> a heavy American accent
Any non-Americans want to chime in on what is a heavy American accent? I’m imagining heavy southern accent, but maybe this is something that can only be heard by non-Americans?
Any non-Americans want to chime in on what is a heavy American accent? I’m imagining heavy southern accent, but maybe this is something that can only be heard by non-Americans?
So I'd say a strong American accent to an Australian is the most divergent one, not one that somebody in US might consider strong.
Living in upstate New York I also frequently heard "oh, you have an accent" to which I always tried to explain "so do you", and several times I got the response that their accent was either neutral or closer to generic English.
It is amazing the subjective differences in how people experience accents, and how they feel about their own.
But one time I was at a wedding in Karlskoga and talked to someone I hadn't met before. I opened my mouth and managed to get half a sentence out before he interrupted with "Oh! You're from Göteborg!"
> ...which is like a mouth full of down feather.
This means speaking soft, muffled words - roughly the way you'd sound if you had your mouth full of something soft. Like feather. Or food.
Not a perfect analogy, but hey, works as a hash for an accent, at least among the people I know locally.
Peter Sellers called Americans "The Herns" [1]:
> Various American characters with the surname Hern or Hearn, often used for narration, outrageous announcements or parody sales pitches. The Goons referred to Americans as "herns", possibly because saying "hern hern hern...." sounded American to them, possibly because Sellers once said that a decent American accent could be developed simply by saying it in between sentences.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_The_Goon_Show_cast_mem...
Personally I'd rather have Americans "lean heavily on the R" than act like the letter doesn't exist (rhotic vs non-rhotic). I think it's another factor why American English is more popular than British English (besides the huge economic factor, the US economy being 5x the UK one), since their pronunciation is clearer and more explicit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhoticity_in_English
>Rhoticity in English is the pronunciation of the historical rhotic consonant /r/ in all contexts by speakers of certain varieties of English. The presence or absence of rhoticity is one of the most prominent distinctions by which varieties of English can be classified. In rhotic varieties, the historical English /r/ sound is preserved in all pronunciation contexts. In non-rhotic varieties, speakers no longer pronounce /r/ in postvocalic environments—that is, when it is immediately after a vowel and not followed by another vowel. For example, in isolation, a rhotic English speaker pronounces the words hard and butter as /ˈhɑːrd/ and /ˈbʌtər/, whereas a non-rhotic speaker "drops" or "deletes" the /r/ sound, pronouncing them as /ˈhɑːd/ and /ˈbʌtə/. When an r is at the end of a word but the next word begins with a vowel, as in the phrase "better apples", most non-rhotic speakers will pronounce the /r/ in that position (the linking R), since it is followed by a vowel in this case. (Not all non-rhotic varieties use the linking R; for example, it is absent in non-rhotic varieties of Southern American English.)
>The rhotic varieties of English include the dialects of South West England, Scotland, Ireland, and most of the United States and Canada. The non-rhotic varieties include most of the dialects of modern England, Wales, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. In some varieties, such as those of some parts of the southern and northeastern United States, rhoticity is a sociolinguistic variable: postvocalic r is deleted depending on an array of social factors such as the speaker's age, social class, ethnicity, or the degree of formality of the speech event.
> (rhotic vs non-rhotic).
:-)
Plus... American multinationals are somewhat close behind. If you want to get a good, well paying job at an American multinational, you have to speak English at least a bit, and you have to know it well if you want to move up the ladder.
It's not just the r's (in fact, some British accents are rhotic - around their South West, if I'm not mistaken?), there are all these glottal stops and whatnot.
But, from my observations at least, there are also big discrepancies related to social class. When I moved to the UK, I had no problem whatsoever talking to, say, a local librarian - but a plumber would be nearly impossible to understand for me, in the first months at least. I didn't really experience it in the US, certainly not to such an extent.
American accents are more familiar because of Hollywood, so they tend to be less surprising; and likely because a lot of them were actually developed by people who learned English as a second language, they are often exaggerate in effect, very clear, and actually more regular (particularly on names, where UK "rules" are anything but).
This said, "deep south" US accents, when pushed hard, can become as inscrutable as certain UK dialects.
> than act like the letter doesn't exist (rhotic vs non-rhotic).
Every language changes. Nobody is acting like "the letter doesn't exist", just occasionally that phoneme has changed or dropped in their dialect. Even in non-rhotic accents, an r in the orthography can indicate a change in vowel quality.
> I think it's another factor why American English is more popular than British English (besides the huge economic factor, the US economy being 5x the UK one),
I think the greater population, and the fact that the Hollywood content has embedded itself globally, has resulted in more exposure to American content (of which there is more of). Any dialect will sound clearer to you if you're exposed to it more often than others.
Regular Brits use their regional access, yes. And those can be much, much harder to understand than your average American accent. For precisely the same reason rhotic accents can cause issues, those regional accents tend to eat up sounds and sometimes entire syllables.
Specifically in my limited experience stuff like pronouncing t’s like d’s and soft back-in-the-throat r’s. “Budder” vs. “buttah”, for example. American vowels tend to sound larger as well in my experience.
I’d say something to a clerk, and they’d reply with “you’re an American!”
Yes, how could you tell?
You’re so loud!
Thanks?
[0]: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOgT48pM4GctCy-88GTDyyqyy...
It's a bit like saying that someone from rural Bavaria who speaks with a strong Bavarian accent has a heavy German accent while speaking German.
I also perceive Canadians to have "heavier" North American accents than Americans do. Some Canadians speak as if from the backs of their throats, with leaden vowels and really round r's. They also often overcorrect /a/ to /æ/ so "drama" becomes "dramma" (like the first two syllables of "Dramamine". And of course there was William Shatner's famous "sabotadge"...
Edit: another example: "door" => "DOH-ur"