A voice, an accent, and a thousand assumptions

[Krista]

There was a generation where accents were taught to be shunned. There are people who do not speak the way their grandparents do. It's sad coming from a place where the accents gives a lot of color and warmth to the place that overall has a lot of sameness to it. I know in school we figuratively had our accent beaten out of us. We did some recitation in early grades. We had to shorten our R's mind our I's, and we were heavily corrected for using double negatives in casual speech.

I get there is a time and place for proper language, grammar usage. I also know that it is the least important gauge for intellect and intelligence. But, that's not how we were taught. We were taught that proper speech, grammar usage, and language would gain us respect. People would no longer see dirty summer feet, because shoes were optional. That kids worked in tobacco, corn, and cattle after school and during summer breaks, etc. We got tan, sunburned, and probably went into the work force instead of college more often. Teachers made it known, quite clear, that if we did not break our bad habits and phase out our accent that we would not be respected. That it was something worth correcting early. 

It created a distinct segregation between those that could break the accent and the kids that had thicker accents and couldn't easily hide it. At least until we got older and overlooked it, and teachers were more relaxed or the curriculum no longer required such emphasis on how the words were spoken, but the correctness of them in general. 

I do not have an accent. My grandparents had them, neighbors had them. I say simple words completely different than the people I respect the most, and as I get older it saddens me. I wished I was left alone. I don't know if I would have an accent as my Mother doesn't either and accents/language does come from where we develop most and that's alongside the people who raise us from an early age. 

Edited June 15 by Krista

[Jason Rimbaud]

10 minutes ago, CassieQ said:

 I worked on training

Same, I had a hardcore Pennsylvania accent that I made sure to lose like I dusted the muck from my small town boots. 

[Zombie]

1 hour ago, Krista said:

I do not have an accent

oh you do, Krista 

everyone has an accent

even if it’s just ‘posh’

[Kileoli]

6 hours ago, Davide said:

I'm switching back to the seriousness of the original topic because I think it's an important one. I don't know if I can make a useful contribution, but I'll try.
 

These kinds of assumptions people make can range from mildly annoying to pretty damaging, depending on how serious and strong the stereotype associated with that accent, mannerism, etc. But it can also be annoyingly difficult for people to counteract this effect, to stop making this kind of assumptions. People can reduce it's impact by trying not to judge, but there are also people who are aware of this effect, thing they have managed to avoid it, but still do it. Which makes it more important to raise awareness of how damaging these assumptions can sometimes be.

Thanks @Davide. That was a good point.

[Kileoli]

3 hours ago, CassieQ said:

Let's see.  Mid-40s female, not married, no children, happily donning gay whale earrings.  Yeah, I'm pretty sure people are making some assumptions about that.  Like I give a damn.  

The accent thing is the one that people (mostly patients) like to comment on.  When they find out that I grew up in the South, they all want to know why I don't have a Southern accent.  They almost sound mad about it.  

I did have a Southern accent.  I worked on training it out of my voice while I was in elementary school because kids teased me about it.  Moving around a lot helped too.  It still creeps in sometimes, especially if I've been around certain family members or drinking.  A few weeks ago, it slipped back in when I pronounced the word "oil" and the coworker that heard pestered me to say it again for days afterwards.

Also, I will still use "Bless your heart" as a polite way to say "You absolute idiot" which is great time for the Southern drawl to kick in a little bit.          

Oh I love the stereotypes...not. it's good you don't care and you have your gay whales.

Let's see. Early 40s, married, 2 kids, engineer....picture perfect of a German male on the playground. The perfect husband definition for the stereotype moms till the reality kicks in and my husband join us on the playground and they realize I don't even look German enough and there's something wrong with the distribution of biological equipment. It's fun to see how the picture perfect definition destroyed and a new picture is built.

From the point of view of a non native i found the Southern accent, difficult to understand but sorta cool. So I can totally imagine why people ask you for extra performance.

And now I know when you say to me bless your heart you are not wishing me something nice....I like it .

[Kileoli]

1 hour ago, Zombie said:

oh you do, Krista 

everyone has an accent

even if it’s just ‘posh’

That's a linguistically correct view. We all have an accent. But for most people when someone has the standard accent, they have no accents.

[Kileoli]

5 hours ago, Krista said:

There was a generation where accents were taught to be shunned. There are people who do not speak the way their grandparents do. It's sad coming from a place where the accents gives a lot of color and warmth to the place that overall has a lot of sameness to it. I know in school we figuratively had our accent beaten out of us. We did some recitation in early grades. We had to shorten our R's mind our I's, and we were heavily corrected for using double negatives in casual speech.

