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Author Archives: Ben
A Question about Foreign Accent Syndrome
I would be remiss not to mention this week’s news story about an Oregon woman who woke up from surgery speaking a different accent (Check out the stunning video clip of her speaking). This lady suffers from a rare condition … Continue reading
Sign of the Times: William and Kate’s Accents
Yes, even a blog about accents needs to touch on the Royal Wedding a little bit. I won’t spill more digital ink about the wedding, nor the wedding-mania that swept America this past week. I am, however, fascinated by the … Continue reading
Posted in British English Tagged class and accent, Estuary English, Received Pronunciation (RP) 36 Comments
The Rise of Creaky Voice
Sometimes when I’m writing a post, I stumble upon something intriguing enough that it makes me change topic mid-stream. Today is one of those days. I was going to look at the differences between General American accents among younger vs. … Continue reading
On the STRUT Vowel and Spelling
To put it mildly, the English language has a tricky spelling system. It’s confusing, illogical, archaic and often just bizarre. Case in point: in standard British English the letter o can, depending on context, represent nine out of the twelve … Continue reading
Can You be Bi-Accented?
Continuing yesterday’s discussion of the accents of transplants, I’m mulling over a related question: can someone be bi-accented? Just as there are bilinguals, are there some people who are native speakers of multiple accents? I should clarify. I’m not talking about … Continue reading
The Accents of Transplants
We’ve all met them. The semi-British, the semi-American, the semi-Irish. I speak, of course, of people who have left their home countries (or regions) for elsewhere, and whose original accents are starting to change. Not only are their native regionalisms … Continue reading
“Um” in Different Accents
All dialects of English have “filler” words. Just to name a few: er, ah, um, eh, or the increasingly common like* and you know. We humans are a hesitant bunch, and these words offer brief moments of reflection. What’s interesting … Continue reading
Twangs vs. Drawls
I would like to discuss a pair of very unscientific words that describe accents or dialects of English: twang and drawl. Both words are associated with the accents of the American South; one often hears of the “Texas twang” or the … Continue reading
A Brief Clarification About New Zealand Accents
I want to quickly clear something up about New Zealand accents, since the topic was touched upon briefly yesterday. In New Zealand English, the vowel in “short e” words like dress or bed moves very close to the vowel that Americans and … Continue reading
The Pin-Pen Merger
I used Ancestry.com for a few months, before it got a bit too expensive. One of the main family branches that I researched were (was?) the Kendricks, a family in Kentucky that has been in that state for several generations. … Continue reading
Posted in American English Tagged American Southern Accents, dialect maps, phonetics, pin-pen merger 34 Comments