Daily Dose of English 150
The American Accent
Daily Dose of English 150
Intermediate
Hey, everyone. My name is Ben, and you're listening to a Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, we're gonna be talking about the American accent. How fun. I'm actually really excited about this accent. accent episode because it's number 150 and I get to talk a little bit about my accent because I'm not actually talking about all American accents as we've discussed before. There are actually hundreds if not thousands of pretty distinct dialects and accents that are used all across the United States. Um, and so I actually want to talk a little bit more specifically about my accent and then also, um, general American English, which is a, um, an idealized version of American, the American accent. So let me start a little bit with my accent. So as you might hear, I have a fairly standard American accent. If you think of an American accent, you very well might just think of how I sound because I have a sort of a Western American accent that has no really obvious distinguishing features. I do actually have plenty in my own accent and dialect, but part of the reason that I specifically have fewer distinguishing features than many other Americans, even from the same place I am, is that I have done some training and I've spoken to people from all over the world even, and so I've kind of accidentally removed my regionalisms a bit. Not always, not everywhere. I definitely still have a specific North American, Pacific Northwestern accent, but that's why it's a little bit less obvious than with some people. And so quickly to talk about the general American English, which is the most common way to refer to this generalized accent. And the first thing I want you to know is that it doesn't really exist. Nobody actually uses general American English exactly as it exists, unless you are trained to do it and you use it on like the news or whatever it is. it is sort of a an average of all of a lot of different accents in the U.S. not all of them it is primarily focused on essentially white people English because that is the because the U.S. is a very I don't wanna, yeah, it's okay. It's a racist past, but it's very divided along race lines, especially with skin color. And the predominant English is white American English. It is seen as the higher profile. That's not the right word. The higher, oh, what's the word? Not class either. It's like when you, prestige, the higher prestige accent of the US. Um, and that is just sort of how it is, which is probably a little bit too bad because a lot of the other accents and dialects from, from other groups of people are very interesting and very rich. Especially there, there's some, if you look up some good videos online about, um, for example, black English or African American English, there's a lot of really cool, uh, features that have been taken from other languages, especially from West African languages that make a very unique English dialect that actually has a lot more grammatical features that my English, for example, just completely lacks. So I definitely don't want you to go out thinking that the English that I speak is necessarily any better or more complex or anything like that. That just isn't true. It's just the English that I speak. So, getting into the English that I do speak, my vowels are pretty normal for the U.S. nowadays, especially for my age. There are a couple things that I want to point out that are interesting. Um, nothing, nothing incredible about E or E, A, A, A. Those are all pretty normal. Um, the one that is kind of interesting is the aw sound that I have. There is no distinction between aw and aw, which is the caught caught merger. And so that's when you say the word, I think we've talked about this also in the past, where you say the word caught, like C-O-T, a little bed that you sleep in, and to catch, I caught the ball, those have the exact same pronunciation in my dialect. And that's very common for pretty much everybody under like 50 or something in the US. Some other ones are the ooh sound being very liquidy. Ooh has that just very moving sound. But there are a couple of things going on in the consonants that I think are interesting. Although actually I just realized I jumped over something. And the last one that you might have noticed is the, sound and go is actually the very open especially in my dialect go uh it starts out there go instead of go and ow is very very fronted to become ow instead of ow so how now brown cow in my dialect is very much how now brown cow but I is not changed so I how have different starting vowels there which I think is cool, but it's a little annoying to learn, I guess. Um, the other thing that I wanted to mention is the or sound is not existing. So instead of saying tour or poor, I would say two were and poor. Um, and that's, that's again, very common for people under a certain age, probably, probably around like 50. Like my parents don't do it either, or they do the same thing as I do. Um, but they're from the same ish region that I am. So yeah, that or is definitely lost. Um, so any word that used to have or has either become or like two things or two were or has become or so two were poor Coors, um, like that that's a Coors light is a um I said oars. That's interesting Coors, um Coors Whatever. Um, that's a brand of beer. But anyways moving on because the actual interesting thing about my accent, I think is in some of the vowel changes before certain, um, consonants. So the consonants are mostly normal. There's not nothing really interesting. The L sound and, um, the, the nasal sound. So the N those things will change some pronunciations. And is there anything else? Um, maybe we'll see. Um, but the, the, the big one is the, that I have is called Canadian raising. And so