HabitableZone

Off Topic » in reply to Doesn't everyone speak with an accent?

Everyone does speak with an accent.

Sometimes several of them. I know I speak with a trace of the Bronx Jew/Yiddish inflections my mother picked up when she lived in New York. I sometimes also speak the Tampa Spanish-influenced English street dialect of growing up in urban Tampa (Think Cheech Marin, the closest example I can come up with), and sometimes I lapse into the redneck of rural Florida. I do not have a Spanish accent when I speak English, or an English one when I speak Spanish, although I have been told I have a thick Spanish accent when I speak French. (My French is awful, but I was approaching fluency when I studied the language formally in high school and college).

I'm sure I picked up accents from my shipmates in the Navy, and I picked up preppy slang and hippy English when a student. I have also lived and worked as an adult in Florida, Puerto Rico, Tennessee, Pennsylvania and California. There is no single correct way to speak English, it is an evolving language, with regional and class dialects that change over time. But its dialects can be identified, classified and mapped.

Log in or register to post.

The whole thread (20 posts)

Related discussions