Esperanza delivers a talk to her co-workers during a monthly brown bag meeting. A Filipina working for a US-headquartered organization, Esperanza’s co-workers are mostly expatriates from the U.S. As soon as she concludes, her audience, mostly well-educated Americans, could not keep their surprise to themselves. “Did you study or grow up in the States?
You have the accent!” This is a major compliment in the Philippines where English as a second language is considered a prime requirement for landing the top jobs. Little did the astonished Americans know, Esperanza gets that comment all the time. Truth be told, she has never gone to the US nor has she studied in the US. Nor have her parents spoke to her in American English as a young child. So how did she learn to speak in an impeccable American accent?
The study of accents and how human beings acquire accents may be a strong candidate for a continuing debate, using the nature versus nurture, clean slate, and other psycholinguistic theories. Accent, like language, is still an evolving phenomenon. As it strides closely with the way humans interact with one another, which they do in a myriad of ways, accent seems to be constantly taking form. How do we acquire accents? How do accents represent our background and culture? Why are there stereotypes for accents?
Accent in linguistics is defined as a manner of pronouncing language. Many a linguists approach the origin of accents in different ways. Some say accent is a result of a child’s early interaction with his parents. As he widens his circle to include relatives, schoolmates, and neighbours, the child continues to develop his accent. In this sense, accent then becomes a product of geographic assignment.
The Essay on Bilingual Program: Children Language Development
This paper discussed on bilingual program that become one of the reasons parents choose schools for their children and its effect on children language development. As the impact of globalization English become a necessity for everyone in exploring and finding new things across the globe. Educational institutions see this as an opportunity to introduce bilingual program as a respond to the demand ...
Certain people speak the way they do depending on the place where they grew up. Still other scholars purport that accent does change, even quickly, depending on the person talked to and the place one finds himself in. In this sense, accent becomes a situational variable.
Aside from its origins, the study of accent is interesting because of the way accent defines certain stereotypes. While the American written English is standardized across the country, there are several recognizable differences in the accent of the U.S. English. The American accent that is relatively free of distinguishing regional characteristics is called the General American accent. Meanwhile, there are obvious differences in the accents between Americans from upstate Boston, for example, and Americans from the South. There is that Southern drawl, for example, that defines the group apart from the others.
How did the American accent come to be? Wikipedia explains that after the Civil War, the settlement of the western territories by migrants from the Eastern U.S. led to dialect mixing and leveling, so that regional dialects are most strongly differentiated along the Eastern seaboard. The Connecticut River and Long Island Sound is usually regarded as the southern/western extent of New England speech, which has its roots in the speech of the Puritans from East Anglia who settled in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
The Potomac River generally divides a group of Northern coastal dialects from the beginning of the Coastal Southern dialect area; in between these two rivers several local variations exist, chief among them the one that prevails in and around New York City and northern New Jersey, which developed on a Dutch substratum after the British conquered New Amsterdam. The main features of Coastal Southern speech can be traced to the speech of the English from the West Country who settled in Virginia after leaving England at the time of the English Civil War, and to the African influences from the African Americans who were enslaved in the South.
Although no longer region-specific,[19] African American Vernacular English, which remains prevalent among African Americans, has a close relationship to Southern varieties of American English and has greatly influenced everyday speech of many Americans.
The Essay on Southern Dialect in William Faulkner
In the writings of William Faulkner, the reader may sense that the author has created an entire world which directly reflects his own personal experience. Faulkner writes about the area in and around Mississippi, where he is from, during the post-Civil War period. It is most frequently Northern Mississippi that Faulkner uses for his literary territory, changing Oxford to ?Jefferson? and Lafayette ...
A distinctive speech pattern also appears near the border between Canada and the United States, centered on the Great Lakes region. This is the Inland North Dialect—the “standard Midwestern” speech that was the basis for General American in the mid-20th Century (although it has been recently modified by the northern cities vowel shift).
Those not from this area frequently confuse it with the North Midland dialect treated below, referring to both collectively as “Midwestern.” The so-called “Minnesota Nice” dialect is also prevalent in the upper Midwest, and is characterized by influences from the German and Scandinavian settlers of the region (yah for yes/ja in German, pronounced the same way).
In the interior, the situation is very different. West of the Appalachian Mountains begins the broad zone of what is generally called “Midland” speech. This is divided into two discrete subdivisions, the North Midland that begins north of the Ohio River valley area, and the South Midland speech; sometimes the former is designated simply “Midland” and the latter is reckoned as “Highland Southern.”
The North Midland speech continues to expand westward until it becomes the closely related Western dialect which contains Pacific Northwest English as well as the well-known California English, although in the immediate San Francisco area some older speakers do not possess the cot-caught merger and thus retain the distinction between words such as cot and caught which reflects a historical Mid-Atlantic heritage.
The South Midland or Highland Southern dialect follows the Ohio River in a generally southwesterly direction, moves across Arkansas and Oklahoma west of the Mississippi, and peters out in West Texas. It is a version of the Midland speech that has assimilated some coastal Southern forms (outsiders often mistakenly believe South Midland speech and coastal South speech to be the same).
The island state of Hawaii has a distinctive Hawaiian Pidgin.
An interesting fact associated with differences in accent is that with it came certain stereotypes. Take the case of the Boston accent versus the Southern Accent. Owing to the blue collar communities in Boston, such as Charlestown, South Boston, Hyde Park, Dorchester, East Boston, and Brighton, the Boston accent – also called Eastern New England accent by some sociolinguists – features a slightly audible “r” and a broad “a” and is said to be spoken by the more refined, elite, and educated upscale class.
The Essay on English Speech – After The First Death
English speech Good morning, teachers and year 11’s, Identity is one of the main themes in the novel 'After the First Death' by Robert Cormier. Identity defined is the individual characteristics by which a thing or person is recognized or known by. Throughout the book, Kate, the main character is constantly changing her emotions and the way she acts showing her different sides. When the main ...
Meanwhile, without reference to economics and the sophistication of the Southerners’ educated ways, Southerners are usually stereotyped as potato growers, if not cowboys. According to Wikipedia, the Southern drawl breaks short front vowels in such words as pat, pet, pit. Some Southern speakers exhibit Canadian-style rising before voiceless consonants so that ride becomes rad.
A dichotomy is thus established: The Boston accent sounds elite and sophisticated; the Southern drawl sounds provincial and uneducated.
In a larger scale, there is an ongoing debate on which American accent is more superior – the British English or the American English. The Britons seem to have more gusto in defending that they really are the originator of the puritan English dialect, such that the American English just broke away from their lexicon.
Still, other language scholars assert that with or without the accent, people generally enjoy communicating with those whom they can understand and share feedback with. At the end of the day, the evaluation boils down to the theory of effective communication, where the process does not just end with the message being sent, but whether the message being sent had an effect on the receiver. So for many communicators, Boston or Southern does not matter as long the intended meaning is shared and the intended response is generated.
Still, whether from the U.S. or not, English speakers cannot be faulted for wanting to master the language especially for their own business or career advantage. Just as learning to speak several languages can add colour and credence to a person, so does an amazing ability to speak in the right American English accent that the audience will best respond to.
