Archive for the ‘Language and Culture’ Category
Thursday, August 30th, 2012
Have you ever wondered how the North American accent came about? Why does the accent we train clients to achieve here at L2 Accent Reduction Centre sound so different from the British Accent? Isn’t the British accent more original or “proper”?
The general North American accent that we teach is called a rhotic accent – meaning we pronounce our /r/’s in words like ‘artist’, ‘work’ and ‘perch’. The British dialect that we most commonly attribute a proper English accent to is called Received Pronunciation (RP). Received Pronunciation is called an R-less dialect because they leave out the /r/ in words like ‘artist’ so that they sound something like /a:tIst/. That being said, it is important to keep in mind that there are many different accents in both North America and the UK. There are some American accents such as a New York or Boston accent which are largely R-less and alternately, there are some British accents that are rhotic.
Historically, most English settlers to North America sounded much like the rest of the speakers back home in England. They spoke with a rhotic accent. Yes, a rhotic accent that sounded much like the one we use today in North America. During the Victorian Era, Received Pronunciation came into fashion with the upper echelons of society and soon, everybody was attempting to emulate their “posh” accent. While British colonists in some areas of North America adopted RP, the balance of power in the continent was shifted to manufacturing and business centres such as New York, Chicago, and Detroit, where the rhotic accent was still popular. As the influence of these areas grew, so did the rhotic accent, until we have the distinctly different accents that we have today.
In a sense, the North American accent could be considered the “original” English accent! We have seen this kind of linguistic conservatism in many other cases, such as with the divergent Spanish accents between Spain and Latin America, and with Quebecois and the French of France. In each case, the original accent has been preserved in the colonial areas while the language has quickly evolved in their countries of origin.
This neat historical story of the American Accent is yet another living indicator that language is constantly shifting and evolving, both on a global and a personal level. If whole countries can change their accent on a whim, what’s stopping you from coming in and changing your own accent today?
(For a detailed and much better written account of how Americans came to lose their British accents, check out this awesome Mentalfloss article!)
Tags: accent reduction, accent reduction training, American accent, British accent, British English, Canadian Accent, foreign accents, foreign name, Jeff Madigan
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Friday, July 27th, 2012
Can Fast Speech and Word Reductions Denote Levels of Politeness?
Although language superstitions may often mislead people into believing that fast speech rules such as /h/ reductions are in fact incorrect ways of speaking, there are some reductions that are context dependent. These reductions can denote different levels of politeness. One such example is ‘you’ reductions. While we teach our clients how to achieve palatalization such as ‘didn’t chu’ or ‘would ju’ over word boundaries to improve rhythm, we do not recommend reducing the ‘you’ pronoun into ‘ya’. Sometimes in informal situations, native speakers of English may reduce the ‘you’ to sound like ‘ya’. Awareness of this reduction has made its way into popular culture. Pop songs titled “Don’t Cha” and “Hey Ya” have infiltrated the airwaves in the past few years. ‘You’ is frequently shortened to ‘ya’ in text messages and ‘y’all’ has made a surprising comeback in informal conversations.
The descriptive approach will tell us that there is no such thing as “wrong” or “improper” language. While this may be true, we should also remember that language follows many politeness rules that determine the appropriateness of certain styles in particular situations. Be aware that reducing ‘you’ to ‘ya’ should be confined to informal situations, because it is a term of address that denotes much less respect than the regular pronoun. When in doubt, it’s best not to reduce ‘you’, and in professional relationships it is definitely not advised. Reductions certainly have an important place in the English language. It can help us achieve clarity and rhythm, but it is important to be aware of the subtle nuances in meaning and politeness that our choices in words and reductions may denote.
Tags: accent reduction, cross-cultural, discrimination, English, Jeff Madigan, Language Superstitions, mispronouncing, mother tongue, pronounced, pronucation, pronunciation, pronunciation training
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Tuesday, July 24th, 2012
“Wear a touque. 90% of your body heat gets released through your head.”
This is something my mother always told me, and I never questioned it. But recently, I found out that it has no scientific claim whatsoever. I asked a few friends, and they also thought it was true. There are some things that we grow up thinking as true, and rules about language are no exception.
Were you ever told that saying, “Me and Bill went fishing.” is wrong? That we should say, “Bill and I went fishing.”
With English usage, there is the prescriptive approach, which tells us the way we should use language, and the descriptive approach, which tells us how people really use the language. Accent reduction requires a mixture of these two extremes.
The rules for Fast Speech, Chapter 3 in our Speak Clearer course book, explain how certain sounds are reduced in order to keep the correct rhythm and flow of spoken English. For instance, it is quite observable, that in spoken English, we often drop the /h/ sound on pronouns.
Examples of H Reductions:
I saw her there = I saw ‘er there
What did he do? = Wha did ‘e do?
I saw his letter. = I saw ‘is letter.
