviously. But it goes way, way beyond that. It’s the person I was – the person I want to be.
“I rang up a friend I had known since I was a teenager and the last time I had spoken to her I was speaking in my old voice. It took me a while to explain it was me.” (Source: The Guardian)
Language learners often aim for a ‘native’ accent when speaking their target language. I wonder if this aim is to make them feel more like the person they think they should be in that language?
Watch a video of Ms Russell here.
I found a cute reference if anyone is having difficulties understanding their Southern brothers and sisters – A Glossary of Quaint Southernisms.
Not sure I agree with the author that the southern accent has “almost been successfully eradicated by the excellent Southern school systems” – last time I was in South Carolina it was alive and well! Also a friend from that state seems to think that the words in the glossary are not Southern but from Texas… Anyone else agree?
The New York accent is familiar to us through movies and television. But many believe it is in decline, and Heather Quinlan is determined to record its variety.
Quinlan is a native New Yorker and filmmaker and is recording the accent for her first documentary, If These Knishes Could Talk. Many believe the accent evolved from Irish, Jewish and Italian immigrants, but in fact London is where the accent originates, according to sociolinguist Prof William Labov.
“Back about 1800 all the major cities in the eastern seaboard of the United States began to copy the British pronunciation of not pronouncing the final ‘r’ as a consonant, saying ‘caah’ instead of ‘car’.
“But New York didn’t imitate London directly, there were quite a few changes in the vowels so that the New York City dialect began to go in its own direction still following that London pattern of r-less speech.”
Another giveaway that someone is a New Yorker is their broadening of the vowel “a”, saying “awe-ful” instead of “awful”, for example. (Source: BBC News)
With New York City constantly changing, the accent is evolving too. According to Prof Labov, it’s because of the decline in white mainstream speakers and the growth of Hispanic and African-American populations, which have their own dialect. Quinlan is not ready to abandon the old accent though:
“People think New Yorkers are gruff and demanding and short-tempered and that’s kind of how they feel about the accent, but once you get a bit underneath you realize that there is a lot of chutzpah and heart and character and that’s what I want to try and come through.”
There’s currently a lot of controversy in Arizona over the removal of teachers with accents from classes with English language learners.
The reasoning behind the removal is that English-learners should have a good model of how to speak the language, and heavily accented and/or ungrammatical teachers do not provide this. This has attracted heavy criticism from many angles, including the question of how to determine who has the ‘right’ accent.
It seems that officials may need to review their stance. A new research study from Israel shows that “it may be easier to learn a foreign language from someone who teaches it in the same accent as your own”. Published recently in the Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, the study was conducted by professors from the University of Haifa who all had an interest in the effects of accent on language acquisition.
The sample size of students at the University of Haifa was adequate and similar enough in composition to test the accent hypothesis. Sixty participants were chosen, aged 18 to 26. Twenty were native Hebrew speakers; 20 were from the FSU; and 20 were Israeli Arabs who had started learning Hebrew at around seven years of age.
In the study, the researchers made recordings of Hebrew phrases where the last word was recorded with one of four different accents: Hebrew, Arabic, Russian or English. The students were then tested to see how long it took for them to recognize the Hebrew word in one of the four accents.
They found that the Hebrew speakers could decipher Hebrew words adequately regardless of the accent in which they were spoken, while the Russian and Arabic speakers needed more time to understand the Hebrew words presented in an accent foreign to their own.
The researchers feel that additional research is needed to determine just how much extra effort is involved in the attempt to process both an unfamiliar accent as well as new material.
“This research lays emphasis on the importance of continuing investigation into the cognitive perspectives of accent in order to gain a better understanding of how we learn languages other than our native tongue. In Israel and in other countries where the population is made up of many different language groups, this understanding holds great significance,” they write.
While many foreign language programs pride themselves on teaching students a second language in its true and native accent, this new study suggests that English taught to Mexican students as a second language, for example, can be taught just as well by a Mexican teacher speaking English, as by a native American who’s been speaking English since birth. (Source: Israel 21c)
