Do you have or have you ever had an accent? Are (were) you ashamed of it?

What did you do about it?

Being from South Carolina with a mother from Charleston (think Fritz Hollings' accent-- I bet you didn't know that "paper" HAD three syllables) and a dad from the sticks (actually, a pretty mellifluous accent, though if we don't watch him, he'll pronounce "police" as poo-leece and "Sears" as sayres), I arrived at Penn like the only hillbilly on Lon Guyland. I caught myself calling an emergency door a fahr exit-- fah-er exit-- FIRE exit, and henceforth murdered my accent ruthlessly. Subsequently I felt foolish about this, realizing that regional accents are one of the few things making America interesting, and let the thing crop up again as it felt so motivated. I still get the "Y'all ain't from around here," and "Where are you from, originally?" things all the time, however.

You?

I'm not nearly as bad as the stereotypical Yinzer, but sometimes I have to pause before I speak so I don't end up saying "worsh" instead of "wash".

i occassionaly let loose a "dahn-tahn" or something, but never a worsh.

I'm proud of it!

it's a great accent - so tough sounding. :thumbsup:

what more can be said.

Trust me..the deep north and the deep south are equally as bad!

Everything's Ai-ut Eighty-ai-ut. I'll get Fritz to be the spokesman.

but perhaps that's another urban legend.

i grew up in the bronx.
and people's accents rub off on me (usually european) or when i start to speak too much spanish, i get a weird spanglish thing happening. it's obnoxious, i am so embarrassed when i catch myself.

But not a terrible drawl like the media loves to portray.

Where you push the vowels through your nose. Sometimes the whole word "FINE" comes out my nose, where the I has a kind of oy sound.

An ex of mine spent two years at the University of South Carolina and it changed his pronunciation of "fine" forever :-)

kicks in.

"Bush? Screw that bastid fukah."

But I have never, ever, had an accent which is very odd because my family is full of people with a draaawwwlll. I have been told that I have no accent, and I have also been told that I have a slightly general continental upper-class american accent. I did not come from an upper-class family either. How the hell did this happen? People are so amazed when they figure out I am from the South.

I must admit though, that the absence of the Southern accent has made me more successful in some areas. I love most of the southern accents. Jimmy Carter's accent is like music to me. I loathe the Texas drawl, especially a certain fake cowboy who I will not mention.

I can turn it on and off though, I usually lay it on thick when I'm out of the city. It's fun having Southerners and Westerners stare in confusion because we talk so fast here.

...while in Hawai'i for 12 years. I wasn't ashamed of it, but once I was back in Florida I got some funny looks.

What? Sumting funny, brah?

And heah I grew up thinkin' that a pee-can was something you keep undah the bed if you don't have indoah tawlets.

Now pu-cahn pie is one of mah favorites! Accent? I have no accent at-tall!

Glad to have you here (he said, dropping the phony drawl)

how to spell the absolute destruction of the english language I did as a young woman! I was so southern I could not even understand what I was saying!!!! I heard myself..and asked..."what is a shauer?"

I now speak REAL English!

Step-dad has one and my mom kind of does...I tried to shed it desperately when kids made fun of me when I moved from Virginia to Colorado in second grade...but I've come to terms with it so I'm not as ashamed.

My mother, from Mississippi, still worshes her clothes and dishes. I was in fourth grade or so when a girl from Illinois moved in next door (in Texas)...she heard me say worsh and just about died. AFter that, I spent hours in my room de-rednecking my speech. I now have people tell me that I sound like I'm from the midwest.

We moved to SC in 1997, and everyone there said the same thing when I opened my mouth...."You ain't from around here, are ya?" Nope, I'm from Texas..."You don't sound like you're from Texas"...OK, newsflash - Texas is a huge state, and there are many dialects, the whole state simply doesn't sound the same.

My kids were two and four when we moved to SC...They picked up the twang almost instantly. "Hair" had two syllables, as did "friend" and "bath". My son came home from kindergarten asking me why he only had one first name...There was Billy Joe, etc in his class. He was the only boy that wasn't doubled up in the name dept. My response was "Because we aren't from here."

Doncha know?

Whachoo gonna do?

When I first moved to WV from SC people would say "You're from South Carolina? You don't have an accent" like they were suspicious. The funny thing is, that after doing theater for a number of years, when I'm conversing with people who do have a strong accent, I tend to pick it up a little and then they think I'm mocking them. When I worked as a catalog telephone operator, the ones that would set me off were southern and midwest.

I've always had a Brooklyn accent, but I've been living in the south for nearly 10 years. :scared:

Plus, I have a deep voice and people always mistake me for a man when I talk on the phone. more :scared:

caught hell in both places for my accent. When I moved from England to Iowa when I was a teenager I would practice dropping my accent by watching TV shows and repeating words I heard.

