LENGTH and LINKING in British, American and Australian accents!

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Hear the fascinating rhythms that distinguish American, British and Australian accents – rhythms that are misrepresented by the major dictionaries, and that can trip up American actors when they aim at a 'British' accent!

Also, learn why do English and Australian speakers say 'law/r/and order' with linking R, and why so-called linking Y and linking W just don't exist.

If you want to speak British English clearly and confidently, I recommend this course from accent coach Luke Nicholson:

[marynoonan]

Aussie here. My mate and I Traveled with a young American chap from Texas through Europe in 1979. He told us his name was Barbie. We thought it a bit odd; but, you know - OK 🤷🏻‍♀️.

About two weeks in staying at Youth Hostels & traveling on our Euro Pass, we eventually had to show our passport at some border crossing. Barbie opened up his passport and the Guard read out his name & asked him to verify it. "Robert Smith"

My friend & I looked at each other and screamed with laughter. He was totally mystified (as was the guard just quietly) We said incredulously, your name is actually Robert? As in Bobby from Robert?


"Well, yeah, Barbie from Robert".


We had bloody introduced him to other Aussie, Kiwis & Poms as Barbie (and they'd all done the WTH 😵‍💫look) OMG we laughed.

Good ol' Robert, he thought we were insane. 😂😂😂

[musicredsubaru]

I remember when I was with an American high school group on a trip through Europe. During a bus trip through the Alps, I was chatting with a classmate behind me, and she was speaking in a fake British accent. To make a long story short, she rated her accent as "authentic." I didn't believe her, but I didn't know any better, so I didn't argue against it. Once we got to England and began talking to British people, my group and I could tell that our attempts in even imitating a British accent were glaringly laughworthy. Ever since that trip, I have wondered why we Americans don't quite get the British accent. Your pointing out the examples of long and short vowels, along with examples from American actors, helped me see, or hear, what my classmate was getting wrong. So, thank you for clearing that up for me.

[martinhartecfc]

Regarding the 'broad transcription' excuse, I can confirm that many Chinese students diligently learn the traditional symbols under the impression that they are an accurate representation of the sounds they need to produce. And many of them produce these symbols if you try to teach them anything different. Sadly, a few even (understandably!) choose to believe what they learned in school and see in every dictionary and pronunciation manual they've ever used over some random teacher online.
However, surely nothing is more counterproductive than calling certain diphthongs "long vowels". I don't think I've ever felt more frustrated than when correcting online homework and giving the feedback that students aren't making a distinction between, say, "ship" and "sheep" and then hearing them dutifully come back with "sheep" and because a teacher or parent had explained that one is a short vowel and the other is a long vowel.

[DrunkenHotei]

English teacher here working and living in Guadalajara, Mexico.

I can't tell you how much your videos have helped me teach and understand my own pronunciation, as well as that of other dialects.

You can probably imagine my endless frustration when my supervisors decided to reprimand me for not adhering to the incorrect vowel symbols in every textbook I'm, given, or for telling my students that my dialect is different from that which the book is using and so I would not say certain things the way the book does, or for clarifying that no one pronunciation is objectively universally "correct, " and explain that what I mean by "correct" or "incorrect" in terms of pronunciation and grammar should only be understood to basically mean "to my knowledge understandable to the majority of English-speakers" and "to my knowledge NOT understandable to the majority of English-speakers, " respectively.

I actually almost got fired over it, as they accused me of simply telling the students the books and other teachers who would tout the "correctness" of the forms they taught based on an unaware assumption of the superiority of their own dialect were simply wrong. They even said that in order to be a good English teacher, I must strictly adhere to explaining correctness through prescriptivism rather than even mention the descriptivist reality of language study at all! (needless to say, those supervisors are not linguists or even good English teachers themselves)

Thank goodness my students rallied to my defense and insisted that I was the best teacher they'd ever had (I take this more as a condemnation of other teachers' explanations than praise of my own, but that obviously warmed my heart), and that I was (sadly) the first one who'd actually bothered to explain the discrepancies they'd been confused by as a result of running into contradictions between different books and incongruity between what they claimed and what the students personally observed, all of which went unchecked, often for years, due to lazy, arrogant teachers who never bothered to seriously study any of these sorts of things for themselves despite years of being educators on these subjects!

It's beyond a shame that, at least in all the schools I've worked for, no more than 2-5% of the staff so much as bother to question the borderline gibberish they misinform paying students with every day.

Your channel is truly the gift that keeps on giving, and I've recommended it more times than I can count. Bless you, Dr. Lindsey!

[BenBenBenBenBenBenBenBenBenBn]

I'm no expert in British accents but "you cut my heh" absolutely murdered me

[allanjmcpherson]

Any classically trained singer will confirm this glide off from a vowel for you. It's one of the big difficulties English speakers run into when learning to sing in languages that do have pure vowels. Without a lot of practice, English speakers really want to glide off the vowel.

[sabinrawr]

In American primary schools, phonics lessons teach that "long" and "short" are the names of the different vowel sounds, not an actual difference in length. So, for Americans, our short/long vowel pairs are ae/ei, eh/ee, ih/ai, ah/oh, and uh/oo. Along with the statistically incorrect i-before-e rule, we are taught to just remember which words have the A sounding like a short O.

