Is Your English Accent British or American?

I said the sentence in Spanish and it gave me 62% British. I tried Portuguese, and it gave me 55% British.

If it's machine learning-based it probably just doesn't know how to handle weird invalid input like that.`

Probably just make refinements to the model they're using to classify samples.

The sentence is obviously taken (with some modifications) from the sample used by the speech accent archive ( http://accent.gmu.edu/howto.php ), which was constructed specifically to include every relevant phonological context in American English. (Not that this was necessarily achieved, but it was the goal.)

Leave them on random people's voicemail, probably.

"My voice is my passport, verify me."

I am too and only got 65% British.

It's actually a famous sample; I remember seeing it in linguistics classes. It just happens to contain a lot of words that reveal differences between English dialects.

I'm American and I get mixed results between 89% American and 53% British on my normal accent. My pronunciation of "call" and "to" seems to tip the scales towards British and most of my other words are not strongly highlighted.

I can reliably fake a British accent although I seem to get stuck on frog and store still sounding American. When I do the stereotypical Texas style "yee haw" accent I get 99% American.

I have so many questions for you right now.

- what does Finnish rally driver sound like - how did you meet Dame Judy Dench - where are you actually from?

It's pretty funny how language roots show. Finnish and Hungarian are the same family of languages and apparently Dame Judy picked up on it!

Like Ari Vatanen?

> Born in Washington DC and that is the southernmost point of my childhood. Father born in England to Eastern European immigrants. Mother is Italian American from Pennsylvania. West coasters semi-frequently think my accent is European, but nobody from back east or from Europe says that. I got 84% British.

That's really interesting. I have a very similar background (and from Washington DC) and I got 84% British, too. It rated my pronunciation of the word "call" as ~100% British. That's pretty interesting if it can regionally categorize people.

I grew up in Connecticut and it finds my pronunciation of "call" and "to" British, but still manages to find the right answer overall. For another datapoint, I guess.

No obvious explosions, but it doesn't know what to make of it. First submission: 18% American, 82% British, second submission: 68% American, 32% British.

I tried putting on American and British accents and could easily get it over 90% either direction, so at least it's working for those.

It tells you which words you said it considers british and which it considered american by their red / blue colour.

It is also a binary choice. Like the hotdog/not hotdog app, you can't expect an AI to tell you much if it only has two options to chose from.

English is British by default, that's just geography.

My nothing was American (just).

I'm American and it put me at 66% British...

Edit: and now 99% British every time. Methinks the site is broken.

I was able to get 90% in either direction at will.

American: over-pronounce your Rs and try to get the æ sound wherever "ah" is called for. (I guess this is a great lakes accent)

British: imitate the intonation of BBC broadcasts I occasionally hear syndicated on npr stations.

Heh. In my regular accent (American) I got 90% American (although, I got 99% American when I spoke normally and didn't purposefully enunciate). But my God-awful British accent got 98% British.

It picked up on the parts of the generic British accent (London accent?) that us Americans think about and exaggerate when mimicking a British accent—tall vowels, especially the "O"s and "A"s.

My normal accent is British but I affected a crappy American accent and got 98% first try. I think this will classify you as American if you just put in rhotic Rs and ham up the vowel sounds.

Here's the trick - the "r" is not as important as that ghastly "o" sound that becomes like an "aaaaaaaa" in General 'Murrican.

Sound legit. Noisy: American. Subtle and understated: British

Cambridge Consultants is a /very/ different firm to Cambridge Analytica, if that's what you were thinking? It's a well regarded contract engineering consultancy rather than a data analysis company.

I've lived in London my entire life and the result flips between very American (~80%) or slightly British.

I pronounce "ask" with a long "a" so I'm not sure why it keeps flagging that pronunciation as American either.

It's somewhat the contrary if I remember correctly. It's the British accent that changed after the split.

The Welsh sound eerily similar to the southern American twang. Except for colloquial words you wouldn’t think it was out of place if you heard them in Kentucky.

They began to evolve separately as soon as the Mayflower arrived. And American accents have been influenced not only by a broad variety of English immigrants over time by also by immigrants from other parts of the world.

For instance, the "standard" (TV broadcaster) accent originated in areas settled largely by German and Scandinavian immigrants. The "New York" and "New Jersey" accents have elements of Irish and Italian and Yiddish accents, and New York accents were influential due to being common among entertainers through the middle of the 20th century.

And accents can evolve quickly. The New York accent you'll hear in films from the 1950s is very different from the one you'll hear today if you go deep enough into Queens to find strong accents.

That said, IMO moderate Scottish accents sound extremely similar to the "standard" American accent. I think it's actually that the cadences are very similar, which for me at least is what makes other strong British accents (other than RP) often difficult to understand.

There's not really any such thing as an "American accent" or a "British accent," particularly when you're looking at the evolution of accents. Accents tend to evolve based on regional tendencies; what people refer to as "General American" (effectively the Midwestern US, but not including the Northern Cities Vowel Shift) and "Received Pronunciation" are accents that lack any recognized regionalism markers, such as the Southern drawl or the New England non-rhoticism.

Accents tend to shift based on contact with other linguistic groups and mixing from different accents that levels out pronunciation. You'll note, for example, that Canadian has more in common with the US accents than it does with British accents. I don't know the historical development of accents very well, but some US accents (I believe the southern one in particular) are closer to 16th and 17th century English than modern British accents. This isn't necessarily atypical--modern Icelandic is the closest in pronunciation to Old Norse, while modern Norwegian is closer in pronunciation to older varieties of Danish. Small, isolated communities are going to be able to better preserve pronunciation in a dialect.

I’m American but I scored 83% British with a crappy Cockney accent ;)

I am from Liverpool and got 98% British using my normal accent

I doubt it's that nuanced actually. My best RP gives 99% although all my British friends would classify that as 'evil nazi overlord' owing to my Swedish accent.

Other than some slang, I wouldn't call any of these accents mutually unintelligible.

My awful Estonian accent rated me 99% british.

Not hotdog ? https://youtu.be/ACmydtFDTGs

Haha I am Irish too, 94% British, 6% American...can I ask where you're from? I am from Dublin.

Californian who has lived in Dublin for 5 years. 82% American, though attempting a south Dublin accent gave me 52/48.

Use Safari.

How? I tried it in my best city accent, my native suburban accent, and my best Rochester accent, and got >95% American each time.

Huh? Why would you expect your accent to be more American if you grew up in a Commonwealth county?

Have you seen the voice controlled elevator sketch on Burnistoun? Give the poor algorithm a break! ;)

:-) I must say though, that for a non-native English speaker, Aussie sounds indeed much more British than American.

I was rated as 71% US ;) I wonder if the various accents of Australia rate differently or whether I'm influenced too much by foreign media.

My Kiwi accent is 96% British. Is that more of less British and an Aussie accent?

Are you from Melbourne or Adelaide?

I got 70% British for an Irish accent.

so update your iPhone.