Hearing your own dialect

[Bjarn]

I go for walks and just listen to the way people are speaking, and not make out the exact words they're saying...I just analyze the sounds.
Here in Newfoundland, its blatant to hear but its not my accent. In my old town people sounded stereotypically Canadian like you hear on television.

[Travis B.]

I go for walks and just listen to the way people are speaking, and not make out the exact words they're saying...I just analyze the sounds.

I do the same, except I generally don't go on walks to do it (rather doing things like listening to family and sitting in coffee shops and like).

Here in Newfoundland, its blatant to hear but its not my accent. In my old town people sounded stereotypically Canadian like you hear on television.

Around here there is really a lot of variation in how people speak, as one can hear both very progressive and very conservative idiolects in use and pronunciation and prosody that ranges from being extremely Upper Midwestern in character (and likely sounding almost foreign to people not from the Upper Midwest) to being almost General American-like.

With respect to progressiveness versus conservatism, such is most dependent upon age, with younger people generally having more progressive features like generalized flap elision and older people generally having more conservative features like not realizing devoiced final /z/ as [s]. On the other hand, distance from GA seems to be partly class-related, as more working class or rural people seem to be more likely to have markedly un-GA-like idiolects, but this is not at all consistent, as many younger middle class individuals can have very un-GA-like speech as well (such as me and my sister).

This last thing is strange in that the typical pattern of dialect loss seems to not be occurring here as it is in much of, say, European and the eastern US. Rather the opposite is taking place, with many younger people actually having idiolects (often much) further from General American than their parents.

What makes this even weirder though is that some of these features, such as final fortition, sound like old substratum features (particularly from German). However, if this were entirely the case then their parents should generally have them as strongly or stronger than said younger people. What seems to be taking place is that said middle-aged people finally learned English "right", and lost many of the substratum features that older people have (many of whom are natively bilingual or had bilingual or simply non-English-speaking parents), but younger people, instead of shedding the last residual substratum features, picked up upon them and ran with them in many cases.

The reason for such likely is that younger people here do not experience any active deprecation of the dialect here, have less contact with their grandparents' generation than their parents, and lack a perception of such features as "foreign" while at the same time are very often rather proud of where they are from (despite the general nastiness of many parts of here in Milwaukee). As a result, they subconsciously adopted such features as a form of identification, which was unopposed by any sort of pressure, direct or indirect, conscious or subconscious, against adopting such. This also explains the lack of contradiction between the lack of the dialect here in the media and the lack of deprecation of the dialect here (especially by younger people), as such features are actually subconsciously perceived as being dialectal and are not expected to appear in media, and especially national media, at all; we tend to be rather surprised when Wisconsin shows up in the national media outside sitcoms to begin with, at that... (We still find it quite irritating, though, that all those sitcoms set here in Wisconsin show not a trace of the dialect here.)

(Sorry for rambling, but I find all this kind of stuff quite interesting as a whole.)

[JackFrost]

I go for walks and just listen to the way people are speaking, and not make out the exact words they're saying...I just analyze the sounds.
Here in Newfoundland, its blatant to hear but its not my accent. In my old town people sounded stereotypically Canadian like you hear on television.

That could be easily explained that Canadian English is probably based on Ontario version. CBC is from there, so I'm not that surprised.

Newfoundland has a differently history and it didn't become of Canada until 1949, so it seems linguistic isolation did them well to develop their own dialect.

I once met a Newfie and he was speaking to me, I thought he was speaking in French that I couldn't understand. My boyfriend had to clear it up that he was speaking English to me. I still had a little trouble understanding him.

[Travis B.]

I go for walks and just listen to the way people are speaking, and not make out the exact words they're saying...I just analyze the sounds.
Here in Newfoundland, its blatant to hear but its not my accent. In my old town people sounded stereotypically Canadian like you hear on television.

That could be easily explained that Canadian English is probably based on Ontario version. CBC is from there, so I'm not that surprised.

Newfoundland has a differently history and it didn't become of Canada until 1949, so it seems linguistic isolation did them well to develop their own dialect.

I once met a Newfie and he was speaking to me, I thought he was speaking in French that I couldn't understand. My boyfriend had to clear it up that he was speaking English to me. I still had a little trouble understanding him.

Hmm... seems North American English dialects are losing crossintelligibility... I was wondering if my own sound samples were just plain weird because many native English speakers, North Americans include, have often had a horrible time understanding them in the past, but maybe not...

