Daily Dose of English 79
Accents
Daily Dose of English 79
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 going to be talking about accents. All of the various accents of English. Well, not all of them, there's so many different ones. But first, an accent is what I did just there. It's a way of talking, or a way of pronouncing words that are a little bit different than other people might pronounce. Um, we usually think of accents as other people's accents or foreign accents. And so a lot of people don't think of themselves as having an accent, but other people have an accent. And I think that's a helpful way to think about it, right? It's the, it's the accents or ways that other people say the same things or the same words. There's a slight difference between accents and dialects. Dialects typically have a lot of word changes, potentially grammar changes, different slang, and accents specifically, usually, talk about the way that words are pronounced. This is not always true, there are differences between accents and dialect, or sorry, there are, people use the words accents and dialect interchangeably, they often mean the same thing, so it's not a perfect definition. But I specifically wanna talk about the ways that we pronounce words, because it's pretty interesting. I've always been interested in accents myself. I think that they're really cool and varied. I don't really know why. I think the sounds of just other ways of speaking is a neat. I've always enjoyed them. I've always liked listening to them and understanding them. I find it cool. I wouldn't say I'm good at accents, but I think I'm definitely more able to do accents than the average person. The accent that I did at the beginning is like some kind of weird Australian accent. It's not perfect. An Australian person would be able to be like, yeah, mate, that's not right. They would be able to tell that that's not an Australian person right away. However, it's I don't know, I really don't know how to explain it. I'm not amazing, but I'm also not bad at them. I'd like to get better, that's something that I wanna practice more in the future, because it is a skill, right? It's something that you have to practice and learn. Some people do have a talent for being able to do other accents, but it's something that you have to practice at and improve and train, really, because they are difficult things to do. I think we'll start this by talking about my native accent, which is a version of American English from the West Coast, specifically the Pacific Northwest. And there's a sort of general accent up in that area. Because usually, the younger a language is in a place, the fewer accents there are. So, for example, in the United States, English is the dominant language. Most people speak English in the U.S., but there are more accents on the East Coast because people have been living there for longer and speaking English. But on the West Coast, the English is a lot more similar because it's not as old, really. If you go to places that are really old, like in Europe or parts of Asia, you get accents in every single different town and city. They're so distinctly different because people have been there for so long. But the more that people move around and talk to each other, the fewer accents there are. This is specifically true in bigger cities, in areas where there is more mixing. In areas where there's less mixing, so in especially older cities like London, for example, has tons of different accents, because people often don't move from where they're from, and so accents kind of develop in little clusters, where people do very specific things and they speak in a very specific way, because that's how their parents speak and their friends speak, and there's these clusters. But a larger new city might have only a couple of different accents that are pretty large and don't necessarily have as specific regions. But like I said, my accent is sort of Pacific Northwestern English. And it's relatively close to what we think of as general American. There's this, actually that's a good thing to talk about. General American or a generalized accent is an accent that is sort of considered to be standard in some way. However, it's very, very rare that anybody actually speaks that accent perfectly because there's always little tiny things that are different. For example, most things that I say in my accent are like what we'd consider as general American. However, there are some specific differences that aren't general American. A good example is the way that I say or, or no, I, sorry, I, yeah. We'll get to or in a second. I is what I was thinking of. The sound I, when there's a soft sound after it, so a sound like tuh or puh, then that becomes I in my accent. So instead, so a lie, right? You can tell a lie, but I would say light. A light is on. Um, so he lied about the light being on, right? You can hear the difference. I, I. However, but, um, Lied, like he lied, right? That has the I. Lied, light. But in a lot of accents, it'd be light and light. Lied and light, sorry. Lied and light. The same sound, they're actually different lengths. There's I and I, but I would say I and I. That might be confusing, I hope that you understand. But it also happens in things like spider and cider, like apple cider. This is also a thing that happens in Canada. So you'll hear them do a very similar thing, especially on the West of Canada, in the West coast of Canada, which is sort of where this is all from. Canadians might also do it with, with O as well. They might also say, um, um, O as, uh, or, How, oh, sorry, ow, geez. Ow is oh, ow, oh, not oh, so they're not gonna say hose, but instead of saying house, they might say hose, hose. And this whole thing is called Canadian Raising. It's also a similar thing can happen in things like sorry to sorry, where there's just a slight changing of the vowel sound that you hear in an accent. That part isn't Canadian Raising, to be clear. I'm giving an example of why this happens. Um, these vowel shifts and vowel changes are very, very common all over the English speaking world. Um, a very obvious example is if you go listen to English from somewhere like New Zealand, they change a lot of vowels between like completely. So for example, instead of saying an eh sound, like in dress, they might say driss, ih, driss. But then the ih sound famously becomes an uh. So instead of saying fish and chips, they might say fush and chups. There's very specific accents and changes that happen all over the world. And I think I might actually go into more depth on some of them because I find them really interesting in other episodes. This is just the first episode talking about accents in general, but I like them, so I think I might. Maybe we'll do it next tomorrow. Yeah, you know what, we're gonna start tomorrow. We're gonna talk about specific interesting accents in English for just about 10 minutes, and yeah, we'll do another little mini series, sort of like we have with different cuisines in the US. We'll talk about different accents in English. Uh, what was I saying? Accents, uh, fush and chups. Oh, uh, one thing that I think is really interesting about accents though is the fact that they're not hard to understand if you already speak the language well. So most Americans can understand pretty much anybody speaking English as long as it's not too thick of an accent. Um, assuming that it's, it's a native accent. Foreign accents, we'll get to in another episode, but a native accent, it's really easy to understand because the changes are regular, and that's the thing I wanna talk about. If all of the changes are regular, it's really easy for our brains to figure out the difference. Right, so if in this example of sort of going to, or let's go to an even more broad example. A lot of English accents don't have R sounds, right? So instead of saying car, you might hear caw, caw, right? There's no, there's no, nothing to be an R there. However, we all know in our brains that there's an R there, right? Car has an R, so we say car, we think car. But then if you meet somebody who always doesn't say their R's, so every time there's an R sound, they don't say the R, then it's actually pretty easy to figure out what they're saying. What they're saying, I just put an R there. What they're saying. Because our brains can figure out what sort of should be there and just fill it in. And so this is why, if you've ever maybe listened to various different accents of English from really anywhere, you might have found it easier to understand than you expected, because your brain is filling in these patterns of things that it knows should be this. The word fush doesn't exist, and so our brain goes, okay, if he's always saying uh instead of ih, then I should just replace uh with ih in my brain. So if he says fush, I hear fish. If he says git, he says gut, I hear git. Or whatever, I don't know. Just giving you little examples there. All right, so I've talked enough about accents. This episode is going to be a little bit long, but I'll see you again tomorrow to talk about a specific accent. I still haven't chosen yet, so we'll see. I'll see you then. Bye.
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