:hi:

:hug: :hug: :hug: :hug: :hug: :hug: :hug: :hug: :hug: :hug: :hug: :hug: :hug: :hug: :hug: :hug: :hug: :hug: :hug: :hug: :hug: :hug:

ya, November 2004 has definitely been the worst year of my life. :(

I live in New England now though. Sometimes, I get mistaken for a kid on the phone anyway. I try to lower it as much as I can, but it can still come out at times. Oh well. :shrug:

Not really ashamed of it. It's me. Plus, I'm one mean soprano when I want to be. :D

although I spent my formative years in western Kentucky. My theory: television. As a child I watched a great deal of TV, where the actors - whether in sitcoms, movies or newscasters - were instructed to develop the LACK of an accent. I joined the Navy at age 18, where untold numbers of people I met from around the country told me I didn't sound like I was from the South. Oddly enough, my speech did develop some Yankee inflections when I was stationed in Connecticut - and even some brogue when I was in Scotland.

I grew up in Todd County.

Hancock County, along the Ohio River. On edit: there is one word that I strove to pronounce correctly and that still gives me problems on occasion. That word is 'get,' which sometimes slips out as 'git,' especially if I'm tired.

a Minnesota accent. And the people from other parts of the country that say I do are wrong. They all have an accent.

Well, I've always had Pennsylvania Dutch but living with a girl from North Jersey while at College and I got the most fucked up accent combining these 2 totally opposite accents:

It'll cost youse foor quoorter to cross the crick

but sounds like Boston when you live in Florida.

Didn't know i had an accent till someone laughed at my "you all" etc.
Also several people ask "where are you from"?

Now (28 years+ later we are back in WV) and now people ask again "where are you from"? because my accent is much less than thers.

No, i have never been ashamed or embarassed.

thats why we become your news anchors, game show hosts and starfleet captains.

Nah, never been ashamed of it, though as a kid I pronounced "r" as "w"...my big brother was Wonnie. I thought well into my 20's I still pronounced my r's wrong until someone told me I didn't. :D

At least not one anyone seems able to imitate. I've asked. People from the south always say we have one. They just can't imitate it.

What about people from the UP? I went to college there for four years, and now my friends swear I have an accent. I really just say "eh" a lot and pronounce me "o"s differently, though I don't notice.

But I'm not an expert. Canadian with a slight Finnish accent. They don't say not(naht) like down state, they say naut, eh?

It's like Canadian, but it has that Finnish edge. Some older folks straight from Finland are intelligable.

Some of it is easily Canadian, but it is Michigan.

I love this state. Warts and all. By warts I do not mean Detroit. Most of us downstate Michiganders are kind of proud of Detroit. They make lemons into lemonaid every day.

I was born and raised in MI. Not a big fan of Detroit, though. Mor of a Chicago type person.

at age 11. Tried my best to lose that accent and did. Now I'm wishing I still had it.
Now I'm in MI and they say I sound Canadian .. geez.

...but I probably do. I grew up in Northern NJ, and now live in Southern Colorado. And many people around here have a slight Hispanic accent, whether they're Hispanic or not - the City of Pueblo is 40% Hispanic, and it's an easy accent to pick up.

when I first went to the East Coast, people would stare at me and ask, "Whea ah you from anyway?"

When I moved back to Minnesota nine years later, people there asked me where I was from, because I gradually adjusted to Eastern pronunciation. I still slip into a southern New England/New York area accent when I'm irritated. It's a GREAT accent for being irritated!

Then I lived for 19 years in the laid-back Pacific Northwest, where the accent is similar to Minnesota but with the consonants less emphasized and the vowels less rounded.

Now that I've been back in Minnesota for a year, new acquaintances ask me where I'm from. :-)

I think that my accent at this point is a real mixture of everywhere I've lived.

Say it right Lydia. :D

in pronouncing the name of our great state. :-)

my dad was born and raised in that great state (Caledonia, extreme southeast)

Call me and we'll talk about it.

Nope, never ashamed. Wear it like a battle scar.

...I never had an accent until I returned from the U.S. Then everyone told me how much of a yank I sounded like. LOL My family would repeat words I would say, trying to get the accent down, but they just couldn't get the hang of it. I do admit though, I could hear it when I came back, and boy I really sounded funny.

Anyway, when I was over there, there were a few times my accent did get in the way:

1st: was in Louisiana when I asked for a glass of coke. The poor waiter had no idea what I was asking for, and I was pretty damn thirsty and getting pretty frustrated, so in the end I spelled it out for him.