(So why the hell do people still understand me just fine at work, as many of my coworkers are from other parts of North America, anyways?)

[JackFrost]

I go for walks and just listen to the way people are speaking, and not make out the exact words they're saying...I just analyze the sounds.
Here in Newfoundland, its blatant to hear but its not my accent. In my old town people sounded stereotypically Canadian like you hear on television.

That could be easily explained that Canadian English is probably based on Ontario version. CBC is from there, so I'm not that surprised.

Newfoundland has a differently history and it didn't become of Canada until 1949, so it seems linguistic isolation did them well to develop their own dialect.

I once met a Newfie and he was speaking to me, I thought he was speaking in French that I couldn't understand. My boyfriend had to clear it up that he was speaking English to me. I still had a little trouble understanding him.

Hmm... seems North American English dialects are losing crossintelligibility... I was wondering if my own sound samples were just plain weird because many native English speakers, North Americans include, have often had a horrible time understanding them in the past, but maybe not...

(So why the hell do people still understand me just fine at work, as many of my coworkers are from other parts of North America, anyways?)

Good question. I don't know. I had some people here in Montreal saying I am hard to understand, but usally they're non-native speakers. I even had a few people saying I have a "thick" accent and they all speak English perfectly.

But Newfoundland English is a dialect in its own right due to historical reasons. First it wasn't part of Canada until 1949 and before then, it was very connected to Britain than the other way around (London was closer to St. John's than Ottawa would be). It had a lot of Irish and Scottish settlers as the base of the population and that influenced the dialect a lot while Canadians were more exposed to the English with some Scots and Irish instead.

Maybe I am tricky to understand if I speak fast and slur up the words into mud and then when I meet someone else I don't know, I tend to speak more clear and slower. My boyfriend is used to me speaking fast and slurring up words, but when his friends listen closely to what I am telling him, they're sometimes lost (again, it could be just the factor of being non-native speakers).

Personally, I don't think it is losing any cross-intertellablity. I think it's the opposite. My area of Pennsylvania sounds more General American than ever before, especially among the younger folks and that includes me. In the past, they would ignore the "th" sounds, not cot-caught and merry-marry-mary merged, and then now...most of us don't do that anymore. Only older people would do that.

Perhaps the people have trouble understanding the old recordings because the quality was lower than now. When I try listening to something coming from 1930s, I would have a lot of trouble understanding because quality on the record disks.

[Travis B.]

I go for walks and just listen to the way people are speaking, and not make out the exact words they're saying...I just analyze the sounds.
Here in Newfoundland, its blatant to hear but its not my accent. In my old town people sounded stereotypically Canadian like you hear on television.

That could be easily explained that Canadian English is probably based on Ontario version. CBC is from there, so I'm not that surprised.

Newfoundland has a differently history and it didn't become of Canada until 1949, so it seems linguistic isolation did them well to develop their own dialect.

I once met a Newfie and he was speaking to me, I thought he was speaking in French that I couldn't understand. My boyfriend had to clear it up that he was speaking English to me. I still had a little trouble understanding him.

Hmm... seems North American English dialects are losing crossintelligibility... I was wondering if my own sound samples were just plain weird because many native English speakers, North Americans include, have often had a horrible time understanding them in the past, but maybe not...

(So why the hell do people still understand me just fine at work, as many of my coworkers are from other parts of North America, anyways?)

Good question. I don't know. I had some people here in Montreal saying I am hard to understand, but usally they're non-native speakers. I even had a few people saying I have a "thick" accent and they all speak English perfectly.

Maybe I am tricky to understand if I speak fast and slur up the words into mud and then when I meet someone else I don't know, I tend to speak more clear and slower. My boyfriend is used to me speaking fast and slurring up words, but when his friends listen closely, they're sometimes lost (again, it could be just the factor of being non-native speakers).

Personally, I don't think it is losing any cross-intertellablity. I think it's the opposite. My area of Pennsylvania sounds more General American than ever before, especially among the younger folks and that includes me. In the past, they would ignore the "th" sounds, not cot-caught and merry-marry-mary merged, and then now...most of us don't do that anymore. Only older people would do that.

