your accent

Here in the US we do have many different accents throughout our country. If i had to pick my favorite one to listen to, i would say a souther accent, especially the one found in people from the oklahoma and surrounding areas.

I grew up in the midwest of the US, nebraska to be specific, and suposedly we have the most "neutral" accent of those found in the USA. I now live in maine, and even though i never thought i spoke with an accents, appearently i do. People who meet me can tell i am not originaly from the area, and generally seem to think i have a slight southern tinge to my speech. I find it mostly in the way i pronounce my short "a" vowel sounds.

Here in maine, it is very interesting to speak to some people who have very think "Maine-ah" accents. Sometimes they are so thick you can hardly understand them!

Hi TheModfather,

We have a lot of accent here (Malaysia) base on which state you are coming from. Almost every state have their own dialect. You can easily recognize their origin from the way they speak. The most hardest to recognize are the people from the northern part of Peninsular Malaysia. They accent are almost the same for some people but if you give a careful listening you can identify their origin state either from Kedah, Penang or Perlis.

The hardest accent that I could understand are Kelantanise and Nogori. I barely understand if they talk using their accent among them.

Happy mylotting and have a nice day.

As I'm from the UK I obviously know the accents you are talking about
I have no regional accent as such but am developing a Gloucestershire type 'farmer' accent which I am fighting to stop

I grew up in Canada so I had the usually "eh" at the end of every sentence...but I have now lived the US in New Jersey for 10 years now & I have seemed to have picked up their accent...or so my friends in Canada tell me...my favorite accent though has to be Massechucetts accent, I love the way they pronounce "car" or "park"...southern accents are nice too...they seem like really friendly people...

Here in the US we have many different accents, When we moved from the up north to the south where we now live i had a hard time understanding everyone, but since we have been here for quite some time now i am used to it. and when i go home for a visit everyone says that i have picket up the southern drawl, but i do not notice it at all. I think that i sound like i always did. Their are a lot of the different accents that you can tell which part of the country people come from. I do not know if i dislike any of them, but some of them sure make it hard to understand people some times.

Alhough I now live in Spain, I was born in the Midlands, in Walsall to be precise. 20 years of living in Cornwall and Devon has toned down my Black Country accent considerably, but it's still there. When we visit friends and family in the Midlands, they say I sound Cornish. My husband, Tony, falls about laughing, because to him, born and bred in Plymouth with the 'Janner' accent as proof, I sound about as Cornish as Osama Bin Laden. However, my family, used to Black Country and Birmingham accents, think I sound just like the Cornish people they hear speaking when they visit us in the West Country.

If you want to really annoy me, tell me I have a Brummie accent. IT'S NOT BRUMMIE, IT'S BLACK COUNTRY! You may say Birmingham is close to the Black Country; well, it might be close in distance, but it's a million miles away in terms of culture, believe me! I hate Brummie accents as much as the next person, and I don't like the Scouse accent either - they always sound as if they're going to 'gob' on me in mid sentence.

In Cornwall, there are different accents for different parts of the county, and I love to hear them all. What I hate is when they show a programme 'from Cornwall,' and you hardly hear a Cornish accent. A few years ago they filmed 'Songs of Praise' in Padstow, which is about 4 miles from where we used to live, and we didn't see one familiar face. They shipped in lots of Z list 'celebrities' who had second homes in the area, and spoke to them.

I love to hear a Geordie accent, and I go weak at the knees when I hear an Edinburgh accent - it's much softer and clearer than most Scottish dialects. Our next door neighbour in Spain originates from Edinburgh, and I could listen to his voice all day. Great topic, Robert. It's given me a chance to expound, and I love a good expound every now and then. They can't touch you for it, you know!

Well I'm in Italy but I'm from UK so I speak Italian with an English accent.Not all are aware of it though and some Italians think I am from southern Italy, probably due to my dark hair too which is typical of that region. Some think I'm German (I come across as harsh and blunt offline too sometimes the first time people meet up with me ) beacue it seems to fit the accent I have if they dont' get the British slant to it.

Here there are accents and dialects in every region. The dialects are almost a completely different language too and some are hard to understand as they differ from Italian. Some of the older Italians mix the dialect int with correct Itlaian and then it's easy to spot where they are from. The same is true for northerners and southerners here - and I give myself a pat on the back because evenI am able to pick out where most of them are from even though I am not originally from here!

May I add that on national television the news readers all use correct Italian which is something I have noticed not to be the case when I return home to UK.
I can't undertsnd all of what some of the newsreaders are saying there, even on BBC

THere are a few here in the US....I don't mind most of them and find it fascinating that we all speak the same language but it comes out differently. The only time I had a real problem is when I had a friend from the Bronx....I couldn't understand what she said most of the time and ended up always saying Huh? Besides that most of them are to say the least very interesting!

There are lots of regional accents in the US. The upper Northeast for instance put a lot of R's on things, like President JFK used to say Cuber for Cuba. There are lots of southern dialects, some as smooth as butter, and some as twangy as cactus. Then there are pockets of the country where various immigrants settled and they have their own flavor as well. Personally, I think of places like New Jersey as being "nasaly" but I could be wrong, that is just my impression from certain characters on TV.

It's interesting that all of the accents you mention are those from large towns. All of them developed during the Industrial revolution from the local (rural) accents and you can still hear elements of them if you listen to speakers from the surrounding rural areas. Worcestershire and Birmingham have many similarities, for example, but what marks out the town accents is that they are harder and harsher than the rural ones from which they developed.

One theory is that town life is noisier (especially in the mills where people mostly came to work) and, in order to make themselves understood over the racket people had to shout and change their tone and this has developed into the more strident 'town' accents.

Scouse (as a dialect) is interesting. It is less related to the local accent than many and that is because of the big influx of Irish because it is (or was) the main port where Irish workers landed. Today you would hardly think of it as Irish but it still has echoes of Irish, Welsh and many other accents. The name 'Scouse' actually comes from a (supposedly) favourite dish - a kind of meat stew - which seems to actually be Norwegian or German in origin, though Liverpudlians may have got the name from North Wales, where a variant is called Lobscows. In Norway a similar dish is called Lapskaus and in Northern Germany it's known as Labskaus. Both Norway (through the Vikings) and Hamburg have strong associations with the North West of England.

I love our accents and feel very sad that many of them are fast disappearing. Where I live, in Cambridge, one rarely hears anything which could be distinguished from a sort of North London accent but I remember people who claimed that they could tell a person's native village from the way they spoke - and that meant villages within 5 miles of the City! If you went ten or fifteen miles further north, you were in the Fens and they spoke almost a different language!

Of course, most of what is lost are the local words - the dialect rather than the accent - but I think that, partly because of the radio and partly because people tend to move around a bit more than they did, accents are merging, especially in the South of England into a kind of mish-mash of flat vowels and harsh sounds which is more or less the same from London nearly to Birmingham and beyond.

Even so, it is still practically impossible for me to understand someone speaking broad Norfolk (only about 50 miles east of here) whereas I often can quite easily get the gist of what someone from Holland or some parts of Germany is saying. It isn't just words or different vowel sounds: it's very much the 'music' and the rhythm of speech that makes it intelligible.