I get there is a time and place for proper language, grammar usage. I also know that it is the least important gauge for intellect and intelligence. But, that's not how we were taught. We were taught that proper speech, grammar usage, and language would gain us respect. People would no longer see dirty summer feet, because shoes were optional. That kids worked in tobacco, corn, and cattle after school and during summer breaks, etc. We got tan, sunburned, and probably went into the work force instead of college more often. Teachers made it known, quite clear, that if we did not break our bad habits and phase out our accent that we would not be respected. That it was something worth correcting early. 

It created a distinct segregation between those that could break the accent and the kids that had thicker accents and couldn't easily hide it. At least until we got older and overlooked it, and teachers were more relaxed or the curriculum no longer required such emphasis on how the words were spoken, but the correctness of them in general. 

I do not have an accent. My grandparents had them, neighbors had them. I say simple words completely different than the people I respect the most, and as I get older it saddens me. I wished I was left alone. I don't know if I would have an accent as my Mother doesn't either and accents/language does come from where we develop most and that's alongside the people who raise us from an early age. 

There are languages taught to be shunned. I still remember the endless discussions between my parents about which language to speak at home. She being Russian wanted us kids to speak Russian at home, even when people decided not to use it and at school we were somehow forced not to use it. It is sorta ridiculous that I can tell a similar story from a totally different part of the world. At home my father won and over the years I sorta forgot the language.

When I moved to Germany, I was desperate to integrate to be part of the red black yellow flag instead of the blue yellow one. Since I learned on my own and based on English, my mistakes came from English, the accent almost too. I hated to have this typical east European accent. East Europe was bad enough, I didn't need the connection to a country that only existed as USSR and people roughly knew about it because of Chernobyl hating the wind coming from the East messing the agriculture.

For a big part I was successful in my integration, and not having the typical build/look and having changed my name helped. Till in 2022 Putin decided to mess with the geopolitical maps. In a short time a country nobody wanted to know where it was became a big European problem. The feelings towards refugees were mixed with Germany remembering its history being the most tolerant and helpful one. My husband suggested I help the families and volunteers with the communication. I did and I hated it. Suddenly I was the outcast, the guy who ran away before anything happened, the foreigner who needed a shelter. I was pushed away from both sides and it hurt in places I thought I had locked up.

That's when I completely stopped using the language. I struggled a lot to get back to my neutral position. It took me a long time to admit my heritage. The fact that I say where I am from is something new, I'm still as German as I can be. Funny none of the countries I can relate to is somewhere to be proud of. With all that said I am starting to believe as crazy as John Lennon's view was, a world like that wouldn't hurt to have.

PS: I apologize for my mistakes and the half ended sentences. I can't read my comment again right now.

Edit: in case it's not clear. I meant Ukraine as the place of birth.

Edited June 15 by Kileoli

[Luca E]

4 hours ago, Kileoli said:

Funny none of the countries I can relate to is somewhere to be proud of.

Is any country somewhere to be proud of? 

 “patriotism… is, of course, far better than individual selfishness, but… inferior to universal charity and should always give way to universal charity when the two conflict.”

CS Lewis.

[Kileoli]

53 minutes ago, Luca E said:

Is any country somewhere to be proud of? 

 “patriotism… is, of course, far better than individual selfishness, but… inferior to universal charity and should always give way to universal charity when the two conflict.”

CS Lewis.

That was my thought as I wrote the sentence but then I thought about the animal farm. 

Every country is proud of themselves, some are prouder. 

In that sense, some countries are universally, world wide a mess, a huge mess, being said, Germany and Ukraine are both a huge mess in the best way of the words and on top of many lists, if there were some rankings to it, there are few countries can keep up with these two.

I see your point by commenting CS Lewis, I am a big fan of let's save the Earth, lets love all and all that shit, but at the end of the day I am a human (hard to believe) and I have this need to belong to somewhere, to have somewhere I can call home. I dunno about others.

Edited June 15 by Kileoli

[Ron]

I was born and raised about an hour's drive from Lake Erie in Ohio. I don't have any particular accent in my speech, and very few people would say I had any accent. I say our as in hour and not as in are, and my we're is clearly heard as wee-rrr and not wer. And, whenever I run into a word I'm unclear of how to pronounce I look it up to make sure I pronounce it correctly most of the time, sometimes I do guess which I get right about 70% of the time. But with non-American or non-English (British) languages my pronunciation guesswork is very poor. 

