Can You Not Have An Accent?

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SOURCES & FURTHER READING

[NameExplain]

Did you ever think you don't have an accent?

[cfgp]

talking without an accent is like typing without a font

[raggedclawstarcraft]

"I speak english without accent!", my german friend once uttered, with noticeable german accent and phonotactics.

[pawtistic]

i always thought "no accent" meant that when non native speakers speak for example english, you wouldn't be able to tell they're either foreigners or where they're from.
like i am from Czechia but you wouldn't be able to tell that from the way i speak.

[codygolden]

I'm American.. I made the mistake of commenting I don't have an accent on a Reddit post once… That was horrible hundreds of downvotes really set my karma back a bit nothing like dozens of strangers telling me how stupid I am 😂

[y_fam_goeglyd]

Cows have accents. Genuinely. Scientific tests have shown that herds of the same breed found in different parts of the country have distinctly different sounds for the same thing (like "milk me now!"). Maybe they're moosical?

When I moved to Kent in the late 1980s, I worked with a teenage girl who hadn't long left school (we were both engineering clerks). Btw, I'm Welsh, from the South.

(There's a point to the following!) An English linguist back in the '40s, give or take (I'm telling this second hand from my mother and she passed away 13 years ago, so it's an old story) had done research throughout the UK and had come to the conclusion that the people who spoke "the best English" were educated Welsh people. I understood that to a point because our dialect was so strong where I lived (it's officially called "Wenglish" because it's a mix of both languages. There are others like Hinglish - Hindi-English - and Singlish - Singaporean-English) that they taught us English much like we were taught French. And German. And Welsh. And for us masochists, Latin 😂 (yes, I took them all, minus Welsh for O level because it didn't fit in with my choices.) One of my English teachers actually gave us elecution lessons!

Back to Kent, my colleague had a _very_ strong Kentish accent. My husband is from just outside the north of London and despite my having adapted to his accent, hers was tougher to understand. According to my husband, and probably because I'd lived in Lancashire and worked at a _very_ multicultural university, followed by living in London working on a mobile library in a _very, very_ multicultural area, my accent was actually pretty mild, probably because it helped my borrowers understand me. It was still mostly a Welsh accent, but I had a few bits and bobs from where I'd lived. My grammar was still really good back then, too.

Anyway, one day, completely out of the blue and in the broadest northern Kentish accent I'd ever heard, she said to me, "You should talk the Queen's English, like what I do!" It took me a while to return from the loo where I'd run to so I could laugh in private!

[pedromenchik]

I don’t think most Brazilians consider Rio’s accent as the standard tbh…while a lot of TV shows are made there (and hence have that accent), the news tend to use a more “neutral” accent, similar to upstate São Paulo but with softer “r”s.

[Larry]

One question: Is there a default/original accent for each language?

[lyricusthelame]

5:36 I'm from Michigan and can absolutely confirm, I've heard plenty of people say they don't have an accent because everyone around here talks almost the exact same.

[macsnafu]

When I was about 12 or 13, my mother gave me the 19" black and white TV for my bedroom because she had gotten a color TV for the living room. That's when I discovered Doctor Who and Monty Python's Flying Circus on my local PBS affiliate station here in Oklahoma. Monty Python was especially difficult to understand the accents, especially when the Pythoners would dress in drag and talk in a high-pitched falsetto.

When I worked customer service in a call center that took calls across the nation, I was rather proud of the fact that people couldn't tell that I in Oklahoma. Maybe I had an accent, but it wasn't a specifically Oklahoman or southern accent. As I've gotten older, though, I seem to be lapsing into a more local or regional accent, although I haven't figured out why.

In any case, it should probably be self-evident that communication is one of the primary purposes of language, spoken or otherwise, and thus people will tend to sound like the people they most commonly talk to, so that they can be understood better. That would usually be the people you live around, but TV and movies showed that people can learn accents that are not local. With the international nature of the internet, it'll be interesting to see if there's some kind of move towards a world or non-regional accent.

[johnrigler]

It's not that I don't have an accent. It's that I don't sound like where I'm from! I've never lived anywhere but SE Texas! When I meet people for the 1st time, I like to where they think I' from, based on how I talk I get different amusing answers ranging from being from Britain to being An American raised in Europe to being a Northerner (Northerners never make this mistake!) On a related note, when I was going to uni, I heard accent that was definitely from a few hours from where I lived. There was a lively conversation that kept mentioning someone named P.I.J. I used context clues to figure out they were discussing Piaget, the Swiss psychologist!

[TrapeZoid_-]

I am from the US. I used to think I didn’t have an accent. Then I started taking Communications courses in college and needed to focus on how I speak. In the process, I realized that my casual voice was an odd combination of a Southern Drawl and slang from low-income urban areas, with the occasional Spanish slang word thrown in. That made perfect sense considering where I have lived. Seriously, pay attention to how you speak. I went from thinking I didn’t have an accent to realizing that I have a very strange way of speaking lol.

[piefighter]

I'm South African and the South African accent is quite distinct, which makes me stand out like a sore thumb because I speak with a British/ Australian accent. This is because I watched a lot of Aussie youtubers growing up and I got a permanent British accent off of Wheatly of all things.

[therealhardrock]

"People tell me, 'Oh, I love your accent!' So I tell them, 'Well, actually, I don't have an accent; I'm from England. This is just how words sound when they're pronounced properly.'" -Jimmy Carr

[LewisLittle]

I'm from Lincolnshire and my accent is very subtle and very close to "standard English". Only once in my life has anyone guessed my acent with any accuracy, and even he was 30 miles off - thought I was from Nottingham. Most people guess "somewhere South". I live in Manchester now and everyone here thinks I have a "posh" accent.

[paulgutman-oc]

I remember hearing a young girl (obviously from France) tell me (in French) "J'ai pas d'accent, tu vois?" ("I don't have an accent, you see." Except she ended her comment with an upswinging intonation that we don't use in that context where I'm from. I'm from Québec.) And then she just kept going on and on and I could feel myself getting more and more annoyed by the minute. There's NO SUCH THING as "pas d'accent/no accent." Only in the eyes of those who are stuck on themselves.

[yellowfuzz]

Back in college, I had a professor who was from Albany, NY he once said to our whole class that people who talked like us wouldn't be news casters because of our improper speech 😂 he's teaching in rural NC, if he turned on the news any station here that's ALL he'd hear.

He was older and sometimes said some REALLY outta pocket stuff, but he was a great teacher and a great guy. He always made me laugh 😂😂😂

[connorsmith]

I studied at Northumbria University. I'm from Northumberland and speak heavy Pit. The southerners all mocked me for my accent and dialect. I was like "herea yeev come herea and am tahkin with me local dialect, nuw get a bottle of broon and watch the toon, Howay!"

[brokenursa]

The New York Times posted a quiz about ten years ago where you answer how you say certain words and it tells you what part of the US it thinks you're from. It only works for US accents, but it's incredibly accurate. Pinpointed the exact part of the Mid-Atlantic I'm from.

[Ivanroadtoglory]

I'm Brazilian from the state of Minas Gerais and I have always had a minas gerais accent up until some years ago, when I started playing video games everyday with some kids from São Paulo, when I absorbed a bit of their accent without noticing, like rolling the R after vowels and before consonants, something I never did my whole life and kind of made fun of my cousins from São Paulo for doing so