I'm back! First two weeks of school under my belt. Both of my professors have very strong Asian accents this semester, and I'm studying Bilingualism, so I will have fun observing them. One has a Japanese accent, and the other has a Mandarin accent - though I don't know whether or not that professor is from Asia or from a big city with a China-town. (Yes, there are parts of the US where English isn't spoken at all!)
Jecka wrote:Shiromi wrote:Jecka wrote:Shiromi wrote:Jecka wrote:Shiromi wrote:My guess – California, probably Northern California, and probably coastal. How close am I?
Pretty far actually. Coastal...I live about an hour and a half from the shore, so kinda close?
Did you misspell "fair" or am I way off?
You're way off. I live in PA and have never been to anywhere further than Michigan (State wise).
And I've never been farther east in the US Nebraska. Also, accents are more tightly grouped in the eastern US, they've had more time to diversify than in the west. I'll have to look up accents there and see if I can more accurately place it.
Though pop culture has a way of spreading language bits like wildfire, and you don't have to live in a place to pick up part of the accent, since accents don't come from the ground, they come from the people that speak them.
At least I got the country right!
Yep!
Also, I think I speak the way I do because I learned most of my English from TV and my ESL parents. So I always assumed I had a bit of an accent until Nini, my younger sister, told me one day that I didn't. *was disappointed*
Okay, I now know why you sound like you're from Northern California. Western Pennsylvania also lacks the that vowel. Apparently the northern tip of New England are missing that vowel as well. That was the main reason I guessed that you were in the Western US.
Some information on the Cot/Caught merger.
You probably wouldn't get much of your accent from your parents, except in vocab you only use at home. As a child, you got your accent from the people around you, and your parents are only 2 of them. Because of school and socializing with neighbors and friends and so on, you'll speak English like they do, not so much like your parents do. But, topics that you only really speak about at home, things involving chores, cooking, cleaning and what honorifics you use for your relatives - those you'll get from your parents. For example, I can my grandmother, the daughter of Italian immigrants, Nonna. Her mother we call Nonni, and her father Nonno. My German great grandmother is called Uni, (even though she's not my uni, she's my mother's uni... the name stuck.) And I have a great great grandmother that we all call Oma to this day.
“Well guys, Kamite here, Kamite
, and I’ll be joining y’all for the ‘Share Your Voice’ thread.”
/wɛɫ ˈɡaiz kəmɪˈti ˈhɪɹ kamiˈte lakɑˈme ɛn ˈaal bi ˈdʒojnn al fɹ ðə ˈɕɛɹ joɹ ˈvojs θɹɛʔ/
“As many of you know, I’m also the host at DTT Movie Nights occasi(onally) per now and then.”
/az ˈmɛni jəˈnoʊ aamˈmoɛzo də ˈhos ɑʔ ˌdiˈtʰiˈtʰi ˈmui ˈnaɪts oˈkeɕe pʌ ˈnaw n ˈðɛn/
“And I’d like to officially announce the movie night coming this Monday night on the first at 14 hundred Eastern time.”
/ɛnn aad ˈlaɪk tu oˈfɪɕɕiali əˈnaus ðə ˈmui ˈnaɪʔ kəˈmɪn dɪs ˈmʌnde ˈnaɪʔ anðə ˈfɹs æ ˈfoɹtin ˈhʌnɹɛʔ ˈistɹn ˈtaɪm/
First thing I noticed was the two ways you pronounced your user name – one the way a English-Speaker might assume it’s pronounced based on the spelling, then how you pronounce it, along with a short phrase that could have been another language, one that I’m not familiar with. So, you’re probably bilingual to some extent.
You used “y’all” and pronounced –ing as a long N or as –in and used /aa/ for "I", so probably from the Southern US. The retained Rs make me think Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah... south-western, non-coastal US, basically.
Your first language is one that doesn’t have very complex consonant clusters intervocalically or word-finally (“also” /ɛzo/, “hundred” /ˈhʌnɹɛʔ/, “host” /ˈhos/, “first” /ˈfɹs/) but doesn’t lose double consonants the way that English does (“I’m also” /aamˈmoɛzo/, “officially” /oˈfɪɕɕiali/). Your language probably doesn’t has aspirated voiceless stops, because the only time you aspirated any voiceless stop was in “DTT”. You didn’t diphthongize long vowels very often, and your “eye” diphthongs were either long As or all out /ai/s. And finally, you like to put stress on the last and second-to-last syllables in words. There are a lot of languages that have these features, but because of the way "officially" was pronounced, it probably is a Romance language (Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese) I'll go out on a limb and say, connecting it to the Southern-US, where there are a lot of bilingual Spanish-English communities, probably Spanish is your other language.
More to come later, I have homework due tomorrow that I need to finish.
Rolls off the mouth, doesn't it? /sarcasm
