What accent do you have?

[604flames]

Western

[MacDougalbry]

Neutral; grew up in Sask watching Detroit TV, lived in Vancouver for a decade, now in Calgary for a few years.

[Burninator]

Neutral for me. Not really surprising.

[Thunderball]

Originally Posted by evman150

Any of you Canadians who are coming up with "American" accents feel like posting your answers to the questions?

I have a feeling some people's answers do not reflect how they actually talk, only how they think they talk. I can't imagine so many people speaking differently from me, and I speak pretty much stereotypical Canadian.

I don't remember all my answers, but this is the big one.

The big question is this one: Do you say ABOUT and MOUTH with the same vowel sound as LOUD and DOWN? Yes. I know some people say about like "aboat" or even "aboot" but I don't, never have. Neither do many people I know. Maybe its because both my parents learned english as a second language and didn't pick up that way of saying certain words.

I also don't say PASTA like its pronounced "paessta" I pronounce it like its properly pronounced, "pahsta" because its an Italian word and the letter A is pronounced with an "ah" sound, like in french.

[jammies]

I have the correct accent. It's the rest of you that are sayin' words wrong. Infidels!

[Incinerator]

neutral

[flamey_mcflame]

I got correct=Canadian

[FireInTheHole]

Western. Born, raised, and lived in Calgary my whole life.

[icarus]

Originally Posted by Teh_Bandwagoner

Chinese
You have the accent of China. You good at maths for wearing glasses and very smart. Dalai Lama big fat liar! You come China now see Orympic gaming. All hail Mao! Qi lai! Qi lai!

lol

[Thor]

Canadian.

[Displaced Flames fan]

Western. Makes sense.

[Yeah_Baby]

Canadian.

[TheyCallMeBruce]

I *used* to have a Malaysian accent. It's gone now. However, I can still communicate in Malay...sort of.

Saya awak apa ini babi makan pergi mati!!!

I really have no idea what I just said. Probably something about pig eating and dying.

I can also imitate a chinese accent.

CHING CHANG CHONG...PING PANG PONG.

[Jayems]

Well, when I moved here from England, I had a full blown rotten teeth and mushy pees accent, but somewhere down the line, i picked up the Canadian one and have no faint trace of the english one.

Edit: But as for the quiz, Neutral it would seem. Or is it seam... not sure if it rhymes with dream or creek

[Daradon]

I got neutral, which doesn't surprise me at all. The only coliqioulism I ever use is 'eh' which I do use a lot, but you can find this in British and Aussie usage too. I can hear accents, even subtle ones (I can pick out central (Ontario even diff parts) and eastern Canadian (Maritime) to my own, and can pick out many different U.S. accents (Boston compared to New York, never mind Texas) as well as different British and Aussie accents. And obviously all the other nationalities.


I have a friend who annunciates very well and when you first hear him you think he's speaking British because of definitive t's in words like 'butter' and such, which most of us pronounce like 'budder or buter'. But he has none of their bad habits. He has a 'world accent' for lack of a better word where pronunciation is key and there are very little lazy words or slang. There definitely is a neutral world (english) accent. Mine is closer to that, though not as good as his.

[Vulcan]

Originally Posted by Thunderball

I don't remember all my answers, but this is the big one.

The big question is this one: Do you say ABOUT and MOUTH with the same vowel sound as LOUD and DOWN? Yes. I know some people say about like "aboat" or even "aboot" but I don't, never have. Neither do many people I know. Maybe its because both my parents learned english as a second language and didn't pick up that way of saying certain words.

I also don't say PASTA like its pronounced "paessta" I pronounce it like its properly pronounced, "pahsta" because its an Italian word and the letter A is pronounced with an "ah" sound, like in french.

Yeah, I mostly agree. Americans think we say aboot but we actually don't. I think what this Canadian classification in this survey is, is what Americans think a Canadian accent is.

[4X4]

Originally Posted by TheyCallMeBruce

I can also imitate a chinese accent.

CHING CHANG CHONG...PING PANG PONG.

Where's that guy that was choked at fotze for talking about chinese people? He probably had a heart attack over this one.

[Sparks]

Originally Posted by Vulcan

Yeah, I mostly agree. Americans think we say aboot but we actually don't. I think what this Canadian classification in this survey is, is what Americans think a Canadian accent is.

Canadian raising is actually the real deal.

Here's a technical mumbo-jumbo explanation:

Because the more familiar pronunciation of /aw/ is articulated with the tongue in a low position, and because it raises to a mid position in Canadian English when the vowel precedes the voiceless obstruents listed above, speakers of other varieties of English will immediately detect the vowel raising, but will sometimes think that the vowel has raised farther than it actually does, all the way to /u/, which is a high vowel--hence the mishearing (and not-quite-right imitation) of this pronunciation as aboot.

From this page: http://www.yorku.ca/twainweb/troberts/raising.html

[evman150]

Originally Posted by Vulcan

Yeah, I mostly agree. Americans think we say aboot but we actually don't. I think what this Canadian classification in this survey is, is what Americans think a Canadian accent is.

Canadians have an about-moat merger. Or at least a pronunciation of about tending towards that merger.

Canadians just don't say "about" like Americans. I've never heard it in my life. Seriously, you may think you do, but you just don't. Unless you have American parents, then maybe.

And, fwiw, the correct Canadian pronunciation of "pasta" is pass-ta. Foreign loan words in Canadian English are pronounced like "cat", not "father". If you say it differently, then you are not speaking Canadian English, but some other dialect. Personally I'm Canadian, so I'll speak Canadian and feel justified in saying anybody that says "pah-sta" is just plain wrong when it comes to Canadian English. I think the key is that the word "pasta" is not an Italian word, it is a foreign loan word in the English language. We pronounce it differently because we are speaking English, not Italian.

Also, I know a guy from Ontario that says full oot "aboot". 99.9% of us don't say that though. We say "a-boat", or at the very least a much softer version of the american "a-bowt".

Seriously, I'm like an accent nazi. I notice the littlest things that nobody else but a linguist would ever notice. I know Canadian English. And I'm from the coast where Canadian English is gradually being merged with west coast American English.

This quiz is not what "Americans think we talk like". I speak Canadian, the answer it gave me was Canadian. All the questions are perfectly fair and quite diagnostic IMO.

[evman150]

Also, "a" is not automatically "ah" in French. I don't think it's even common for it to be "ah". Mostly "cat" I think. Vocabulaire, information, prononciation, connotation, principalement, idiomatiques, habitude, années etc.

Edit: Somebody who got the "western" accent, give me your answers. I want to diagnose where the disconnect is happening here. I feel like I'm going crazy.