All Kinds of Accents in the U.S

Open Forum
1

There are so many different accents in America. Is there really such a thing as an “American Accent” ? (This is a rhetorical question folks.)

Here’s a Southern Accent: north carolina southern accent - YouTube

2

Here’s a Philadelphian Accent: - YouTube

3

Scarlett O’Hara, eat your heart out!

4

Brooklyn: BROOKLYN ACCENT - YouTube

5

Sanne! Hahahaha…

6

There isn’t one American accent, but every accent spoken in the US is indeed an American accent…

7

Uh, yeah, that was a rhetorical question. You know, the kind of question not in search of answer (it’s already obvious), but merely posed to produce an effect of some sort or another.

8

I’ll answer your rhetorical question with a pointless statement: I love the variety of American accents.

I work for a company that has customers all over the world, but mainly in the US and Canada. I answer the phone a lot, and one of the games I play with myself is to guess where the customer is from at the beginning of the call before I look them up in our database. It’s a lot of fun, and I’ve become quite good at picking out certain types of Canadian accents at the very beginning of the call. If I engage the person, they’re usually quite eager to tell me about where they’re from and how they speak. (Although the other day I took a call from someone in Tennessee who I could NOT UNDERSTAND AT ALL. It was a fun conversation, and I realized that I could understand the German lessons that I listen to here on LingQ far better than I could him!)

I had a funny interaction with a gentleman recently when I shipped a package. He sounded to me like he was from New York. Upon interacting with me he stated, “You’ve got a little bit of an accent there, don’t ya?” His coworker piped up to quickly respond, “Yeah, it’s called ‘New England’”. This was extra amusing to me as my Dad was from NYC, and when I was a kid we would often argue on how to pronounce words like “orange”.

Just my silly interlude on American accents. :wink:

(And typing this has made me want to call my dear friend in Texas just so I can hear her say, “well, dadgum, girl!”)

9

I’m from the South, but I don’t have a Southern accent (at least I don’t think so). I think that I have the Standard American accent, although I use some Southern vocabulary, as well as African American Vernacular English vocabulary.