to speak POSH in your language.

[loqu]

Hi!!!

The other day I was riding the bus and in front of the local theater, some very posh people came in and I started to hear how they spoke.

Then I began to notice how posh people pronounce, since they have obvious differences in pronunciation.

For example, in my dialect, posh people usually relax very much fricative-approximants; what to us would be [β ð ɣ], to them they're usually [β̞ ð̞ ɰ] and also very often disappear from speech.

And an interesting transformation I have noticed; they usually transform what to us would be [ʃ] or [tʃ] first into [ts] and then to [tʰ]. That is indeed annoying.

Are there any special transformations in phonetics for posh people in your language?

[Lazar Taxon]

For American English, some posh affectations might include retaining a plosive [t] in words like "better" or "authority", or retaining [j] in words like "tune" or "news", or preserving /ʍ/ in words like "which".

[Formiko]

For American English, some posh affectations might include retaining a plosive [t] in words like "better" or "authority", or retaining [j] in words like "tune" or "news", or preserving /ʍ/ in words like "which".

That's true, but mostly it's vowel changes. I like to call it the "Kennedy Accent". The upper class Bostonian accent. If anyone is familiar with theTV show Frasier, that is an exaggerated example.
The comlete opposite of posh, is the lower working class accents, which are mostly vowel changes as well. Besdies the obvious southern accent, there is the switching of ð and θ with d and t.
Moth will become mawt

[hashi]

or retaining [j] in words like "tune" or "news"

We do that in New Zealand English anyway

We consider a british accent to be quite snobby. Not accents like manchester but rather the more upper class sounding ones. I wonder why

[Aleco]

Hm... Well, being posh, language-wise, in Norway, would be speaking as close to Bokmål (or how most people in Oslo speaks Norwegian) as possible, without any dialectical (is this a word?) sounds. Taking most eastern dialects as an example, they'd omit the thick l - /r`/ and either pronounce it as a normal l or r depending on how it's represented orthographically.

No contractions of any kind, or simplifactions of often used words:
written - pronounced
ikke - 'ke/'kke (unstr / not)
han - 'n (unstr / him)
den - 'n (unstr / it: object)
annen - aan (another/else: masc)
faren - faarn (the father)
fiskeren - fisker'n (the fisherman)
dataen - data'n (the computer)

As well as the omitment of the feminine gender in speech, which not only sounds arrogant, but also silly

Well, it's this simple: to be going as close to the written language as possible.

[Travis B.]

For American English, some posh affectations might include retaining a plosive [t] in words like "better" or "authority", or retaining [j] in words like "tune" or "news", or preserving /ʍ/ in words like "which".

One thing that should be noted is that there are posh affectations which are more specific to dialects within North American English as well.

The most obvious one here is the consistent pronunciation of historical initial /ð/ as [ð]~[ð̥]. This is in contrast to it being very much the norm in the dialect here to stop initial /ð/ and assimilate it to preceding nasals and sibilants. Of course, this is certainly shared with other NAE dialects as well, but this is particularly prominent here because such stopping is found throughout normal everyday speech in most registers, rather than being relegated to lower registers as in many other dialects.

Another one is never reducing consonant clusters like /st/ (always pronouncing it as [sʲtʲ] rather than [sʲː]) or /dl/ (always pronouncing it as [ˈdʟ̞] rather than [ˈɰː]). This is because such consonant cluster reduction is very well normal in normal speech here, even though it is generally not completely consistent. Hence never doing such reduction comes off as sounding more careful, more correct than normal everyday speech here.

A third one is clearly pronouncing lateralness at the start of stressed or word-initial syllables or, even moreso, in onset clusters where most speakers here would only pronounce such inconsistently in normal speech. For most speakers here, lateralness in even such positions only shows up consistently when individuals are deliberately speaking carefully, and otherwise is only weakly expressed or left completely unexpressed. Hence it, again, makes one sound as if one is always speaking carefully compared to most individuals here.

[Travis B.]

Another one, but for English in general this time, is the consistent pronouncing of our as hour rather than are.

[Sean of the Dead]

Well, it's this simple: to be going as close to the written language as possible.

And that's one thing I don't like about Norwegian, because in English, at least where I live, our speech doesn't vary from the written language (except for the very unintelligent people.)

[Lazar Taxon]

One possible affectation that I've noticed - and maybe Travis could help me on this one - is that some people seem to have extra labialization when they pronounce /ʃ/, which strikes me as a sort of posh speech feature. I've noticed this with the actor James Spader, for example.

[Travis B.]

