Accent-blind?

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Do you often have trouble placing an accent? I do.

People ask me "Yeah, but what kind of accent did they have?"

Me: I dunno...I wasn't paying attention to that.

"Well yeah, but surely you must know? You did talk to them right?".

Me:"Yeah, I talked to them but I was focusing on what they were saying rather than how they were saying it"

"But surely you could tell"

Me: "I wasn't trying to though"

"Yeah, but how can you not know? Were they Polish? French? Geordie? Scouse?"

Me: "I DON'T KNOW, I can't remember what the accent they spoke in was"

"How?"

Anyone else?

I've studied applied linguistics pretty extensively....but I can only discern the most blatant accents.

I'd say probably yes, although it might have as much to do with not knowing what accents are from where as anything else.

One thing I will say for sure is that accents, unless I'm very familiar with them, make it much more difficult for me to understand people. If I'm talking to someone with an unfamiliar accent, it feels like I'm asking them to repeat themselves over and over and over.

In the US dialects change less in a 1000 miles than they do in Britain in fifty miles. So pegging dialects probably doesn't have the same social importance in the US that it does in the UK.

If anything when I was a kid I was the opposite.

When folks talked to me I would automatically start replying to them in the same dialect that THEY were speaking in.

As late as 14 it would happen:when the family took an epic cross country (USA)road trip from the east coast to the west coast we all stayed at a motel somewhere in the desert southwest. Went to the little swimming pool and a cute middle school girl my age struck up a conversation with me in an extremely twangy Texas dialect. Had to bite my tongue to keep from lapsing into HER dialect for fear she would think that I was mocking her.

The New York City accent has a very limited extent--and always has had a very limited extent.

North: Maybe about 20 miles

East: That's where it goes furthest---because of migration from NYC, it extends well into Suffolk County.

West: Maybe 10 miles or so.

South: A very short distance.

I like hearing accents, and finding out where they're from. Not so good at placing them, though.
I also have a tendency to mimic accents, or maybe to rapidly take on parts of them.
I worked at a summer camp for a bit with employees from overseas. Ended up with bits and pieces of accents from New Zealand and Australia for a while.

My family has a few sui generis accents, but otherwise I can pick out at least familiar accents - most of the Atlantic seaboard through the Great Lakes, as well as distinctive accents from other regions (the various major drawls of the south). Occasionally slip into mimicking accents myself, but can't imitate them deliberately.

Well, the "Joisey" accent is a sub-type of the "New Yawk" accent and stretches to a line ~70-100 miles from the Lincoln Tunnel, between commuters (SSW to due S) and vacationers (Jersey Shore).

Source, born & raised in Jersey.

The people "down the shore," as far as I know, speak with more of a Philly accent. Which sounds, superficially, like a NYC accent--though there are subtle differences.

People from Bayonne, Hoboken, Jersey City speak with a definite NYC accent. I'm not actually sure about Perth Amboy, right across the Outerbridge Crossing from Staten Island.

Listen to Bruce Springsteen talk sometime. He grew up in Freehold. Does he have a NYC accent?

Last edited by kraftiekortie on 02 Dec 2017, 7:41 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Shouldn't it be accent-deaf instead of accent blind?

Abso-toot-ly

As naturalplastic said, you have a lot more variety in accents in England than we do in the US.

Usually I can hear accents (because it makes it more difficult to understand people), but I can't always place them. Sometimes during D&D, I will try to make an NPC speak with a specific accent, and I'll slip and it'll turn into a completely different one >_< "I do not know why zees dwarf ees speaking wiss a French accent, I guess he's just a French dwarf. Sacré bleu!"

When I watch too much BBC TV, eventually I don't even hear the accents anymore. and then I'll watch a movie or documentary or something, and later it will be revealed that a character was British, and I'll go "Ohh....yeah, I guess he is, isn't he?"

I would say i'm the opposite, I'm usually quite good at placing an accent.

This happens to me as well! Once I didn't notice the accent of a character until they said "cuppa" and suddenly my brain registered the accent.

Sometimes I'm really good at recognizing accents and other times I am not, even if it's an accent I previously recognized easily. I think it messes me up when the speaker differs from the speaker I usually hear with that accent (e.g. a heavier vs softer accent, or male vs female voice).

I can recognize some of the more obvious accents rather easily, but not so much the subtle ones.

I guess its two issues. Recognizing that a person is speaking in ANY accent that is not one's own, and the other issue is pegging that dialect to a place (or social class) of origin.

The UK (like most Eurasian old world countries) is choke full of dialects (class as well geographic)so its of greater import to "peg" the dialect of someone from outside your neighborhood.

In a recently settled New World country like the US we do recognize dialects (Southern, Midwest, Boston Southie, etc) but according to linguist James McWhorter all American dialects (including even Ebonics)differ from each other less than do dialects within European countries including England.

Also Americans have other ways to peg folks, like skin color. Interestingly at work I recall hearing a native born Black girl saying "OH! That's why she talks so proper" when someone told her that another Black young woman was not native born, but was an immigrant from the West Indies. In other words "of course she speaks our language better than we do. She is not from here!").

Its always obvious to me if someone has *a* dialect. But I cant always peg it. Foreigners can be hard to peg. Hollywood Nazis sound very different from Pepe LePew. But real Europeans you meet tend to have a kind of pan-European accent. I can tell that they have AN accent, but its often hard for me to tell whether the person is French, German, Russian, Israeli, or what.

You are quite right.