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Authentic Regional Accent in Target Lang | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| 1e4e6 Octoglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4289 days ago 1013 posts - 1588 votes  Speaks: English*, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Norwegian, Dutch, Swedish, Italian Studies: German, Danish, Russian, Catalan | Message 25 of 44 16 April 2015 at 6:20am | IP Logged | |||||
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I added here some more videos of Rioplatense accents from Zona Oeste and Zona Sur. It
was harder than I thought to find a lot of speaking from people from the certain barrios that talk for few minutes, but I add some more. I am going to add some more in the next hour. Unfortunately some of the videos that I found that have residents talking are about crime and delincuency: Ramos Mejía (Zona Oeste) 1 Ramos Mejía (Zona Oeste) 2 Caseros (Zona Oeste) 1 Quilmes (Zona Sur) Avellaneda, Dock Sud (Zona Sur) Caseros (Zona Oeste) 2 Haedo (Zona Oeste) 1 Haedo (Zona Oeste) 2 One interesting this is about the Italian "up-down" tonal-like phenomenon in the Rioplatense accent. In these cases, it seems that the tonal accent seems to be much stronger than usual. Not like Norwegian or Swedish or an actual tonal language like Mandarin, but it seems that here they move their voices up and down with much more force and frequency than standard Rioplatense. The point is not to use a heavy accent when giving a speech, but rather to fit in. I know, likewise, because I still have friends that do this, immigrants, especially as said earlier above, from Europe, mostly Norway, Netherlands and Sweden, imitate extremely well regional UK accents in general (some not though). I know people from Bergen, Göteborg, Kristiansund, Stavanger, Malmö, Groningen, Leiden, Texel(?!) who can imitate one of Geordie or Manc, some in addition to RP that have either close to or just completely fooled me into thinking that they are natives. They were not trying to make fun of the accent, but I gather, just tried to fit in with extra effort. It makes it seem like they want to assimilate, even more than the person who can do RP after spending 30 years in the UK, they can spend a few months and can do all-out Geordie or Manc accents over a maintained period. However much effort they tried at least makes me feel like they want to be part of our regional area, which is very different from even places 20 km away. I suppose that what I mean is that the accent gives a sense of "belonging". Edited by 1e4e6 on 16 April 2015 at 10:18am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4706 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 26 of 44 16 April 2015 at 9:29am | IP Logged | |||||
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I think the problem is also that most dialects simply haven't been that thoroughly
researched by linguists, and especially rare variants may not have been noted down (or may be on the way out). Dialects are traditionally considered low prestige in many cases (except for the dominant ones) and thus tend to be subsumed by the more mainstream dialects, except in countries where the dialects are preserved by an egalitarian streak like in Norway. It's hard for foreigners to figure out dialect differences when many natives don't know about them either and they're not well publicised, common knowledge (such as Scottish people tapping their r's, rhotic vs non-rhotic, cot-caught merger and so on). It's also a reason why I don't speak dialect - traditionally my mother's family dialect is seen as a provincial, rural dialect with zero prestige. Given that my mother married a speaker of a fairly regular Dutch nature (with an accent but you will always keep an accent in Dutch) she didn't continue to speak it outside her family ties (or maybe when she is in that region she may move into a more dialectical variant), but I never learned to speak it (though I can definitely recognise it). My mother once joked that she didn't teach us "Brabantian". It's not useful where I live - it would sound totally off in the western part of the Netherlands where rural accents are looked down upon - and strong variants are impossible to understand. And even then I can only imitate the main features (soft g, enclitic pronouns "hedde gij" instead of "heb jij"), oe instead of u, and so on. It's not enough to know these - it will sound out of context although I definitely weaken my g sounds when speaking to my family. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5429 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 27 of 44 16 April 2015 at 10:05am | IP Logged | |||||
