Your accent

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

Your accent

Your Usual Table wrote: It's possible I've just got a tin ear for accents. That friend of mine from Sunderland that I referred to - I genuinely annoyed him when I told him I couldn't distinguish between his accent and that of a Geordie and despite your informative description on the previous page I don't think I would be able to discern a Californian accent. I know what the Texan accent sounds like (everyone does) and that of Boston and New York but the accents from the rest of the USA tend to blend into one for me.

bloody dubliners.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

Your accent

seand wrote:

2 Augher or Clogher

A lawyer
B docker
C profer
D power

E None of the above. Aw-her and Clo-her. Soft O sound in Clogher like in, er, soft.

My accent is pretty neutral Irish, I believe (though obviously Irish to a non-Irish person). My parents are from the south east and north west of Ireland but neither have strong accents and both moved around a bit in their early adulthood. I survived 3 years in Belfast without suffering the ignominy of picking up a northern accent, though that was in the relatively cosmopolitan university environment. Well, as cosmopolitan as you can get in Belfast in the 1990s.

I would have gone with a CH. Clogher is from clochar, the irish word for convent. And Augher, is Eochair.

[Sam]

Your accent

Your Usual Table wrote:

Ha ha, no, my accent is definitely closer to The Dude's.

Related side discussion: does everybody read OTF posters' posts in imagined accents? I do.

No, I have a fairly neutral "net voice", for want of a better term, that I hear whenever I read text online.

Same as YUT for stuff online, although when I'm reading books if the narrator is from an identified place (as opposed to being your generic omniscient bodyless third person narrator) I do read it in the accent of that place if I know what it sounds like. This isn't something I can stop myself doing, and is very probably a contributing factor the fact I'm reading A Brief History Of Seven Killings so fucking slowly.

The exception to the neutral net voice is for people I've met - so steveeeeeeeee, Gramsci, Wouter etc. all talk to me in (what I remember as) their real-life voices on here, but the rest of you sound like my default internal reading voice.

[ad hoc]

Your accent

My accent was a sort of generic middle class Cambridge-ish accent (it didnt really have the undertones of Norfolk that your full on Cambridge accent has) with a few words (pronucniation and vocabulary) that came from my Sheffield accented parents. Over the years I think it's become if anything even more unremarkable, partly because I think I subconsciously slightly modify it every time I have lived in a new country with the goal of making it more intelligible. This is also the case with my vocab and syntax - I've cut an awful lot of idioms out of my speech, something i realise whenever my mother talks to my kids and I have to help them out with all the idioms that she has no idea she's using.

My younger daughter who is to all intents and purposes bilingual has recently started gaining a mid Atlantic accent as she spends half her time following various people on YouTube, at least half of whom are American. (Prior to this point she pretty much had my accent as mine was the only English she heard for the vast majority of the time). She recorded her own YouTube clip recently and it was all "super awesome" and "anyways".