Well, it's this simple: to be going as close to the written language as possible.

And that's one thing I don't like about Norwegian, because in English, at least where I live, our speech doesn't vary from the written language (except for the very unintelligent people.)

To be honest, this is actually something that tends to bother me subjectively a lot about many people from the non-coastal West or the Lower Midwest - they just sound too standard while speaking, as if they simply have no dialects of their own, cot-caught merger aside, to begin with. Real people just are not supposed to sound like people on TV in my mind. Of course, that really means that real people (that is, anyone who you could actually meet in Real Life) are not supposed to actually speak pure General American. Such is not any really consciously developed idea but rather a subjective bias that has come out of living my whole life in an area where practically no one actually speaks pure GA without at least some non-GA substratum influence. And mind you that that is not necessarily a bias just against people not from here, there are some people from here who get close to such, and honestly they do set off similar mental alarm bells with me.

[Travis B.]

One possible affectation that I've noticed - and maybe Travis could help me on this one - is that some people seem to have extra labialization when they pronounce /ʃ/, which strikes me as a sort of posh speech feature. I've noticed this with the actor James Spader, for example.

I have not noticed such at all, but then the dialect here simply does not have labialized /ʃ/ in the first place and I have never heard of anyone here actually noticing such enough so as to actually bother "correcting" it.

[TaylorS]

In my mind "posh-sounding" American English is conservative non-rhotic Northeastern speech, Franklin Roosevelt (conservative New Yorker) and the Kennedys (conservative New Englander) are good examples, as is the rich guy on "Gilligan's Island".

[TaylorS]

One possible affectation that I've noticed - and maybe Travis could help me on this one - is that some people seem to have extra labialization when they pronounce /ʃ/, which strikes me as a sort of posh speech feature. I've noticed this with the actor James Spader, for example.

I have not noticed such at all, but then the dialect here simply does not have labialized /ʃ/ in the first place and I have never heard of anyone here actually noticing such enough so as to actually bother "correcting" it.

labialization of /ʃ/ and /ʒ/ is pretty typical here.

[TaylorS]

Well, it's this simple: to be going as close to the written language as possible.

And that's one thing I don't like about Norwegian, because in English, at least where I live, our speech doesn't vary from the written language (except for the very unintelligent people.)

To be honest, this is actually something that tends to bother me subjectively a lot about many people from the non-coastal West or the Lower Midwest - they just sound too standard while speaking, as if they simply have no dialects of their own, cot-caught merger aside, to begin with. Real people just are not supposed to sound like people on TV in my mind. Of course, that really means that real people (that is, anyone who you could actually meet in Real Life) are not supposed to actually speak pure General American. Such is not any really consciously developed idea but rather a subjective bias that has come out of living my whole life in an area where practically no one actually speaks pure GA without at least some non-GA substratum influence. And mind you that that is not necessarily a bias just against people not from here, there are some people from here who get close to such, and honestly they do set off similar mental alarm bells with me.

Around here many people, myself included, tend to code shift between the local accent and General American, with GA usually used on the job while talking to customers and in formal situations, as well as when singing.

[Travis B.]

In my mind "posh-sounding" American English is conservative non-rhotic Northeastern speech, Franklin Roosevelt (conservative New Yorker) and the Kennedys (conservative New Englander) are good examples, as is the rich guy on "Gilligan's Island".

The only thing is that that kind of "posh" is firmly part of the past, and really has no clear modern analogue. While the closest thing to such today is conservative General American, conservative GA does not really fit quite the same niche that the old conservative non-rhotic Northeastern speech did, being used primarily by people like newscasters today.

[Travis B.]

Around here many people, myself included, tend to code shift between the local accent and General American, with GA usually used on the job while talking to customers and in formal situations, as well as when singing.

That is an interesting social difference from things down here in Milwaukee, I have to say. Amongst native speakers of the dialect other than AAVE here, code-switching is largely limited to primarily middle and upper-class older people and middle aged people who have actually learned General American, with younger people having largely never learned GA. The big thing about most younger people here is that they have replaced such with register within dialect, but even with that, the registers used at work are generally not particularly high when not talking to customers. And while some younger people may be able to speak a localized GA, they may not be very competent at it; I myself for one cannot sustain speaking in localized GA for very long at all due to finding it quite tiring, particularly with respect to vowel length, intonation, and (the lack of) pitch accent.

By saying that younger people here largely replaced code-switching with register within dialect, I mean that they never actually code-switch out the dialect here, but rather smoothly change between different registers within the same dialect. That is, said registers are all part of a single fundamental phonological system rather than belonging to two different systems. Likewise, a lot of features are shared between both the highest and lowest registers, as most of the differences between the two are merely in terms of carefulness and style than anything else.

