What are some of the oddest accents you've heard?
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  What are some of the oddest accents you've heard?
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Author Topic: What are some of the oddest accents you've heard?  (Read 459 times)
I spent the winter writing songs about getting better
BRTD
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« on: October 02, 2012, 10:16:58 PM »

By that I mean ones that one can't place or wouldn't expect to be naturally occurring. A few that come to mind for me:

-I used to work with a woman who was about 35 and had basically spent half her life in Texas and the other half in Minnesota. So you can only imagine what she sounded like.
-Another girl I still work with has parents from Puerto Rico who speak Spanish at home, but has lived in Minnesota almost since she was able to talk, so she somehow manages to sound both as stereotypically Latin and stereotypically Minnesotan as possible. It's kind of a running joke at work when we make fun of her for rolling r's, and yet she still has all the "ya's" and whatnot.*
-My own cousin, who often has a rather stereotypical rural Western drawl, which sounds more like an imitation, even though he grew up in Wyoming. Even odder is that no one in his immediate family talks like that either, and hearing him talk to his sister is kind of funny since she basically has the "newscaster" generic American accent (and of course lives in Des Moines now, which is kind of the heart of the region where that is natural)

My own often confuses people, because the part of North Dakota is kind of the border between the Midwest and whole western interior, so it's not quite a non-exaggerated "Fargo" type one or interior western. The most known North Dakota trait is every word with a double oo (like "root") is pronounced like the u in "put" which is definitely true for me. But today I found out that I say "continue to download" as "continya ta download" which when I actually stop to listen to sounds funny.

*Actually what's kind of interesting is that if I ever go to a store with a "Se habla Espanol" sign and hear the staff speaking Spanish, they usually sound quite stereotypically Latin American, but if they speak English to me then sound completely Minnesotan. This is true even of some younger Somalis when switching between their native language and English, which is really weird.
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Grumpier Than Thou
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« Reply #1 on: October 03, 2012, 05:19:41 AM »

I know a kid whose accent fluctuates between his native Domincan-accent and then some kid of Australian and it hurts my brain
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Vosem
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« Reply #2 on: October 03, 2012, 05:49:43 AM »

I've been informed I have a very odd accent when speaking Spanish, since my accent is a mixture of the generic American English I speak everyday and the Russian that I still use to communicate with my family. (Also, apparently the actual words I pronounce with the accent are stereotypically Colombian, since my first Spanish teacher a few years back was an immigrant from Medellin to the US), which all adds up to an accent which apparently sounds totally bizarre.
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Platypus
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« Reply #3 on: October 03, 2012, 07:36:53 AM »

My spanish is bizarre, but that's OK with me. It's exotic.

---------

Other people's accents: Michael, Burmese parents, grew up there, in Fiji, in NZ, and in Australia. Very much an Australian base to the accent, but completely kiwi or just unbelievably random pronunciations would pop up.
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Grumpier Than Thou
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« Reply #4 on: October 03, 2012, 09:03:28 AM »

I have a pretty Philadelphian accent, but it's even more blatantly obvious when I speak German.
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bore
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« Reply #5 on: October 03, 2012, 11:22:24 AM »

I've got a fairly distinctive accent, which sounds a bit Bury like, despite having never lived there.

Although the weirdest family accent is my relative who has a mum from Bury and a Mexican father, so her english is broad Bury, which feels quite odd coming from the mouth of someone who looks Mexican.
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Filuwaúrdjan
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« Reply #6 on: October 03, 2012, 12:17:55 PM »

Could be mine, I guess. But then my Dad's might actually be stranger.
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« Reply #7 on: October 03, 2012, 12:20:34 PM »

Supposedly, I have an extremely odd accent in any of the four (or more accurately 3.5) languages that I speak.
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Joe Republic
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« Reply #8 on: October 03, 2012, 12:58:47 PM »

Ocracoke Island, North Carolina.

I'd been told already that the local dialect is close to the English spoken by the original Elizabethan settlers, and thus was something of a linguistic time capsule.  Unfortunately it's already fading away as more tourists visit and settle there, and the remoteness is being lost.  Luckily however, I was able to meet a lady working at the ferry terminal who was born and raised on the island.  And yes, it was just about the strangest English accent I had ever heard.
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patrick1
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« Reply #9 on: October 03, 2012, 01:13:34 PM »

I've spoken to people with heavily accented and broken English from hundreds of countries around the world; the most difficult time was speaking to a gentleman from outside of Hattiesburg, Mississippi.  Sounded like an older, working class white guy. The accent he had was an un-intelligible mixture of deep south and cajun inflicted English.
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Oldiesfreak1854
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« Reply #10 on: October 03, 2012, 07:02:15 PM »

I'm kind of weird too.  I'm from the Midwest, but you wouldn't know it by the way I talk sometimes.  I call milk "milk", not "melk", I pronounce double Os like "oo", and my entire family calls it a "glove compartment", not a "glove box".  But I do call soft drinks "pop." Smiley
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