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Comment by jessriedel | Hacker News Reader

Can anyone please characterize that accent/cadence to me?!? It reminds me very strongly of an accent I've been hearing on tech support telephone call frequently in the past 5 years but never recalled hearing before that. I have a pet theory that it's actually from a new technique for more rapidly teaching intelligible English pronunciation to folks learning it as a second language. But maybe it's just an accent from a region that only recently started hosting lots of tech support calls?

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Sounds like a Northern to North Eastern European accent to me. But I will say that YouTubers have their own accents that permeate different genres of videos as well, which can add ambiguity.

My favourite accent tidbit is the English voice of the Shinkansen in Japan. It is voiced by an Australian, imitating a Canadian, who was imitating a British accent. The result is a totally ambiguous accent that sounds almost disconnected from geography. I say that as an Australian with a british twang.

> But I will say that YouTubers have their own accents that permeate different genres of videos as well, which can add ambiguity.

That's like the modern version of the "mid-Atlantic" accent.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-Atlantic_accent

Fairly sure that's a native Dutch speaker. e.g. "Thingss" rather than "thingz"

Hmm, you could be right of course, but I had a few Dutch friends in grad school and this did not remind me of their accents at all.

I lived in Rotterdam for a while before internet was so widespread.

It's a Dutch person. They were always good at English and sounded like this.

Nothing new, engineered, or special about it, that's a bog-standard Dutch accent.

I would not consider this representative of any Dutch accent I've heard from living in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, or Nijmegen. Nor even for the strange Zeeland Belgian accents. This sounds like an odd Russian Dutch English combination.

The author's twitter account: Location: "Amsterdam & Everywhere"

https://twitter.com/DANNYonPC

100% Dutch accent. I wish we could pin it down to a teaching technique, this is just how we sound.

Dutch.

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