My only guess is that I happen to have a larger difference between my speech at work and my speech at home than I generally realize, and that when I make sound samples I tend to use my home speech unless I am reading off a passage. The last part seems to be apparent from one of my sound samples, which was a reading of a prewritten passage by someone else; people have often said that my accent sounds "foreign", but I have run into few who could not actually understand it. On the other hand, in the ones where I spoke naturally, many people said they simply could not understand much of my speech and those who did generally said I had a pretty extreme accent overall. (The only person that I remember responding to such and saying that they had no real problems was another Upper Midwesterner, which also implies that it was not simply the recording or my diction that was the matter.)

As a result, I suspect that the difference between my work speech and my home speech is really analogous to my natural speech in sound samples and my reading speech in sound samples. That would neatly explain my intelligibility at work despite my lack thereof in some of my sound samples.

However, that still raises the question of just how far have North American English dialects diverged overall. The Midwest is classically thought of as being almost "neutral" accent-wise by many North Americans, even though that view is not truly applicable to the Upper Midwest in reality as this area had a great degree of substratum influence. Even still, though, many middle-aged people here have speech that is still not all too far from General American. Hence, a great deal of change has happened in not too long of a time at least here. So if there were a similar rate of change in other North American English dialect groups, a relatively rapid loss of crossintelligibility, at least for everyday speech, would not be unthinkable.

However, the rate of change in NAE dialects seems to not be uniform; in particular, western dialects seem to actually be awfully conservative in nature all things considered, while some other dialects, such as Upper Midwestern and Californian ones, seem to have a greater rate of language change. Consequently, that would require a greater rate of change amongst the faster-changing dialects for such a general loss of crossintelligiblity to take place.

[Travis B.]

Personally, I don't think it is losing any cross-intertellablity. I think it's the opposite. My area of Pennsylvania sounds more General American than ever before, especially among the younger folks and that includes me. In the past, they would ignore the "th" sounds, not cot-caught and merry-marry-mary merged, and then now...most of us don't do that anymore. Only older people would do that.

It seems that many more eastern US dialects have become significantly more GA-like in the last fifty years or so. One factor, though, is that the Upper Midwest is probably more isolated from the rest of the US than, say, central Pennsylvia. The eastern seaboard is quite urbanized these days, and as urban areas tend to be associated with both the innovation and the transmission of innovations and standardization, there likely is relatively strong outside influence with respect to both where you are.

On the other hand, there are only a few disparate urban centers here; the only major urban areas of any real consequence anywhere near here are the Chicago, Madison, and Minneapolis/St. Louis areas. Aside from those areas, much of this area is primarily surrounded by highly rural areas over a wide portion of the north-central US and south-central Canada, which would help isolate the Upper Midwest linguistically and culturally.

This is similarly evidenced by the internal immigration/emigration patterns here in southeastern Wisconsin - people tend to leave here more than come here aside from other Midwesterners and particularly Upper Midwesterners from places like northern Illinois and Minnesota. Likewise, there is really little direct person-to-person contact here with other North Americans except for those from northern Illinois and Minnesota. (Most people that I personally know who live elsewhere are people who emigrated from the Upper Midwest.) As language transmission tends to be driven by such, it would insulate the western Upper Midwest (northern Illinois, Wisconsin, the Upper Peninsula, Minnesota, and North Dakota) from the influence of much of the rest of North America. (However, there is still clear outside influence from outside the Upper Midwest here, such as the southward spread of Canadian Raising and the widespread adoption of clicitized forms of don't, doesn't, and didn't which are used with personal pronouns.)

Perhaps the people have trouble understanding the old recordings because the quality was lower than now. When I try listening to something coming from 1930s, I would have a lot of trouble understanding because quality on the record disks.

I was using the same equipment and hardware for such - the only real difference that the earlier ones were just speaking out loud normally and the later one was actually reading off written text in front of me.

[darkina]

Dialects in Greece (but not in Cyprus), are synonymous to low education. I find it normal to hear people in my town speak the dialect but when someone is interviewed for example, it sounds bad to me. Unfortunately when someone on TV speaks a heavy dialect most people will comment on how he speaks and not on what he says. Our current mayor has an extremely heavy accent although he is a lawyer, and sometimes I think that politicians and others whom he meets to ask for funds etc, won't take him seriously, as he speaks like a shepherd. I'm a bit ashamed that I think like this, but this is how we are taught to think about dialects and this is how everyone thinks I guess

More or less the same for me. Sometimes on TV they iterview local people about some news etc, and if they speak our dialect (even on the local TV, where even the journalists have a slight accent anyway), my mum underlines how ugly and uneducated it sounds, while she thinks that Southern dialects sound more elegant at least, even if they also sound uneducated (she's half Southern, so my dad disagrees). I find my dialect really funny and so hearing it on TV makes me laugh - I rarely use it in a serious context, only for fun, or sometimes when I'm really angry or carried away by a topic and I'm with a certain friend.

