Archive for Accents

iRabbit

There are a number of videos in this series, some of them several years old, but I don't think we've been exposed to them yet on Language Log.  They are quite hilarious and linguistically sophisticated, so it's worth listening to at least one.

Read the rest of this entry »

Comments (16)

A seasonal song for Bill Labov

At the end of Paul Krugman's latest substack post ("This Is Not a Serious Post", 12/24/2024), he gives us a link to a seasonal song, with the note "Some relatives from my parents' generation really did sound like that". The song is "Winter Wonderland", from The Roches' X-mas Show in 1990.


Read the rest of this entry »

Comments (5)

Affected brogue

Having just come back from two weeks in London and Belfast, this article is particularly germane for me:

"The Irish and Scots Aren’t Fooled by Your Fake Accent:  Some cultures are better than others at spotting impostors. The skill could allow them to pick out outsiders trying to infiltrate their groups."  By Eric Niiler, WSJ (12'16/24)

I love to hear Scots and Irish speak, although often I cannot understand all that they are saying.  Twenty and more years ago, the head circulation librarian at my university had such a mellifluous lilt that I would sometimes check out books when she was on duty just to hear her sweet tongue, but I had no idea which particular variety of Scottish (I think) she was speaking.

Read the rest of this entry »

Comments (24)

Accent bias

"Why tackling accent bias matters at work:  Wall Street banks and big City law firms among employers addressing potential discrimination" by Pilita Clark, Financial Times (7/16/24).

If the polls are to be believed, the UK parliament is going to look quite different after the July 4 general election. But there might also be a big change in the way it sounds.

The last election in 2019 produced a parliament dominated by Conservative party MPs and 69 per cent of them spoke RP, Received Pronunciation, or BBC English, the accent long deemed the most prestigious in the UK.

Among the Conservatives’ Labour party opponents, however, only 37 per cent spoke like this.

With some polls predicting a Labour landslide, the halls of Westminster could soon ring with very different sounds.

Yet one aspect of parliament will probably stay the same. If history is a guide, the new crop of MPs will still sound posher than the people who elected them, because less than 10 per cent of the British population speak RP.

Read the rest of this entry »

Comments (70)

The perception and construction of Hong Kong identity via the quotation of non-standard Cantonese

Assertively spicy and conspicuously Cantonese

That's almost a contradiction in terms, because Hong Kongers are not very big on spicy food and they generally are not very good at cooking it either.

Photographs of walls in a popular chain of special Yunnan style spicy noodles in Hong Kong:

(Facebook)

Read the rest of this entry »

Comments (2)

That mystifying, baffling Mid-Atlantic / TransAtlantic Accent

The same as Gideon, the legendary LetThemTalkTV presenter of this edifying video, as a child I too was deeply puzzled by how some of these famous American actors sounded so British.

Read the rest of this entry »

Comments (13)

Super Bowl rhoticism

The most linguistically focused of this year's Super Bowl commercials:

Read the rest of this entry »

Comments (11)

Cancel your taem sher

Driving to work this morning, I heard an advertisement on the radio that left me mightily perplexed till the last 5-10 seconds when I finally figured out what the speaker was talking about.

He had a thick southern accent and kept talking about how bad it was to have a "taem sher".  The first word sounded like it was between "tam" and "tem", so I give the makeshift transcription "taem".

I had no idea what he was decrying, but it was something very bad for "you and your family", so bad that apparently it could bankrupt you.  Moreover, it was something that was very hard to get rid of.

Read the rest of this entry »

Comments (21)

The changing accents of British English

King’s English and Cockney replaced by three new accents, study finds

Britons depart from overtly class-based post-war speech epitomised by either clipped vowels or working-class dialects

By Charles Hymas, The Telegraph, Home Affairs Editor 

I vaguely recall an earlier study from about ten years ago that came to similar conclusions (including the emergence of a "multicultural" accent).  It's not surprising that differences would gradually diminish, especially under the influence of enhanced, pervasive mass communications and increased population mobility.

What we see, though, is that, as the older, established accents wither away, new ones arise among various shifting cultural, ethnic, and social regroupings.

Remember the Valley Girl accent, which people used to talk about a lot ten or twenty years ago?  Where is it now?

Read the rest of this entry »

Comments (35)

English accents

Comments (6)

Irish accents

"Lost in translation — navigating accents in a changing world"

Joe Horgan, Irish Post (8/7/23)

An engaging story:

WHEN I first started associating with English people I had to translate when my father spoke to them. I’d grown up in a very large Irish community in an immigrant area in an English city and it wasn’t until I went away to a northern English polytechnic that I really got to know English people.

When they met my dad he would speak and they would smile and look worriedly at me and I’d say he’s asking if you want a cup of tea and if you’ve eaten.

Read the rest of this entry »

Comments (8)

Euro-Americans speaking North Korean with native fluency

This short video claims that these two men speak perfect Korean with a Pyeongyang accent.

 

Read the rest of this entry »

Comments (5)

In North Korea, it's a dire crime to speak like a South Korean, part 2

This is a language war that has been going on for years, and there will never be an end to it, so long as there is a communist North Korea and a democratic South Korea.  It is as deadly as a shooting war, because people die for using the language of the enemy.  I'm not talking about the content of their speech, but rather its very nature.

North Koreans face execution for using South Korean idioms

The Times (6/30/23)

How does this work out in practice?

North Koreans who use the “obsequious” accent and expressions of South Korea face execution under a harsh new law aimed at eliminating South Korea's growing influence on the language used by its communist neighbour.

Read the rest of this entry »

Comments (13)