that's where an, an I sound comes before a, a, a quiet unvoiced sound like S or F. Instead of saying I, I say I. So I don't say high school, I say high school. High school. High, not high. Hike, but not, oh it wasn't, high isn't a word. Height, hide, height and hide. There we go, that's a good one. So height and hide, height, hide. Those are two different sounding words. Or spider, spider and, no, that's also, what was the example that I used, rider? Oh, rider and rider, that's the example, sorry. Trying to remember, because spiter isn't a word, so it would be spiter. I guess it is a word. Someone who spites a spider and a spider. Whatever. The actual example is rider and rider. So a rider is someone who rides a horse, and a rider is someone who writes. You might not be able to hear, but there are slightly different vowels that I have in rye and rye. Rider, rider. And that's a pretty common thing in Oregon, Washington, and lots of Canada, actually. Canada also has it in some other vowels, which is where you get things like house instead of house, house, instead of house, or sorry instead of sorry. Their vowels get a little bit raised in front of some other things and some other words. It's not as obvious as you might hear in some Canadian, people trying to like sound more Canadian like almost nobody says sorry and um house and uh boat or boat isn't one right boat boat no it's about about yeah that's what it was a boot that's what it is a boot nobody says a boot but they do say a boat which is a little bit different than about but anyways sorry I just punched you in the microphone I'm running out of time, so I don't think I'm going to get into actual, like, general American English. But honestly, it's not that different from my dialect. It's actually pretty close. There are some, like, differences that I just went through that don't really happen. Yeah, the other thing I do want to mention though that I think is important is the L sound. Because this is also fairly common in lots of general American English, but when O becomes for an ul sound, like in a bowl, it kind of gets this very dark, rounded sound, bowl, a bowl of soup, a bowl, or you wanna go bowling, those has a very different sound than bowl, bowl, sounds very fancy and weird. This also can come into some other random words, like I say the word both with sort of this weird L sound in there, which people point out and make fun of, but it is relatively normal. There's also some, I've also mentioned before, some dialectical differences and some phrasings and some words that I say. For example, in my dialect, it's perfectly normal to say that you did something on accident. Oh, I'm sorry, I did that on accident, right? I didn't mean to. but the correct one in the rest of most of the US is by accident. You can't say on accident, that's weird. You have to say by accident. But for pretty much everybody that I know, you can say on accident, why not? It's fine. So those are some interesting things. There's also a bunch of little words that are a little bit more dialectical, but I don't think it's that really worth mentioning. Let me just Google really quick before I end this. I know it's going to be a long episode. I hope you don't mind. Pacific Northwestern English. I can't spell. English. Pacific Northwestern English. Let's see what it says in here to see if there's anything interesting about my dialect. Let's see if there's anything in here. Vowel shifts, duh, duh, duh. Yeah, that's what I do. Before the rain, rang. Oh, this is something I've noticed, but I don't do. The ah sound before NG can change to become rain, rain. So, like the phone rain. Um, instead of the phone rang the phone rain, um, I don't do that. That sounds very strange to me, but it's, I've definitely heard it from lots of people. Um, and. Uh, yet this is the sand and, and. pants. That's definitely something I do that, that ab to air, but that's a, a very common thing. Um, and a lot of the U S that, that, uh, pre nasal, duh, duh, duh. Close central vowel. Um, duh, duh, duh, duh. Looking at trying to see if there's anything else interesting in here. Um, Yeah, I don't do this. This is a little more Canadian to say boat becoming boat and bait becoming bait. That's probably more rural, where people don't really live in cities, but it also seems to be not super common. Oh yeah, by the way, there's lots of similarities with Californian English as well, even though it's pretty further south. That's just because the west coast of the US is a lot younger and a lot more connected to each other. Yeah, that's pretty much everything here. There's some people that have... Oh, interesting. Bull, yeah, okay, the bull-bull merger is, this looks to be a pretty small rural thing as well, but people saying the word bull like a big cow? Yeah, they're cows, right? And bull as the same. So bull-bull would be the same. So bull-bull, I don't do that. And then, yeah, there's also some, words that are from this area, um, that are from where I'm from. So Cougar is apparently a, a word from this region. Spendy. Oh, I didn't know that was a, a regionalism. Spendy is something that's expensive. Um, potato bug is a kind of bug apparently called a wood louse is the official term. But, um, yeah, potato bug. Huh. Interesting, I've always, yeah, I've known that. But yeah, I don't see really anything else interesting in this article. So that's apparently everything. There's nothing else interesting about my dialect of English. But anyways, I know this has been a 15 minute episode. Oh my God. Well, I hope that you enjoyed. I hope that you learned something new and let me know down below in the comments, what do you think of my dialect of English? And I'll see you again tomorrow for another episode. Have a good one. Bye-bye.
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