2nd: was in San Francisco. It was Sapph's and my second date and I was out of smokes. Anyway we walked to a gas station and there was a Middle Eatern (I have no idea what part of the ME he was from, and quite frankly I didn't care either. Everyone is equal to me) guy serving and I asked for a pack of Marborough lights. Poor guy had no idea what I was asking for. Again I started getting pretty frustrated so in the end I looked at Sapph and she asked for my smokes for me. LOL

So I have never been ashamed of my accent. But I have been pretty damn frustrated with having an accent at times.

I used to have a slight "Long Island" (read: "New York") accent, having grown up there.

After 33 years here I now have a "California" accent, whatever that is.

So what.

I'm from Iowa. They used to send news anchors there to study the dialect, because it was so homogeneous.

On edit: My father has a terrific accent. Grew up in Kansas, now lives in Maine, and has managed to combine the two. I noticed it first when he told me he was going out to "warsh the cah."

First time I ever saw William Macy.

Now he seems to be into everything. Love that guy!

of O's and others since I moved up here to WA state...since I'm close to Canada I hear a lot of "OMG You said "Ouut" or "It's NOT POP! it's SODA!". Hey...it just happens after you've lived in a place for a while...

Which is odd, since my dad is a Mississippi boy and other than Japan (and Texas), I've lived nowhere but the South. Didn't have one when I was a kid, don't have one now. Outside of a propensity for saying y'all, no one ever suspects I'm a southerner. I have no idea how that happened.

if need be, I can tone it down.

I have to really clamp down on it so they don't think I'm sending them up.

I spend all day talking to Chinese students who have mostly studied British English. I've caught myself saying "moe-buy-ul" and "auntie-bee-otics" instead of mobile and anti-biotics and "colleges" when I mean "colleagues".

:shrug:

I could turn it off or on if I wanted to, however I do speak quickly thats something I can't control.

my accent got me all the chicks.

It faded over the years, as did my, er, magnetism.

I find nothing sexier than a British accent, there's something so James Bond-y about it!

My mother had an English accent (having grown up in Scotland). Maybe that's the reason. I can't even DO a good Dahchestah accent.

However, I recall being mocked in college (in New York) for saying Bostonian things like "So didn't I".

That was OK though, because it gave me the opportunity to retaliate against the Bronx girls who said "huh" instead of "her", and the girls who said "Tixis" instead of "Texas".

you got a problem with that? ;-)

Although people here in California say I don't have a Queens accent at all, what I'm beginning to understand what they are actually saying is, "Gee, you don't sound like Fran Dreischer!"

I spent my early childhood in Germany and came here just in time to go to school. There is no torture like being in elementary school and not speaking like the rest of the children. And this was before the days of making allowances for language differences so my teachers mostly just thought I was retarded.

My accent is mostly gone, but it occasionally comes back when I'm tired, then people start giving me funny looks. I used to say 'howdy', 'cause it sounded natural to me. I had this girlfriend once, and I saw her with a group of her friends. I went over and said "howdy!". She giggled: "Tee-hee-hee, he said 'howdy'." Well, she wasn't my girlfriend for long after THAT, I'll tell you.

I knew I was with the right woman when I told her once that I was "fixin'" to do something, and she said "Fixin'. Oh that's so cute!"

:-):7:DB-):smoke::hippie:

People often don't know where I'm from, unless I actually say it - Lawn Guyland.

That's about the extent of my accent, and I'm proud of that. I like not being easily labeled.

I have a heavy German accent; I manage to pronounce the "th" correctly, but I'm pretty obvious anyway. And no, I'm not ashamed of it; I wasn't when I was living in the UK and I am certainly not ashamed when I'm visiting the US. Why should I? I haven't met an American German prof without an accent yet (and usually my vocabulary is bigger than theirs).

Of course no one ever thinks they have an accent. I grew up in southern Ohio and never really thought I had an accent. I moved up to Minnesota and now whenever I say my name to ppl (Erin) they ALWAYS think I'm saying Ann!

Erin
a.k.a. Ann

Don't know if the latter is an accent, a speech impediment, or a flaw in other people's hearing. You would think that if someone were introducing himself to you and you were unclear between John and Don, you'd assume it was the more popular name. Even now, with many fewer Johns about, there's still probably 10 times more Johns than Dons. At least the Erin/Ann confusion makes a little bit of sense in this regard.

is a hint of British. Not so much an accent as word usage but it makes it sound a bit Brit. I think it's because old New Englanders retain a bit of that word use and perhaps a hint of the accent - at least those of us who do not live in Boston.

I've been asked any number of times, especially since I moved to California, if I'm British. I'm not, not for at least ten generations back. Or maybe it's from reading all those PG Wodehouse novels.

Yet I've only ever been in the west and the midwest. Maybe some strange amalgam of these accents has caused the trouble.

:cry: