Job Discussion Forums

[yaramaz]

Log and frog, cot and caught are both rhyming pairs for me and my Canadiana generica accent

[kattie72]

Mine's the "bland" Southern English accent which in class becomes "BBC English" but after a few drinks turns into Hampshire accent; The R sound gets thown in everywhere, thus "all right?" becomes "oor roit?" and "yeah" becomes "yairr"

[joe-joe]

I am a little surprised, quite frankly, that some on this thread have taken what appears to be an 'anti-RP' stance. The original question was 'what is you accent?', not 'which accent should be used in class?'.

Why would anyone assume that RP is the correct, and only accent which should be taught to students. I think many people who have learned English with those dreadful tapes in class which do use only RP, find understanding English on arrival in the UK practically impossible, as few people do speak RP. It's even true to say some people within the UK don't fully understand each other due to the huge dialectual differences.

A variety of accents should be taught as in Britain there is a multitude of accents in daily use in the various locations around the country. And as for other English speaking countries, again why on earth would a Canadian, American, Australian and so on, ever want to speak RP? Such an accent doesn't exist in their vernacular in the first place. But then that's just my opinion as a 'plummy mouthed numpty'....... Perhaps it's just a case on inverted snobbery, who knows?

[Wolf]

Klingon. It's the fangs.

Seriously, I don't know. I think how I sound has altered over the years.

[johnslat]

I've pretty much "lost" my Boston accent (broad A: I pArk my cAr in the HArvArd YArd) over the years, although it resurfaces whenever I'm back there. But I still tend to say "Cuber" (Cuba) and "Africer" (Africa).
Regards,
John

[Steiner]

Log and frog DO rhyme in American English.

I've got a standard American accent, too--from the Midwest. I don't change pronunciation for the classroom, except to be sure to enunciate more clearly on the normal reductions.

Oh, and I always pronounce double Ts as a D. As in butter=budder, little=lidl.


Well, my electricity just came back on, over 12 hours after I typed this post, so now I'm sure the bit about log and frog rhyming has already been said.

[Capergirl]

[dduck]

I have some sort of Scottish accent. I've met the occasionaly accent expert who managed to place which part of Scotland it comes from, and I've also spoken with other Scots who almost refused to believe that I'm Scottish. It really depends how much exposure a person gets to different accents as to whether they can detect subtle accents. However, no English person thinks I'm English.

I often surprise myself when I hear my recorded voice, or when students pick up my accent 100% (I wish I could do that in Spanish!) Recently, I've been working on producing an American accent, and I seem to be making some progress with mimicing Australian accents. Occasionally, I demonstrate a Laandaan aksin, which can be as freakish as some New York accents. Once when I was drunk, "me and a friend" affected Northern Irish accents while out in Edinburgh. It was just one of those things.

Iain

[ntropy]

Accent? What accent? I speak "normal" English, of course. It's everyone else who butchers the language. Seriously, bland newscaster English of the mid-west American sense. I'm Canadian.

Interesting, Capergirl, your Cape Breton and UK comment. I used to work in Yemen with a lovely man from Cornwall who was in the British Navy most of his life so had pieces of accent from everywhere.

We were watching a documentary about a UFO incident in Nova Scotia, I believe, and he just about fell off his chair. Said the locals accent was spot on for a few miles down the road from Cornwall.

[joe-joe]

Hmm.... Cape Breton(ese?) sounding like South West English; now that I would like to hear! Any comments Capergirl?! Perhaps people living in Cape Breton are simply a group of decendants of some Cornish fishermen who got lost......

But on a more serious note, I think the point Capergirl made about using less slang and 'idiomatic' language when working in class is a good one though. I think this is more of an issue than the teacher's accent in class; I guess it goes back to the old grading of language.

This actually leads me on to another point; have any of you out there in TEFL World found your English has become a bit stilted/artificial in your time teaching? I found I have become very self-conscious about the way I speak since I began teaching; for example, I've even sometimes found myself correcting my own grammar and questioning my own use of tenses! I also ended up 'degrading' my language at times in order to be able to communicate when in certain locations; speaking a kind of pidgin which was a mix of English and local words. Comments?

[Capergirl]

[Lynn]

Okay, I gotta ask, what hell is a PR accent?

And to the DDuck man, when I met you, you didn't have a very strong Scottish accent? Were you doing that on purpose? Or is that from teaching ESL? Or had you picked up a New Yawk accent?

As for my accent...whatever it is, I hate it. I sound so funny. I left home when I was 17. I went to a college in Hawaii where most of the students were non-native speakers of English. My roommate/best friend was from Hong Kong, my boyfriend and his friends Japan. My third year I went to study in Japan. I came back to Hawaii and my roommate was a Korean woman who spoke no English, but had lived in Japan for 15 years, so we spoke Japanese. I had always been an ESL tutor or worked as a Japanese tour guide.

Eleven years of working/living with non-native speakers of English has taken a toll on my language. I admit, my vocabulary is so poor, it's embarassing. My writing is also poor. When I was in high school, writing was my best subject. I had such a way with words. Now, everything I write/say is so simple, too simple.

Americans always ask where I'm from. Even my very own brother looks at me and says, "where'd you get that accent?"

[joe-joe]

Lynn

An RP accent is sort of like an old fashioned British 'posh' accent. You may hear actors/actresses like Jeremy Irons, Charles Dance, Helena Bonham-Carter and Joely Richardson speaking it. The Queen, 'Gawd' bless her speaks a very extreme form of it, (well extreme in my opinion anyway ). Some call it 'well-spoken'.

And Capergirl, I liked the 'cockney' spelling you used! Most observant of you

[Lynn]

Thanks Joe-joe. I did a quick dictionary search and this is what I got:

Re�ceived Pronunciation
n.
A pronunciation of British English, originally based on the speech of the upper class of southeastern England and characteristic of the English spoken at the public schools and at Oxford and Cambridge Universities. Until recently it was the standard form of English used in British broadcasting.

[dduck]