I myself would wonder what the sociolinguistic factors were which causes code-switching amongst non-AAVE, non-Spanish-speakers here to die off in favor of the present single-variety system while code-switching between your dialect and GA has remained or become the norm where you are. Here at least, it seems that the dialect here was largely spoken by working-class white people, with middle and upper-class white people speaking variants of GA much of the time, but the dialect here has been increasingly adopted over time by middle-class white people with an accompanying loss of deprecated syntactic features. Thus code-switching was lost as GA was finally replaced in all social contexts with the dialect here, with higher registers thereof replacing much of the role of GA. The situation where you are almost sounds, for a random guess on my part, like the dialect where you were had GA superimposed on top of it as a prestige variety, with neither the dialect nor GA ever gaining enough prestige to eliminate the other as has happened here. However, that is a complete and very vague guess on my part, to say the least.

[Sean of the Dead]

Well, it's this simple: to be going as close to the written language as possible.

And that's one thing I don't like about Norwegian, because in English, at least where I live, our speech doesn't vary from the written language (except for the very unintelligent people.)

To be honest, this is actually something that tends to bother me subjectively a lot about many people from the non-coastal West or the Lower Midwest - they just sound too standard while speaking, as if they simply have no dialects of their own, cot-caught merger aside, to begin with. Real people just are not supposed to sound like people on TV in my mind. Of course, that really means that real people (that is, anyone who you could actually meet in Real Life) are not supposed to actually speak pure General American. Such is not any really consciously developed idea but rather a subjective bias that has come out of living my whole life in an area where practically no one actually speaks pure GA without at least some non-GA substratum influence. And mind you that that is not necessarily a bias just against people not from here, there are some people from here who get close to such, and honestly they do set off similar mental alarm bells with me.

That's what I like about where I live, we don't have dialects/accents.
I hate dialects personally, although I have nothing against accents. Come to think of it, I don't really know any dialects of English, everyone else just seems to talk funny.

[Travis B.]

That's what I like about where I live, we don't have dialects/accents.
I hate dialects personally, although I have nothing against accents. Come to think of it, I don't really know any dialects of English, everyone else just seems to talk funny.

Mind you that when I say dialect, I really just mean language variety spoken natively at some given location. That would in most cases probably include what you call an "accent", as what exactly makes the phonology of a given language variety different from any other aspects of such so as to make such worth categorizing with a special term just on the grounds of such? That said, though, why exactly do you hate "dialects" as opposed to "accents", and how would you make the distinction between the two yourself?

[Sean of the Dead]

I think of a dialect as say Swabian ( even more, Boarisch), with words largely different than the standard language, like "Mir ganget" as opposed to the standard "Wir gehen" in High German, and an accent as a different pronunciation of the same word, not an entirely new word altogether.

And why do I hate/despise dialects? I don't see why people make up new words/use different words when there already exists a perfectly fine, standard word. Oh, and people that speak dialects as opposed to the real, standard language don't seem as intelligent to me.

But, I guess Norwegians are excused, since they don't have one true written AND spoken standard language. :Þ

[Travis B.]

I think of a dialect as say Swabian ( even more, Boarisch), with words largely different than the standard language, like "Mir ganget" as opposed to the standard "Wir gehen" in High German, and an accent as a different pronunciation of the same word, not an entirely new word altogether.

But even with such criteria, does things like different patterns of cliticization count? Does being able to cliticize, say, was so that it is distinct from cliticized is count? And conversely, does extreme phonological differences, to the point of potentially interfering with crossintelligibility, which do not change mapping to dictionary words disqualify a variety from being a dialect?

And why do I hate/despise dialects? I don't see why people make up new words/use different words when there already exists a perfectly fine, standard word. Oh, and people that speak dialects as opposed to the real, standard language don't seem as intelligent to me.

That is the thing - I see almost completely the opposite of such. I see the language as natively spoken by the populace, at home and on an everyday basis, as being the real language in any given location. And likewise, I see standards as largely being artificial outside impositions upon how people already natively speak someplace unless it somehow happens that the standard is already extremely close to how people speak someplace. Why should people be told that what they natively speak is "incorrect" or "worse" and that they should change how they speak to something artificially imported from elsewhere because it is "correct" or "better"? And even when such is not absolutely imposed, why should people be forced to speak a different language variety at work or in public from that which they natively speak at home, heritage language situations aside?