Thank you for the perspective on vowel length actually being a measure of a vowel's length; this is a genuinely foreign idea to most Americans. As an aspiring voice actor who does a lot of character and accent work, this has already transformed how I think about vowels independent of articulation.

As a related aside: when the US military taught me the NATO phonetic alphabet, I noticed some of the words were slightly different than how I normally say them, such as Lima (like the city, not the bean) and Quebec (KAY-beck instead of kwuh-BECK); these made sense because I know that's how those words are pronounced in Peru and Canada, respectively, and this alphabet was used by more than just Americans. When it came to the numbers, I understood why 9 was "niner", as would anyone who has tried to relay a phone number over a bad connection. But there was one weirdness that never quite made sense to me, until 26 years later. Why was 4 pronounced "fo-wer" instead of "for"? I now understand that it's to make sure Americans give enough length to the vowel so that it's easier for British operators to hear, and for them to add a tiny bit of W articulation so that we don't confuse it with Oh or Golf (possible with some accents).

It's amazing how something like this can have such an effect far outside of the realm of linguistics.

[ViciousSatsuma]

Video request: It would be really interesting to see a video on how native English speakers get other languages wrong because they add the unwritten sounds we have at the end of our vowels. Like putting w on the end of Spanish "Ricardo", j on the end of German "sie" etc.

We don't know we're erroneously adding those sounds when we speak a foreign language - because we don't even know we're adding those sounds in English!

The lesson is that it's hard to pronounce a foreign language properly when you don't realise how you're pronouncing your own.

[aweatherall]

As an Aussie, I struggled so much when teachers told me to "sound out the words to figure out the spelling", I was adding extra Rs, Js and Ws in so many places! It's good to know I wasn't imagining them! Sometimes they are part of the vowel sounds and sometimes people just add them in!
It was extra confusing when I was so exposed to both British and American accents that had so many differences in the way things are pronounced!!

[jfftck]

These videos show the English language as a much more complicated subject than any teacher would teach you in school. Also, learning how the language has evolved is something that is fascinating.

My wife is Bulgarian, but she was taught American English and so are many of her friends; one of her friends moved to the UK and the children speak with a British accent even when speaking in Bulgarian. This is why I find languages, in general, fascinating!

[jamesm]

I love the twinkle Geoff always has in his eye when teaching us about accents. Another great video.

[klondike]

That reversed "jɪp" was so simple yet ingenious!
And my accent says "lawn order" for law & order 😂

[rattttooooo]

4:30 I learned this a long time ago, funnily enough because of the voice recording feature on my 3DS, where I could play what I had recorded backwards, and what I often did was try to mimic as closely as possible, what a word sounded like in reverse. I noticed that "ee" sounds in particular sounded the same as "yih" sounds, and later realised that it was the same tongue placement. Glad to hear someone talk about it. Your channel is a wonderful resource that I'm glad I found.

[Tritone_b]

Not the collaboration I was expecting, but it is a welcome one. Maths and language go together, who would have thunk. Great to see Matt Parker here!

[rdreher]

Intrusive R can be found in America too! I suddenly realized this when my Massachusetts Grandmother said "I saw rit." It makes sense that in New England English, where non-rhoticity is common, intrusive R would also appear. I never noticed this when growing up, only when I was more aware of these features through linguistics.

[BenBenBenBenBenBenBenBenBenBn]

As a French man trying to perfect his English pronunciation and wants to have a southern English accent, this video is invaluable, thank you very much

EDIT: some people seem to misunderstand:
1) I'm not trying to hide my French accent, I'm trying to change from an American accent to a British one because I think it sounds nicer
2) my main reason for working on and correcting my accent is because I enjoy doing so, not because I'm ashamed of anything

[omegasmileyface]

im slowly becoming more and more convinced that sentence-mixing (using audio editing to assemble new phrases out of voice recordings— a tactic of the "YouTube Poop" medium of editing videos to make them funny via absurdity (in my opinion, the most silly-driven art form <3)) is a great way to learn more about phonetics and to apply phonetics knowledge. you'd already know about the "uw" sound if you had seen how easy it is to make people say "uwu"! understanding the little sounds making up larger sounds makes it a lot easier to identify which little puzzle pieces of audio you need for mixed sentences that aren't distracting.

[AngrySkipperGC]

As an Aussie, when you said "allergic to hiatus" and then said banana ish - I almost died trying to say banana and ish without an R sound.

[LunizIsGlacey]

Yay! More Australian! Nice that the South African English accent got a mention too. Love the fact that you are starting to use more examples from other English accents than just the "American v British" binary.

[yaroslavdon]

I am very impressed (each video anew) by Dr. Lindsey with his ability to explain clearly and concisely rather complicated linguistic features backed up by recent research. As a non-native English speaker, it's opened my eyes to many mistakes I make trying to mimic colloquial spoken speech. Please do continue with these wonderful lectures!

On a different note, I think one of the subtle points made is that academic (well-established) knowledge doesn't permeate properly to the educational system. That's why those YouTube channels present wrong facts (I don't doubt for a second their dedication and love for the English language). I'm a bit puzzled though by what you showed in professional books and dictionaries; the authors should've known better.