How did we create different accents?

Even more variations, arguably, and that's the same for other "old world" (Europe/Asia/Africa)countries. People from the south of England and the far north-east can have trouble understanding one other!Your comments on American accents are interesting. One we're likely to notice here is the deep southern drawl, mainly because you have to wait so many days before the speaker has finished his first sentence.I could maybe identify a New York accent of the type that seems heavily influenced by Italian, Yiddish and other non-English origins, even though the speaker may never have spoken anything but English. It's spoken quickly, and the contrast between the two matches the theory that slow=rural and fast=urban (we have the same thing here). So accents can be influenced by the environment, in part, a reflection of the pace of life in those two cases.

You may be right about that. Like I said, I think its remarkable that for a relatively small area, so many variations have come about. Yeah, I believe it. Cockney is a tough one to follow. I saw an interview once with the singer from Oasis, and the sad thing is, the station promoting the interview had to put subtitles even though he was speaking English to an English-speaking audience! That's how thick and choppy it was. Couldn't understood a thing he said. I never thought about it until you mentioned it, but now that you have, I seem to recall quite a few run-on sentences. I forgot to mention a New York accent. Yes, that's another noticeable one. Let me ask you something. Sometimes on movies we see American actors and actresses doing terrible English accents. I mean, they butcher it. Others are spot on. Likewise, I've heard British actors and actresses nail a typical American accent while others do a terrible job at it. In your opinion, is emulating an American accent difficult or relatively easy?Another thing that just popped into my head is that we also, in America, have a penchant for starting sentences with prepositions, which in proper English grammar, is bad. I always do that. For instance, I often start a sentence, with, "And." That's bad grammar, but I often write how I would speak. I also place too many commas in my sentences because if I had a natural pause in my speaking, that's how I tend to write it as well. I'm an editors nightmare.

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"He has shown you, O man, what is good; And what does the Lord require of you but to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God. -Micah 6:8

"And" is a conjunction. But I hear you. I think what people don't get a lot of the time is that writing and speaking are two different languages.When you get down to the comma rules, they're not hard to master. Commas separate clauses. (For instance, I just used a comma to separate a dependant clause and an independent clause.) We use the "pause rule" because speakers of English typically pause between clauses. But speakers also typically pause when separating two independent clauses conjoined by "and" in a complex sentence, and no comma is necessary when a conjunction is used.If you remember to take out commas that appear before "and" (except in a list of three or more nouns,) you'll get rid of almost all of your extraneous commas. (But, looking through your post, I can't find a single one. I suspect you're better with commas than you realize.)What drives me batty is improper use of quotation marks in advertising. For instance, in New Orleans I once saw as sign that informed me:

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The wages of "sin" is death!

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Since they were serious, I couldn't understand why they felt the need to quote "sin". Usually that signifies the use of terminology that the speaker finds invalid. I see this a lot and it drives me nuts because I can't understand what they're trying to say, or why they felt the need to set off part of their statement in quotes. Like when I see a sign that says

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We're "best" in the business!

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What gives? Anybody know?Edited by crashfrog, : No reason given.

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Yeah, I believe it. Cockney is a tough one to follow. I saw an interview once with the singer from Oasis

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The leader singer of Oasis speaks with a thick Mancunian accent, Manchester being more than 300km away from London . Though I can imagine thick Mancunian being harder for Americans to follow than even Cockney.

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I forgot to mention a New York accent. Yes, that's another noticeable one. Let me ask you something. Sometimes on movies we see American actors and actresses doing terrible English accents. I mean, they butcher it. Others are spot on. Likewise, I've heard British actors and actresses nail a typical American accent while others do a terrible job at it. In your opinion, is emulating an American accent difficult or relatively easy?

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The problem with a lot of American's fake English accents are that they're a crazy hybrid of all sorts of English accents. They'll take some Scouse from what they've heard of The Beatles in interviews, they'll take some Cockney, some Received Pronounciation, and go crazy with it.Because Americans more or else always soften the letter T in words such as "butter" and "letter" into D sounds, whereas Englishmen use either a hard T sound or a glottal stop (often interchanging the two in the course of conversation), I find that many Americans trying to emulate a British accent don't know when to use one or the other. For example, they might be doing an impression of an Englishman from a middle-class background, and use glottal stops instead of the T consonant.Successfuly emulating accents takes more than a good ear, it requires quite a lot of background knowledge, such as the social class assosciated with different accents etc...As for people with English accents trying to emulate the American accent... when I hear a fairly okay American accent, one of the things I notice that stops it from being successful is that they don't put enough 'r' sounds in there, or they might drawl a little too much with certain vowel sounds. Strangely though, many English singers seem hopelessly drawn to singing with an American accent, and the accent usually sounds quite good to me.I've also heard a lot about Hugh Laurie going to America and getting the American accent down so well that people who weren't familiar with his earlier work thought that he was American....I know this wasn't addressed to me, but I thought I'd throw in my two pence anyway

well, unless I knew Robert Plant was english, I would not say he was. You can't really hear it when he sings, but you can when he speaks. Gilmour and Waters both have a more english accent when singing, but . . .just what is a "glottal stop"?

