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From: peter@statsci.com (Peter Schumacher)
Subject: Re: Dutch and English accents
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References: <D8rGGz.5FM@midway.uchicago.edu> <24MAY199512174401@cc.weber.edu> <3qt757$3dg@gordon.enea.se> <D9rt2x.6nJ@actcom.co.il> <3r54io$b3p@nic.wi.leidenuniv.nl> <3r6lnq$1n3@pheidippides.axion.bt.co.uk> <rte-0906951433220001@mac-118.lz.att.com> <3rgfmn$958@cville-srv.wam.umd.edu> <rte-1206951353530001@mac-118.lz.att.com>
Date: Thu, 15 Jun 1995 11:17:39 GMT
Lines: 60

I mixed up who said what, so these citations are not from the same person
or even in chronological order anymore. Sorry.

>> : Robert goes over the top, but it is fair to say that the language of US
>> : television comes close to representing the speech of circa 220 million US
>> : and Canadian speakers of English (with another 50 million or so speaking
>> : accents more basically different). ...

Depends on what you mean by "close". I can for example tell an American or
Canadian anglophone apart within a minute or two of them opening their
mouths. One doesn't need to wait for characteristic vowel giveaways to do
so. Canadian English is more rapid and clipped, and has more of a lilt to
it; American is broader and slower. For a start. Are we still "close"?
Where is that hypothetical line?

If your point was that US TV English is closer to the speech of those 220M
than BBC English (which is _not_ RP) is to working-class London, let alone
Midlands, York, Scottish or Welsh accents, then I agree. But I always get
upset when people lump all of us North Americans together linguistically.

>> Don't forget Peter Jennings and 
>> Morley Safer, who still "betray" their Canadian roots.

>Barely.  How likely do you suppose it would be that a European could tell
>a US citizen from an Anglophone Canadian?

Whether a European can tell us apart or not is quite irrelevant to the
issue of how different our speech is or is not. Does my inability to
distinguish between Bavarian and Austrian German, or Amsterdam and Belgian
Dutch, or Serbian and Croatian -- provide any information about the
differences between those pairs of accents/dialects? Clearly not.

>Perhaps it's because I'm from Michigan, but I find the speech of Toronto
>less different from my speech than that of Cincinnati.  I once conversed
>with a guy from Toronto for 15 minutes before I realized he was Canadian. 

Hi guy. I'm real curious about where in Michigan you're from. I grew up
in Windsor, across the border from Detroit, and the Detroit accent is one
of the most striking and obvious to my ears. _However_, I've talked to
other people from Michigan, and found them to have less of an "accent" --
meaning of course that we talk more or less the same.  That Michigan <ae>
in "back" is always a giveaway, though. We probably sound equally weird
to you sometimes. Oddly enough, Michigan, Wisconsin, and (of all places)
Boston are the only US places I know of that share the Canadian -ou-
in "out". Scottish English has something similar too.

This probably isn't terribly interesting to the rest of the world.  But it
is worth keeping in mind that the degree to which accents are perceived to
differ is very much a function of how well the observer knows one of the
accents. This usually means, whether he grew up with it. As a final
example, I once read an American who was quite offended that Canadians
thought the Virginian accent was the same as the Texan.  I can't tell them
apart, but to him they're like night and day.

Peter Schumacher
peter@statsci.com
-- 

Peter Schumacher
peter@statsci.com