Sometime back in the 1930s and 1940s people from Ohio were sought out for radio, and later television broadcasts for their lack of an accent. It was called the 'broadcasters dialect' because our speech was highly intelligible (especially those from central Ohio), not triggering any regional biases. 

In my early twenties when I began going to Gay bars regularly the Gay-accent began creeping into my voice. When I realized it was happening I was very alarmed. I lived in a small area that was still considered a village because we didn't yet have the population to be considered a town. One didn't want to go around sounding like a 'fag' at the time, not with family and not in public. At the time I was also working in a steel plant finishing raw steel into a polished product. I achieved first-class setup operator status on the machines and even made tooling in the shop (bragging rights for that) and was once elected union president. Bringing the Gay-accent into those environs was not a good idea. The Gay-accent once learned is hard to get rid of even if you want to, especially when you're out in the bars with 'your kind' as much as possible, and for some the speech becomes part of their identity. 

I haven't been to a Gay bar in around eight years now. Even before that I was no longer part of any scene after age thirty-five or thereabouts. I'm now sixty-six and three-quarter years old and I sometimes hear the Gay-accent creep into the occasional word, I guess you could call it Gay-accent light on those occasions. If I don't explicitly tell someone I'm Gay they seem surprised if/when they find out. Is it a good thing, a bad thing? I don't know. I don't feel like I'm betraying 'my kind' in any way by not speaking the lingo. But, that does have its advantages.

[Luca E]

3 hours ago, Kileoli said:

I have this need to belong to somewhere, to have somewhere I can call home.

Belonging... a huge topic open to discussion. Somewhere to call home... yes, but that can change. 

If you belong to something, somewhere, other people, by definition, do not belong, they are excluded. So, it's nice for you to belong, but crap for the outsiders.

[Luca E]

@Ron you bring up pronunciation and irrespective of where you live English is a language which does not pronounce words the way they write them. Which leaves a lot of scope for variation.

Need examples? We write monk we pronounce munk, we write colour or color we pronounce cula, culaw. If we said col-law, you might think we were saying collar.

Essentially, it's speech laziness, which sometimes makes it difficult for native speakers to understand one another. This is not confined to English, it happens everywhere.

One question is, when is speech an accent and when is it slang?

[Ron]

32 minutes ago, Luca E said:

One question is, when is speech an accent and when is it slang?

Slang is often ephemeral, evolving much faster than is the norm and often manipulates existing words by assigning new meaning to them. Even professions have jargon/slang specific to their environments.

Slang is also informal and Gay people have no exception to its usage. The Gay-accent is not an affectation, words are pronounced correctly when not using slang but not in what is considered normal cadence, so it's more of a social dialect that seeps into everyday speech for many, and not one that gets used for Gay interactions/environs only. 

51 minutes ago, Luca E said:

We write monk we pronounce munk, we write colour or color we pronounce cula, culaw. If we said col-law, you might think we were saying collar.

Essentially, it's speech laziness, which sometimes makes it difficult for native speakers to understand one another. This is not confined to English, it happens everywhere.

I can assure you that I pronounce color as 'kuh-lr' in the Ohio way.  And, yes the O N in monk is pronounced like in the word munch but that's not slang/or accent, as I'm sure you know. But if you said 'col-law' (which would be considered an accent) in context I would likely understand what you meant regardless of how I heard the word, therefore context matters a great deal in understanding accents.

Although, I tried to watch The Wind That Shakes the Barley starring Cillian Murphy (a great actor Imo) and I couldn't understand a spoken word because of the heavy Irish accent. I gave up and the disc has just been sitting on the shelf collecting dust for the last nineteen years. 

A web search will give you more information about the differences between slang and accent if you'd like to further pursue the subject. I used it to more clearly make my own commentary.

[Luca E]

1 hour ago, Ron said:

I couldn't understand a spoken word because of the heavy Irish accent.

I was once travelling by train from the coast to London after arriving in England. I had a question about what time we would arrive so decide to ask the two gentlemen sitting opposite. "Excuse me," I said, "do you speak English?"

They were Scottish, bit like Irish, strong accent.

[Zombie]

2 minutes ago, Luca E said:

"do you speak English?"

🤣😂classic way to restart the ‘border wars’