One of the problems our clients face when they explain these fast speech rules to their English speaking friends is that those rules are wrong. Unfortunately, many of us grow up learning about these language superstitions and fast speech rules are often confused by prescriptivists as being colloquialisms. Many a great writer of literature use colloquial speech to add depth to their characters.
Examples of Colloquialisms from Classic Literature
“Who is your folks?” = Who are your parents? (Huckleberry Finn)
“What yawl mean?” = What do all of you mean? (The Sound and the Fury)
“He is dirty thief.” = He’s a dirty thief. (Call of the Wild)
The trouble with colloquial speech is that often times they are used to depict a character as being uneducated, like in the above examples, and so many people develop the superstition that using any reductions will make you too sound poorly educated. It’s just not true.
“You don’t go back to doin sumthin that didn’t work.” – Barack Obama
Tags: accent reduction, cross-cultural, discrimination, English, English accent, Jeff Madigan, Language Superstitions, mispronouncing, mother tongue, pronounced, pronucation, pronunciation, pronunciation training
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Thursday, July 19th, 2012
At L2 Accent Reduction Centre we offer many different accent reduction courses, including online and one-on-one training to help you speak Proper English Pronunciations.
Here’s a short story about Proper English Pronunciation:
The way Canadians pronounce their diphthongs (double vowels), especially in the word “about” has been the butt of many American jokes. We are often fabled to pronounce the word as aboot or aboat. The particularly humorous phrase “oat and aboat in a boat” is frequently attributed to our quirky Canadian accents. On the northern side of the 49th Parallel, most Canadians are clueless as to why Americans continue to relentlessly poke fun at them while repeating the word “about” in a preposterous accent. Most Canadians will agree that they do not say the word ‘out’ as oot or oat. Here, at L2 Accent Reduction Centre, clients frequently ask our specialists about the difference between words such as ‘rider’ and ‘writer’. Often, the environment in which they learned English did not distinguish between the vowels in these words, and it often comes as a surprise when Canadians have trouble understanding their speech because of the lack of vowel distinctions.
Canadian Pop Culture
However, the truth is that Canadians do pronounce their vowels differently from Americans and what results from this difference is the perception of the Canadian accent that has served as a common stereotype the world over. That being said, what Canadians are not doing is saying ‘about’ as aboat or ‘house’ as hoose. In the linguistic phenomenon called Canadian Raising, vowel combinations such as the /ay/ sound in the word ‘five’ and the /aw/ sound in the word ‘crowd’ are raised to the higher vowel combinations /Ãy/ and /Ãw/ respectively before a voiceless consonant, such as /t/, /s/, f/, etc. This results in a vowel differentiation between the words ‘writer’ and ‘rider’ or ‘house’ (verb) and ‘house’ (noun). Americans may perceive this vowel difference to be more exaggerated than it truly is and hear the high vowels /o/ or /u/ when Canadians are engaging in their characteristic vowel raising. Of course, there are other aspects that distinguish Canadian English from General American English, but Canadian Raising is perhaps the most salient and well-known characteristic of Canadian speech. As always, it is important to remember that, just like everywhere else, it’s unwise to generalize and Canadian accents can vary widely from coast to coast.
At L2 Accent Reduction Centre we offer many different accent reduction courses, including online and one-on-one training to help you speak Proper English Pronunciations.
Tags: accent reduction courses, accent reduction training, American accent, Canadian Accent, foreign accents, Jeff Madigan, mispronouncing, online english training, pronucation, pronunciation, pronunciation training
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Wednesday, June 27th, 2012
Happy Face - Accent Reduction Tools
When we first learn the English alphabet, we are taught that there is only one /n/. While this may be true of our written language, there are in fact two very important and different ways in which /n/ can be pronounced in spoken English. The first [n] is what often comes to mind as the regular [n], such as the [n] in the words “nice”, “never” and “knowledge”. This [n] is a short and sweet sound that temporarily directs air through your nose before the next sound quickly redirects it back into your oral cavity.
The second and perhaps more obscure pronunciation of the /n/ consonant is called the syllabic [n]. The syllabic [n] is very important in the production of the North American English accent and it is characterized by an elongated direction of air through the nose. In other terms, the syllabic [n] is simply held for longer than the regular [n]. It is very easy to identify the syllabic [n], because it appears every time the [n] is the last sound in a word. For example, common words such as “phone”, “mean” and “button” all contain the syllabic [n].
The bolded words in the following sentences contain the syllabic [n]. Practice reading these out loud and remember to hold any [n] that is the last sound of a word. Can you distinguish between the two different types of [n] sounds?
1. Transportation - The bus is an efficient source of transportation.
2. Phone - Pick up the phone!
3. Earn - How are we going to earn money?
4. Complain - He came to complain about an employee.
5. Croon - The singer continued to croon well into the night.
Tags: accent, accent reduction, accent reduction training, Canadian Accent, English accent, English as a Second Language, foreign accents, Jeff Madigan, mispronouncing, north american english accent, online learning, pronounced, pronucation, pronunciation training
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