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Good at languages, bad at dialects? | ||
Tags: Code-switching | Dialect | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| hrhenry Octoglot Senior Member United States languagehopper.blogs Joined 5135 days ago 1871 posts - 3642 votes  Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, ItalianC2, Norwegian, Catalan, Galician, Turkish, Portuguese Studies: Polish, Indonesian, Ojibwe | Message 9 of 10 16 February 2011 at 4:25pm | IP Logged |
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I've only ever consciously tried to change my way of speaking once in my native English - when I moved to California. Most of the US west coast has what I would consider the flattest accent (subjective, I know). I grew up in Northern Minnesota and had (still have, really) a pretty strong regional MN accent, and when I moved there I got a lot of smirks and giggles because of it. It wasn't until the movie "Fargo" came out that people started to find the accent charming.
Anyway, I went through a few accent reduction classes out in California. In hindsight, I don't think it really helped me substantially change the way I spoke. What it DID do for me was teach me to precisely discern other regional accents with more ease. And when I moved to Chicago I actively resisted the speech patterns there. I thought the accent was really ugly. I don't now, though. I don't think my speech has altered from living in Chicago, aside from maybe a couple words here and there. Somewhat related and from another thread, someone had mentioned that the most neutral speech would be heard from TV newscasters. A long time ago I worked at a TV station. All the newscasters and reports spoke their "neutral" speech, but even then certain things popped out every now and then. And most of them had also been through accent reduction classes too. It was quite amusing to hear how they really spoke once the studio lights went out. Their accents were all over the map. R. == 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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