Accents

Hey everybody - or is it "ya'll?" - actually, that's kinda what this thread is about. After a conversation with my friends, who come from several different places in the US, I was thinking about what accents people have, different ways they speak, and all those nice little inflections that make out conversations different from anyone else.

I grew up in rural Virginia, and my family is largely from that area or the mountains of North Carolina, so I inherited a bit of southern twang that I still have to this day. The thing is, I never would have even known I had this particular accent until I went to college - up until that point, everyone just spoke the same as me! Apparently I say things differently too: "Didn't it" becomes "diddinit", "pillow" becomes "pilla", etc. Not to mention throwing contractions every which-way without even knowing it.

If you live in an English-speaking country, or speak English regularly, do you have an accent that differs from your region? Does it make you self-conscious? Do you speak or say things differently from anyone else?

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Originally Posted by SenorKaffee

The thread should be renamed to "US accents", or someone like me might start a discussion about bavarian or saxon accentss in Germany.

Being American, US accents are about all I"m exposed to. I'd be interested to hear about accents in other countries, too.

Originally Posted by gaming

I have british combined with vietnamese/chinese accent... I really hate it

Aw, don't say that. When I made the thread, I was interested to see if other people were self-conscious about their accents like me. I don't hate my speech at all, but sometimes I feel like that's what people are hearing more than my words. Southerners tend to have the stereotype of being dumb hicks, and it always kinda stayed in the back of my mind when I spoke to someone who wasn't from my area. I'm definitely in a different 'mode' when I'm not around my family, placing other words in my speech to sound less like a yokel.

But you know what? I'm unique. We're unique. I have an accent that you don't hear every day on TV or radio (unless it's John Boy, but, who listens to him who isn't southern?), and I've learned to live with it. I work with some Vietnamese, and I don't find their accents bad. They're a little shaky around some consonant sounds, but they can speak and express themselves just as well as anyone else. If you're articulate enough, people won't care what you sound like anyway. That goes for anyone else, too.

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