New dialect emerging

Depends on political inclination. Republicans are high-pitched. Just watch Faux News.

 

I wasn't mocking. I find it interesting that one language can have so many differing pronunciations.

 

Yes, I find the vehicle thing odd too.

The "route" thing is particularly awkward here, as "root" means "make sweet love to someone you love very much" in Australia.

As for whether everyone sounds like J W Pepper, I would have to say no. I have been to America, and I can verify that only about half of them sound like him. The other half sound like Rosco P Coltrane.

 

Yes, it was much the same for me. If someone's from the North of England, I can usually tell to within about 10 miles where they're from.

And I can barely understand Scousers (people from Liverpool), even though it's less than an hour's drive from where I grew up.

America does at least have some regional accents. In Australia, there's almost nothing. Adelaide has an accent, but it's the only city that does. Apart from that, there's a standard posh inner-suburbs accent (the same for each city), and a standard not-posh outer-city accent (the same for each city), and a countryside accent. And that's it.

 

I thought Melbourne had an accent of it's own?

I know the Kiwi's have a more nasal twang as one of Mrs Cabbie's friends is a Kiwi and Mrs Cabbie has unfortunately picked up some of her accent

And what was that scouser saying?!?! Wth.

Let the forum work out this chap I think he's East Riding by the sound of it. He's a bit broad but perfectly understandable to me.

 

Poorly-educated South-Eastern Suburbs people in Melbourne have an accent, but it's not really very different to people from Sydney's or Brisbane's Western Suburbs. Melbourne people just talk about coffee.

A Kiwi accent is completely different. See if you can find "Police Ten 7" on one of your millions of digital TV channels: Kiwis arguing sound like cockatoos having a fight.

The Jamie Carragher clip is brilliant. The Scouse accent is a remarkable thing to behold.

I liked your Yorkshire clip. I reckon they'd struggle to find anyone who sounds like that now: we are losing our accents gradually as people from the pre-TV generation die off.

My mum's from Dundee (on the east coast of Scotland), and a Dundee accent isn't difficult to understand. But she had an aunt from Arbroath, only about 20 miles further North, and her accent was wildly different. It had loads of Scandinavian words in it. I once watched (entirely legally, obviously), season 1 of Star Trek TNG with Swedish subtitles, and it was remarkable reading the subtitles and seeing how similar they were to Auntie Betty's accent and vocabulary.

 

A Canadian friend told me that the British claim they sound like Americans, and the Americans say they sound British.

 

When I was very very very young - 18 - I spent a summer in Taiwan. To pay for my flights, I got a job at an English-language school - one of those private language-instruction places.

They had an interesting policy. Most English-language schools in Taiwan focused on teaching American English. Students who then went to Britain or Australia didn't know what anyone was on about. This school had a policy of employing people from different English-speaking places around the world - America, Canada, England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, etc - and rotating the teachers through different classes, so that the students got a good understanding of different accents. I thought it was a great idea.

 

True. That's because the residents of the one in Delaware don't wish to be mistaken for people from the other Newark---much as citizens of "Ver-SALES" Kentucky don't want be mixed up with the those in the similarly spelled French city.

 

Yes, that seems to go for pretty much every town with a French-based name, whether it's New Orleans or Des Moines or Grand Teton (excellent name) or St Louis or wherever.