I tend to agree with you about country music but some I do like. George Strait etc.
I think that folks have to have tolerance for other accents. It really is not their fault.
It helps if you can understand the person with the accent but whatever accent you have you think it is normal. Their normal is not your normal.

Well considering Euro's typically speak their native language, English and a third it's not really an issue.

What's most embarrassing is how much better their English is.

Agreed on Country.

I can understand accents and regions of the county. But I more annoyed by the sing/song valley girl dialect that is creeping in to adult speech. I hear it on the radio from "experts" or authors of books and it annoys the h-ll out of me. NPR will have a 30-something women giving her opinion on a serious topic (health care, education, etc.) and I can't get past the manner in which she speaks. They sound like they are still in high school. You would think someone would tell them how immature they sound.

I suppose people have always spoken different in public than they do in private to some degree, but now it seems less and less.

Not I, but I tend to think that those who enjoy Rap Music have an IQ close to zero.

Valley girl = ending every sentence on a high note as if it was a question. My 40 YO DIL talks like this and even the grandkids don't sound that stupid.

Origin is said to be perhaps in the speech patterns of Norwegian settlements of Canada and just south. Get a couple of transplants in the SoCal teen set and you can have a speech revolution.

I don't have research on hand to back this up, but Blacks have been known to be more itinerant and have taken their dialect to all corners. Since they tend to be homogeneous in their living habits, the dialect doesn't give way to the regional speak as easily.

A thick Boston accent tends to disappear more quickly in CA because most severe accents mark a person here as different. West Coast accent is that of open speech. Take someone with an accent as perceived by CA speak and ask (aks) them to sing loudly. Singing opens up the throat and mouth and many accents are impossible to produce while singing.

Not that everyone in CA can sing.

I think that I understand what you mean Zeke when here people may end their sentence on a high note - namely eh? I think the intention is good because the recipient is being asked a question and input is needed. It is better than somebody that likes the sound of their own voice and won't shut up.

While on the subject of s-p-e-e-c-h I am speculating that the southern drawl(Virginia , Tennessee etc) would come about because of the heat and that talking becomes a real effort. Southerners please correct me if you think that this is not true...
A long winded talk by a southerner loses my attention quite quickly.ZZZZZZZZ

Zeke, you've posted about accent/dialect stuff before. I find it fascinating. What has always struck me is when you meet someone that grew up in an area with some sort of heavy regional accent, that doesn't have it. I have a buddy that grew up in the booneys here near Houston that you would expect to sound like a hick, but he has very little to no accent. I don't have much accent, but then I've always attributed that to my father originally being from the north and my growing up in the military where we moved around so there wasn't a predominant accent, but what do I know.

I've visited CA a few times and never noticed an accent other than hearing about the Valley Girl thing in the 80s when the song hit.

Huh?

I can live with that eh?

Parts of Virgina have thier own strange speech patterns like none other.

I've now read the links that EM posted and I'd be happy if you'd admit that your original post on this thread was BS from top to bottom and that you pulled it out of your ass. :cool:

Hey now. I love to hear the differences in the way people speak. Its fun. I'm native to Northern VA. There is a Northern VA accent if you listen for it (I don't have it). I spent last weekend in Danville at VIR working with the flaggers...they know that guy "tickle" from TV. They have a much more southern sounding accent. I was in Richmond yesterday for the NASCAR race. Richmond has its own odd accent. The man that took my ticket sounded like Cleveland from Family Guy...which is a little different than the "white" Richmond accent.

The accents of the Southern states can be traced back to various English counties as they settled in separate areas. The accents of England alone are staggering in numbers. Add in the others of the UK and it's a rich land for dialect.

I wish I had the paper I wrote about this long ago. What I didn't do and should have is get a map of the British Isles and the East Coast of America. I could have drawn lines from the origins of many of the first settlers to the various ports in the Americas including parts of the Caribbean. Of course other Euro countries played a major part in this.

I guess it shouldn't appear odd that half South America speaks Spanish while Brazil accounts for the other half, that being Portuguese. I recognize that indigenous languages are spoken locally and there is a bit of English and French. I have no idea as to accents, but I can only imagine that many Spanish speakers in SA can't understand other Spanish speakers, accents notwithstanding. Vocabulary varies in all languages. Well, I can't say that as a blanket statement, but to the best of my knowledge.

As to the Southern drawl being tied to weather, that's highly insupportable. Western 'accent' has been attributed to sparsely populated territories during the Western migration.

Leaving the UK when I was 19 yo I was well aware of the different accents. The obvious difference in the UK is that you don't have to travel far to notice a different accent. I was borne in Scarborough, Yorkshire and travelling to my grandparents in Norfolk took about 3 hours. Just a huge difference in accents.

Everybody has an accent even if you think you don't have one.:)

I've had a chance to travel the entire country and have heard all the accents, but what flabbergasted me the most was what I heard in southern Louisiana earlier this spring. I sat next to 3 white oil worker guys having a beer after work at a Texas Roadhouse. They all sounded identical: some kind of high-pitched squeaky voice coming from deep within their throats. I was just amazed.

Y’all ever wonder why Suthinas talk the way we do? | CharlotteObserver.com

I would say that they are a quart low....

Yeah there's some crazy speech in Loosiana! We were driving from 'Nawlins recently and passing near Lafayette. We hooked into a local radio station that was having a creole morning and it was all creole music, all the time. Even the DJ was speaking Creole. Fun stuff!

working on a supply boat turned radar blimp boat I had to translate the captain's cajun accent for the yankee crew setting up the electronics

Language is organic, a living thing that changes to suit the needs to communicate, at whatever intellectual level, from the street level of the uneducated poor of whatever ethnicity to the necessarily refined and sharply defined language used to communicate in science and philosophy.

To ridicule the language used by any group or subset of whatever socioeconomic set in focus, only highlights the ignorance of the critics. :rolleyes: