Why do People have accents? How do people acquire these accents? Why do people judge others because of their accents? And how are those with accents treated differently because of their accents? In the past I have always thought that every different culture had their own accent. When I was younger I would watch youtube a channels called Ownage Prank which solely focused on accents and pranking others using these accents. Because of this youtube channel I learned to listen to the way people talk and how it differs from one person to another. I later learned that everyone has their own way of talking, which lead me to believe that everyone has their own accent. However, People with heavy accents are always mistreated in society, some are respected, others are hated, and the majority are misunderstood. As a result of this misunderstanding people with accents are treated differently by society. …show more content…
It is, therefore, impossible to speak without an accent. Some people may think they do not have an accent but they do. I did not realize I had an accent until my first day of college. My roommate told me that I had a really weird accent that he did not quite understand what to define it as. He said it sounded like a middle eastern accent which to me came to a surprise because he was able to know my origins from the way I talked. Accents are developed when people learn more than one language and mix traits from one to another. People acquire these accents by traveling and living in different societies. In an article online it states that "A region's geographic location also has a direct influence on the development of a local tongue," which similar to Americas society there are different accents for every location(Etter). For example, there are southern accents, New York City English, Mid-Atlantic English, and Great Lakes English all theses accents are located at one country with the same
This chapter focused mainly on misconceptions and attempting to clarify those misconceptions about accents. In the opinion of linguists, accent is a difficult word to define. This is due to the fact that language has variation therefore when it comes to a person having an accent or not, there is no true technical distinction because every person has different phonological aspects to their way of speaking. However, when forced to define this word, it is described as “a way of speaking” (Lippi-Green, 2012, p.44). Although Lippi- Green identified the difficulty linguists have in distinguishing between accent, dialect, and another language entirely, they were able to construct a loose way of distinguishing. Lippi- Green states that an accent can be determined by difference in phonological features alone, dialect can be determined by difference in syntax, lexicon, and semantics alone, and when all of these aspects are different from the original language it is considered another language entirely (Lippi-Green, 2012).
All accents and dialects tend to originate from where people came from. A largely known accent that is often stereotyped is the southern accent. Although there are many different kinds of southern accents, people often associate the southern accent with stupidity, or someone that is “slow”. The southern accent comes from most southern states such as Georgia, Tennessee, Mississippi as well as many others. In the film American Tongues, they show an example of a woman (from the north with a northern type accent) that says that she was once dating a man that was originally from the south and had asked her to come visit his family, that was still living in the south. She decided to go, and as they got closer to his home town, the mans southern accent began to grow stronger. She then told him to stop the car and immediately got a flight back home. She then stated that she was not going to have babies that spoke like that. This is a great example of how people will strictly judge you from your accent and the way you speak. While the woman in this example believed that the man had a strong accent, people from the south would believe that she was the one that had the accent. Everyone has an accent, and everyone believes everyone else has and accent, therefore judging them on it, thinking their way of speaking is the only way. One of the most common judgements would be judging a person’s social class on their accent or dialect. For example, hearing someone talk with a southern accent (which is said to be slow) can make people think they have no money because they are thought to be a blue-collar worker, categorizing them into the lower class. Since most accents generally are concerned with the region, the south for example has more emphasis on agriculture than in the north, causing there to be less need for education. These stereotypes do not just go towards the south or
An accent, according to www.dictionary.com, is defined as “Vocal prominence or emphasis given to a particular syllable, word, or phrase.” Around the world, different cultures have different accents because of their language and the way they say words. In Allison Joseph’s “On Being Told I Don’t Speak Like a Black Person”, this description is shown. Joseph uses her mother as an example of having an accent and her mother was from Jamaica. In World War I, 250,000 workers from the Caribbean were recruited and 90,000 of them were Jamaican.
Chicago’s accent situation is almost identical to those in other cities, you cannot expect everybody from New York to have a thick Brooklyn accent, and this lies true within the Windy City. As shown through the script experiment, a large percentage of people do have three of the characteristic vowel changes that distinguish the accent, but only a small minority speaks with all the vowel changes that make up the quintessential accent.
Which in some cases it might apply and be true, but a whole race can’t be classified as poor or uneducated because not everyone in a minority group are lower class and not everyone in the hegemony race is wealthy and has had a good education. The poem mentions how the mother of the author has a different accent because even though the mother was forced to lose her accent back in Jamaica when colonial minded teachers were teaching her. Her. “Mother never lost her accent, though, the music of her voice, charming everyone.” (701) This quote shows that the author still thinks her mom 's voice is beautiful, even though is different from her own voice and how she admires her mother accent and don’t think less of her by the accent even if that’s not the accent she pick up as a kid. It also implies that now everyone in a same household has the same accent and this is because people even in the same neighborhood have different
Finegan says this is something “living languages must do”. For me, I was raised in a military home in which we moved to a new region every couple of years. Coming from Germany, moving to Rochester, and then to Lowville, my dialect is a combination of all three speech communities. It is different than my parents, and will mostly be passed down to my children. As I age and move locations it is opted to change again as well. So it is not that I speak differently or incorrect than the rest of my family, my speech community is merely growing and changing as it is passed generation to generation. Richard Lederer stated in his article, “We are a teeming nations within a nation, a country that is like a world.” (150) He was portraying how our country, with a universal language, can be so diverted by each region’s version of the English language. I agree completely that although we all “sing” the same song of the American language, “we talk in melodies of infinite variety.” (150) The way our country was built was by different American regions doing their own work, for example, the south had plantations, where my ancestors were small town farmers who worked with manufacturing in mills and
Language plays a huge role in everyday life- connotation, denotation, etymology, idioms- all of these things come into play. We as English-speakers sometimes have trouble understanding certain expressions or accents- imagine the Price family trying to decipher French and Kilangan.
The video “American Tongues” is about variety of English dialect in America, and people still carry prejudice and stereotypes in people’s accents and dialects. These accent and dialects are not limited in pronunciation. There are different words, phrases and grammars in their dialects, therefore, some people are noticed where they are from. As a premise, everyone has an accent. However, some people believe they don’t have an accent because people around them have the exact same accent and dialect in their community. Therefore, they haven’t noticed differences. In the video, there was a scene of a woman was correcting her accent for work to speak “standard dialect”. It was required for her to speak “standard dialect” for work because when she was out of her original community where
As an elementary student, I had a slight accent as I spoke, and I would get bullied for not being able to talk as fluently as the other kids. The way the other students would act
Recently Inc published an interview in which I said we'd noticed a correlation between founders having very strong foreign accents and their companies doing badly.
Another difficulty cultures deal with is language and the way people speak. In some cases, people struggle to belong by making changes in the way they speak the English language just to be assimilated. They attempt to use words and letters, as well as body language that fit in the norm; all in an attempt to denounce their original intonation and style of pronunciation. One ...
In “Why I Keep Speaking Up, Even When People Mock My Accent,” Safwat Saleem(2016), in an inspiring Ted Talk, emphasizes that maybe normal isn't really normal, Saleem talks about his life and growing up with a stutter and learning confidence. Although as a kid Saleem was bullied such as this example; “After some awkward silence, he goes, "Have you forgotten your name?" (Saleem 2016)And I'm still quiet. And then, slowly, all the other people in the room begin to turn toward me and ask, almost in unison,”(Saleem 2016) with this experience, he, later on, he found comfort in doing voice overs in his videos and disguising his voice to help him except his voice. As to find a norm in his voice
People are often viewed differently because of their linguistic differences. It is hard for some people to understand those that speak with accents and that makes those listening having various opinions about that speaker. In the except of “Hunger Of Memory,” it was mentioned that Richard Rodriguez would speak english that he did not
Style has been an integral component in the field of linguistics. Linguistic style refers to a person’s speaking pattern, which can include different features such as pace, pitch, intonation, syntactic patterns, etc. Styles of speech is learned, and is often influenced by location, gender, ethnicity, and age. As different cultures and sub-cultures arise, linguistic variations occur and different sociolinguistic styles come into being. Each style can index social meanings such as group membership, personal attributes or beliefs.
Allan Bell’s theory of audience design argues that your speaking style varies according to the audience you are speaking to. Bell studied New Zealand newsreaders on various radio stations and discovered that more formal pronunciation was used on stations where the audience was known to consist of professional, educated people. Interestingly, some of the newsreaders worked on several stations and their pronunciation would change to suit the style of the station (p.301 course book). Bell examined the pronunciation of the letter /t/