I think that it is a very valid point that the main reason for wanting to adopt a local accent is the need or desire to fit in. This is something that most immigrants do spontaneously by sheer exposure. And within a generation their children will be speaking like natives. On the other hand, I still have difficulty understanding why someone would explicitly focus on learning a low-prestige regional dialect such as the one mentioned here, especially from a great distance. If the idea is to go to Argentina and spend time in this area, fine. If learning this kind of Spanish will supplement a more mainstream Spanish, that may be a good idea. Again, I want to emphasize that the idea is not to sneer at a language variety but more to speculate about what choices an adult learner must make. I, for example, speak a kind of Spanish that probably has a distinct Mexican flavour because my current teacher and language buddy are from Mexico. I have some interest in Mexican regional language differences and urban slang but I certainly do not want to focus on trying to sound like an inhabitant of a Mexico City slum. I have no intention of trying to fit into such a slum. Frankly, I think I have so much else to learn of the language that I'm not going to obsess about trying to sound like a resident of a certain part of Mexico. Edited by s_allard on 16 April 2015 at 10:09am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Ogrim Heptaglot Senior Member France Joined 4638 days ago 991 posts - 1896 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Spanish, French, Romansh, German, Italian Studies: Russian, Catalan, Latin, Greek, Romanian | Message 28 of 44 16 April 2015 at 10:34am | IP Logged | |||||
Well, to me most Norwegians and Swedes speak English with a more or less strong Norwegian or Swedish accent, but there certainly are some who are good at imitating regional UK accents. To me that makes sense if you go and live in Birmingham or Newcastle or Glasgow. My wife, who is Spanish, spent two years in Stirling when she was about 20 years old, and she came away with a strong Scottish accent (but you could of course hear that she was not a native speaker). I find that normal, she took after the Scottish friends she made there, and she would have seemed out of place and probably not integrated so well if she had tried to speak RP. So I totally agree with the idea of fitting in. However, if you do not live in a specific region, I don't really see the reason for wanting to speak with the particular accent of that region. As others have said here, if you want to be understood by speakers of language X in general, I think you are better off using a neutral standard verison of that language X. But by all means, I won't try to convince anyone not to learn a regional accent if that is what they want to do. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| eyðimörk Triglot Senior Member France goo.gl/aT4FY7 Joined 4098 days ago 490 posts - 1158 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French Studies: Breton, Italian | Message 29 of 44 16 April 2015 at 10:54am | IP Logged | |||||
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Relevant YouTube humour
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| 1e4e6 Octoglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4289 days ago 1013 posts - 1588 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Norwegian, Dutch, Swedish, Italian Studies: German, Danish, Russian, Catalan | Message 30 of 44 16 April 2015 at 11:58pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Regarding UK accents and class, they have always been tied with each other, and there
have been various forms of discrimination with both the combination of accent and class throoughout history, and almost everyone in the UK is at least familiar with this occurence. However, from what I see in my experience, those who are for example around my age, i.e. 25-26, and +/- 5 years, i.e. up to 30 and University freshers, as a rule tend not to care much about accent and class. I suppose that it might be, that if you want to meet new people and become friends, it would make little sense to belittle and discriminate your peers because of their class or accent. For those born for example, before 1980 or so, there might be the same class/accent problem, but I think that my generation might tend to throw off at least a little, this unnecessary, as I see it, discrimination. There is also another factor that I think affects the class/accent distinction in the UK. There are much more immigrants than for example, in the 1800s or even 1950. If you have immigrants with non-native accents when they speak English, there is no class/accent distinction because I) they do not have roots in the UK and so have no class history, nor certain area distinction and II) English is not even their native language, so their accents are unlike those of native speakers born in the UK who have some sort of class and area distinction (e.g. steel miner in South Yorkshire). If you put a coal miner, a Lord, and recent first-generation immigrants from Pakistan, Angola, Cuba, Greece, Vietnam, and Hungary all in one room to speak to each other, the native speakers, being the first two, would be silly to say