Joe Orr Road Rod wrote:
good dolphin wrote:
I'm pretty good with articulation. My friends laugh at me because I always mispronounce probably. I say something like prolly, as if I'm some ignorant Pittsburgher.
I have one of the more absurd Chicago accents you will ever hear. I'm not exactly sure how I got it because neither of my parents had such an extreme accent.
I'm fascinated by accents. I have a friend from Greece who didn't speak a word of English until he came to Chicago at age 13 and the only accent he has now is a Chicago accent.
This may be elitist but I don't subscribe to the popular idea that accents are neutral. I think I have poor and sloppy diction. The fact that I developed these bad habits due to where I lived is immaterial. I sound like a fucking idiot and people are going to judge me by the way I sound whether I like it or not. On the other hand, I'm kind of proud of my accent. It's a complicated and interesting topic.
I heard an interesting segment on NPR the other day. It was about a young woman named Ciku Theuri and they talked about the typical black American accent and how it was developed. It took the position that it is no less proper than any other way of speaking.
Ciku speaks English more perfectly than anyone I have ever met. Her mother is Kenyan but Ciku grew up in Cincinnati. She talked about people saying she doesn't "sound black". The piece went into the reason why so many black Americans speak the way they do. But I don't really think there's any reason why we can't all speak English the way Ciku does except for laziness.
But hey, maybe I'm wrong and accents are neutral and my speaking is just as good as anyone else's. I don't really believe that though. Anyone who heard Ciku and I speak would immediately think she was more intelligent and better educated than I am.
I got pulled out of suburban primary school because I caught hell for sounding like a white kid around the neighborhood. And pulled out of CPS in two years because my parents were convinced that I was sounding ghetto. So it was Hyde Park until college for me.
Because I don't have an accent, I generally don't care about most of them, except two, deep old time Chicago and deep southern accents. Strangely enough because I used to struggle to understand them. I don't think that you come anywhere near the bad Chicago one.
Living down south I learned the regional/state differences which I found funny, but back then they found my then California (?) sounding accent.
Yeah, you really don't have much of an accent, though I suppose someone who was really paying attention could peg you as Midwestern.
I just asked my wife her opinion and she said that there are no bad accents, there is just perception of what a "bad" accent is.
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