I'm a fan of Coronation Street, so I can tell a Mancunian from a Cockney.
The older Mancunians are distinguishable from the younger ones too - I think I've heard it called "talking broad".I find it's necessary to really listen in order to follow a conversation - but the vocabulary is a bigger stumbling-block than the accent. (I used the word "toque" in a post recently and I wondered if anybody outside of Canada would know what it meant.)

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We're "best" in the business!

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What gives? Anybody know?

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Yes it's weird. It seems to say, "We're "best" - whatever that means! - in the business". I think the explanation is either that an idiot wrote it, or that it’s some sort of legal get-out in case a rival company challenges their claim of being ”best’ in the business.Edited by Zawinul, : No reason given.

If you used a glottal stop instead of a T sound when saying the word "butter", it would sound like "buh-eh".

well, it is from New Orleans.(just joking here, so those of you from katrinaville, please don't shoot me)

I've never heard of talking broad, I'll have to look it up. Though I definitely know what you mean by the older generations speaking with a different accent to younger generations. It's very noticeable in London accents right now, I think this is because of multiculturalism and also TV and radio. I don’t know whether or not my experience of this reflects the real situation, but I’ve noticed that young people with London accents have very recently started to use a new ”oo’ vowel sound. I first heard it about three years ago in a rap song. Before then I’d never heard it.”Toque’ . hmm, unless you’re talking about mechanics, I don’t know what you mean .

Would the "Received Pronounciation" be what is sometimes called "BBC English"? We have a similar situation in Canada, where the CBC has homogenized many of the regional and ethnic accents, though Maritimers are still distinct and NewfoundLANDers even more so.(A toque - rhymes with "nuke" - is a knitted winter hat, often in garish colours with advertising and a big pompom. Rappers should come to Canada to buy their "hats", eh?)

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Zawinal gave a good reply about the actors and accents, as well as saving me from pointing out that Oasis are Mancunians (emphatically so!).The grammar's really off topic, so just briefly. Crashfrog pointed out that you meant conjunctions, but what I want to say is that it is not bad or improper English to start sentences with them. It's only in the type of very formal English that you might use for a business letter to a stranger or a legal document that you should avoid doing so. Prose writers of both fiction and non-fiction will start sentences with conjunctions. They'll also do what you say you do, and stick commas in wherever they feel a pause is appropriate or natural to the flow. So don't worry too much about it.In conversational English, which is all we need to use on these threads, it's just clarity that's important. The only thing I'd mention here is that it makes a post easier to read if people capitalize, because the full-stops (periods) don't show up too well on the screen, so it's much easier to see the beginnings and endings of sentences if we all make the effort to hit the shift key!

Indeed it is. I stand corrected. I understand the comma rule, however, I don't always employ it appropriately. One of my worst writing habits is my overuse of commas to denote what a natural pause might sound like if I were actually speaking the words. My wife tells me that use extraneous commas. She's an excellent writer so I may have trusted her judgment in error. Maybe I've simply developed a complex over it.

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The wages of "sin" is death!

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Since they were serious, I couldn't understand why they felt the need to quote "sin".[/qs]It sounds as if they just wanted the word to standout as an attention grabber. They could have simply boldened (sin). That's usually how I use it and understand it to be used. I think they are trying to emphasize how they are the best in the business. Why they use quotation marks for that purpose is beyond me.

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"He has shown you, O man, what is good; And what does the Lord require of you but to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God. -Micah 6:8

Yes, that's what "Z" means. Also sometimes known as "the Queen's English".Aren't we quaint?

Oops... My bad. Does a Mancunian accent sound similar to Cockney or am I way off? A British mishmash of accents, eh? Yeah, I suppose that makes sense, especially since most Americans can't quite identify the different accents as well as someone living in the UK. I think Cate Blanchett does a remarkable job with an American accent. Yes, some do. I think Chris Martin (of Coldplay) is the only one of this era that still sounds British when he sings. No, that's fine. I was hoping for alot of feedback anyhow.

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"He has shown you, O man, what is good; And what does the Lord require of you but to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God. -Micah 6:8