that their accent is tied with a certain class, because they have no family who lived in the UK for generations, which basically is assumed with this class/accent distinction in the UK. Most of the Norwegians that I know are from Bergen, Stavanger (little wonder, only 1,5 hours flight to the UK), or Kristiansund. Not all of them have near-perfect UK accents, but I have met them for the first time and they did fool me completely. But what surprises me is that some of them have either never been to the UK, or at least, only been there for short holidays. They did not learn English in the UK, but rather in Norway. Thus, they must have self-trained themselves to try their best to be indistinguishable from a British native. I highly doubt that all of them hired a speech therapist that specialises in Geordie and Manc accents and drilled phonetics over a long time before they came. One master's student from Kristiansund told me that this was the first week that she spent in the UK, i.e. she moved to Newcastle and her total amount of time in the UK beforehand was less than a week. Given that she was 23 at the time, which is slightly younger than I am now, she must have really practised at home in Norway to sound like a Geordie. I am still awed by this. Of course, there is the question that I do not live in BsAs nor Madrid, nor Delft nor Den Haag, neither Bergen nor Tromsø, nor Göteborg nor Kiruna, etc. I suppose that when (not if) I travel to all of the places, some times again or for first time, or perhaps have the opportunity to spend more time there, that the natives think, "Wow, that is a nice Bergen/Coimbra/Göteborg/BsAs Zona Oeste/Chamartín/Sherbrooke/etc. accent" like how I think of these Scandinavians' in the UK. Here is one of the videos that I used years ago when I was a beginner in Dutch. The presenter is Dutch, but speaks with such a native American/Canadian accent that it sounds like west-coast North American to me. After watching a few videos, I was thinking to myself, "What part of San Francisco, Seattle or Vancouver is she?" Dutch presenter with native Anglophone accent Edited by 1e4e6 on 17 April 2015 at 12:08am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| robarb Nonaglot Senior Member United States languagenpluson Joined 5058 days ago 361 posts - 921 votes Speaks: Portuguese, English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, French Studies: Mandarin, Danish, Russian, Norwegian, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Greek, Latin, Nepali, Modern Hebrew | Message 31 of 44 17 April 2015 at 2:01am | IP Logged | |||||
Actually, she has a noticeable Dutch accent. If you're from the UK it may have been masked behind her North American pronunciation, which might stand out more to you. It comes out at 0:25 "and the tenses" sounds like "en de tenses", and 0:45 "always the basis" comes out as "olways de basiz." Very close to, but not quite, the accent of an American. So the real point is not that she has a native Anglophone accent, but that her slight Dutch accent is layered on top of an authentic regional way of pronouncing English, rather than a neutral international one. It still illustrates the point that language learners can end up with any of a variety of accents. When they end up with regional accents, it's no more or less "imitating" than it is when they end up with the standard/neutral/prestige accent. It just means they're imitating different speakers.The highest-prestige native accent, a neutral blend that's easily understood by everyone, the accent of the people you learned from, or the accent of the people you mostly interact with are all reasonable choices. Edited by robarb on 17 April 2015 at 2:06am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| eyðimörk Triglot Senior Member France goo.gl/aT4FY7 Joined 4098 days ago 490 posts - 1158 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French Studies: Breton, Italian | Message 32 of 44 17 April 2015 at 8:08am | IP Logged | |||||
The same amount of imitating is involved, yes, but when going for the full package (rather than layering local sounds on a more neutral accent in order to fit in) the offensiveness is worlds apart. Society's most privileged speakers, who make the rules, make the money, and maybe even have a history of oppressing the others, don't have much reason and much less right to object to others imitating them, which is sometimes required even to "get ahead". A society's outcasts, maligned, constantly stepped on speakers have far more reasons not to take it well when you pretend to be one of them. There is a reason "blackface" paint is much more offensive than "whiteface" (cf. making fun of different classes of accents), and why harmful skin-whitening ad hair-straightening products are a thing in for example Afro-American and Indian communities (cf. changing accents to get ahead). 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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