I find it disturbing to be with Southern people and suddenly starting to hear my accent, which I don't perceive otherwise, obviously enough. (and I don't have a strong one, I was told I sound obviously Northern and the opposite would be shocking, but nothing clearer than that).

[Travis B.]

I find it disturbing to be with Southern people and suddenly starting to hear my accent, which I don't perceive otherwise, obviously enough. (and I don't have a strong one, I was told I sound obviously Northern and the opposite would be shocking, but nothing clearer than that).

I myself also notice my accent when speaking to other North Americans from outside the Upper Midwest, such as at work, but I do not find it disturbing at all. However, after starting working where I currently work, where a lot of employees are from other parts of North America, and becoming more aware of dialect differences in North American English, I have started to really notice such outside work contexts as well.

[Bjarn]

I go for walks and just listen to the way people are speaking, and not make out the exact words they're saying...I just analyze the sounds.
Here in Newfoundland, its blatant to hear but its not my accent. In my old town people sounded stereotypically Canadian like you hear on television.

That could be easily explained that Canadian English is probably based on Ontario version. CBC is from there, so I'm not that surprised.

Newfoundland has a differently history and it didn't become of Canada until 1949, so it seems linguistic isolation did them well to develop their own dialect.

I once met a Newfie and he was speaking to me, I thought he was speaking in French that I couldn't understand. My boyfriend had to clear it up that he was speaking English to me. I still had a little trouble understanding him.

There is a French minority in Newfoundland...as to how much French they actually speak I'm not sure.

Also, there are areas where they speak a gaelic pidgin it seems...my uncle being one of these. I find it hard to understand some of the people and I grew up with them all my life.

I wouldn't ever say Newfoundlanders were cross-intelligible.
Maybe to other Newfies...

[Ariki]

I quite like hearing my own dialect on tv and radio. Everyone in Aotearoa likes hearing their own Maori dialect being broadcasted on TV. Its quite perfectly fine to speak one's own dialect.

[Levo]

Does anyone ever get confused about which language variety to speak? E.g. if you're with people who speak the standard variety only and then an old acquaintance comes by. Do you speak the standard variety or do you switch to your dialect and then switch to standard and so on? And do you notice that even old friends tend to sound a little different when you're surrounded with non-dialect speakers?

Wow, I never thought such problems can exist.
Okey, since I am learning languages I have already thought about this but it is so interesting that for most of the world it is a problem.

[skye]

Does anyone ever get confused about which language variety to speak? E.g. if you're with people who speak the standard variety only and then an old acquaintance comes by. Do you speak the standard variety or do you switch to your dialect and then switch to standard and so on? And do you notice that even old friends tend to sound a little different when you're surrounded with non-dialect speakers?

Wow, I never thought such problems can exist.
Okey, since I am learning languages I have already thought about this but it is so interesting that for most of the world it is a problem.

Well, there aren't many situations like this, which is why it's even more weird when they do happen.

And if you come back home and speak the standard variety only people will say that you're a snob!

[Levo]

Does anyone ever get confused about which language variety to speak? E.g. if you're with people who speak the standard variety only and then an old acquaintance comes by. Do you speak the standard variety or do you switch to your dialect and then switch to standard and so on? And do you notice that even old friends tend to sound a little different when you're surrounded with non-dialect speakers?

Wow, I never thought such problems can exist.
Okey, since I am learning languages I have already thought about this but it is so interesting that for most of the world it is a problem.

Well, there aren't many situations like this, which is why it's even more weird when they do happen.

And if you come back home and speak the standard variety only people will say that you're a snob!

I heard Hungarian Slovenian is hardly understandable for homeland Slovenians. The "Vend"-speach. They go to Ljubljana, then go home, speaking Ljubljana dialect and people would watch like:
Is it like that?

[skye]

I guess Hungarian Slovenians don't get to hear the standard or the Ljubljana variety very often. (But I could be wrong.)

And their speech really is very difficult to understand. There was a TV show for Hungarian Slovenians on the national tv sometimes and most of the time Hungarian Slovenians were subtitled.

[Sappho]

Where I live in Flanders the saying goes that we ( = Limburg) talk slower (research confirmed the fact, we do indeed talk slower while the West-Flemish talk the fastest ). Especially in the area of Hasselt they do indeed talk very slow. But I was born in that area (but not Hasselt) and most of my family comes from there, though now some have spread out over all Limburg. It's just that we don't live anymore since I was eight, so I don't really talk that slow. But some of my family do, so I'm used to it.

A couple of days ago there was a program and one of the persons in it was from there and it was quite surprising to hear how slow he spoke. Especially in comparison with the other persons who where from other provinces. I never noticed it before! I always highly sceptical when people from other areas in Limburg told that those from Hasselt speak so 'sloooooow', because it didn't seem that way to me. But then again, if I'm with my family they all talk slow and there are less people there who talk faster, so it doesn't stand so out for me. While where I live people talk faster and there less people speaking so slow, so it doesn't stand out either.

Because there were people from different provinces in the program, I could clearly hear the difference while I don't really notice it when speaking with people from there.

[darkina]

Welcome here Sappho, I've seen a few post of yours today, and they even make sense, which is rarely the case for members of this community Don't worry, soon you'll stop making sense too

Anyway, I was thinking of my dialect a lot these days, because for some reason I seem to speak it more than I used to. At new year's I was with a lot of people from villages so I spoke a lot of it just because I was around them. I've seen it written on some websites just by chance and sometimes we write some sentences in it on msn, and it looks funny. Maybe I want to learn it better, even if it still sounds a bit coarse especially for a lady. I'm especially intrigued by the differences between cities, as in the other cities of the region it's a bit different from here but still understandable, but it sounds funnier and kind of annoying to us here

[Æxylis]

I would say that the local dialect in my area is kind of odd... but it's not to different from general american english
on the other hand, I use three different subtle different dialects

1 - my personal dialect, which few but my close friends can understand, is really nasally, kind of mumbled, and the words kind of run together... most words end with glottal stops or nasalized glottal stops, and I tend to use multiple contracted phrases (like couldn't've)
it would be very difficult for me to phoneticize an example, but maybe you can get an example from the following sentence comparison

I d'no wha' you thin' yer gonna do with-tha'... shouldn't've even though' o' tryin' anythin'
translates to:
I don't know what you think you're going to do with that... you shouldn't have even thought of trying anything



2 - my family dialect, which I use in place of the local dialect and use it mainly among less close friends who can't stand my dialect




3 - western general dialect... this is more like the type I usually have to revert back to at work... though sometimes I'm a mix between 2 and 3, I try to stay professional and stay closer to 3 when I can though... sounds to 'fake' to me though... I don't like it.... most people at work are like this (except, their 2 is usually some variety of the local utah dialect... mine is different because my family is from back east... so it sounds closer to the standard american english dialect, but with a few westernizations and some of our own slang) to the point where they will speak in 3 during a call... then immediately revert back to 2 after when they go to talk to one of their friends around them...

this can often be very interesting

[Travis B.]

I would say that the local dialect in my area is kind of odd... but it's not to different from general american english
on the other hand, I use three different subtle different dialects

1 - my personal dialect, which few but my close friends can understand, is really nasally, kind of mumbled, and the words kind of run together... most words end with glottal stops or nasalized glottal stops, and I tend to use multiple contracted phrases (like couldn't've)
it would be very difficult for me to phoneticize an example, but maybe you can get an example from the following sentence comparison

I d'no wha' you thin' yer gonna do with-tha'... shouldn't've even though' o' tryin' anythin'
translates to:
I don't know what you think you're going to do with that... you shouldn't have even thought of trying anything

That's actually some pretty mundane spoken North American English, at least by my standards - heh. In particular, multiple contractions like couldn't've are practically standard spoken NAE, as are their reduction down to pronunciations like [ˈkʰʊːnəː]

[OCCASVS]

I use a very "Italianised" local dialect of Italian only in informal contexts.
Strong dialects are linked to low education. I've always been encouraged to speak standard Italian.

Luckily I've got a local accent when speaking Italian. The "standard" accent is so fake and horrible to my ears.
When I hear it on the TV and the radio, I perceive it as artificial. I'm indifferent if I hear a local accent on the TV or radio, because I expect people to have one.