asperger's and accents

Post Reply New Topic

While I sound Scottish, as I am, my accent is apparently a formal, upper-class one. People used to make fun of me for it when I was in school. Then they found out I was quite poor and made fun of me for that instead. I don't care though, I like my voice.

Yeah, he speaks quite slowly. And he is definitely not mentally slow, though I don't know if anyone ever thinks he is.

I was born in Brentford (london) lived in Hailsowen (midlands) for a year, then Suffolk (country) for 8 years and I now live in Australia. Just TRY imagine my accent.

I have been told that I have a New York accent, but I am not from New York and neither is any of my family.

To my American ears, you sound like you come from NW England.

As far as I can tell, Aspies have an amazing ability to mimic any accent they hear. We can pick it up and learn it well enough to fool the natives.

But it's always acquired and deliberate.

I wouldn't be surprised that many Aspie children reject the dialect of their region and opt for another one that they hear in the media.

A remarkable ability, really.

The DSM calls this "odd speech parasody" *contemptuous smirk

(If aspies could walk on water, the DSM would say that we can't swim.)

Another one here who gets the where are you from? question. As a child, I had a tendency to over enunciate things. I am Southern.....but I've been told that people from New Orleans don't have typical southern accents anyhow. Which we don't....and I don't know who came up with that awful French-southern combination in the movies, but we don't sound like that.
Some people told me I sounded like a New Yorker-from the Bronx specifically. Yankees say I sound southern. Texans can't place me, at all, but say I sound like I'm from "somewhere else". Hmm...I am from somewhere else....a world of my own, lol.
I get the speak too fast thing, as well. But I know that according to foreigners, Americans are thought to speak slower.
I've heard myself recorded, and it was bizarre. I sounded like an old, British woman. Strange. Even my classmates agreed that I sounded weird. This happens on tape recordings and recorded video.
I can also adopt the accent of a region. I once was staying with some people about 2 hours north of New Orleans, where the accent was more typically and homogenously southern, and it took me a week to lose the accent.
I've also been told that I don't sound typically African-American. And was ridiculed for it constantly as a child. But being biracial.....I've noticed that a lot of biracial people who have black ancestry don't sound the same as other people who do.......so who knows?
I also went to college with this woman, who was black, from the same city as I was, and she had this British accent.
And her parents were not from the UK. It was so weird. I thought that she was being pretentious, at first. We didn't really get along, but not because of her accent......just total personality clash. But thinking about her now, she really seemed to have some AS traits.
It's fascinating to see how many people share this trait.

I've been told by a lot of people that I have quite the accent. I've had a few people tell me that they can tell I'm from London. I've also been told that I have a Cockney accent. I don't fake it, or anything. If I faked it, than I wouldn't have it. I'm quite proud of it, really.

I'll tell the next person to say I have an American accent that you said that xD.
EMZ=]

i do not speak in the same accent as my parents or anyone around me.
i speak in the way i know instinctively to utter my words.

some people think i sound haughty.
i am rather impatient and shorten my words often to speed up conversation.

australians often think i am british, but british people do not see the similarity.

i think i have a sterile neutral accent (as i am sure everyone else in the world thinks about their own voice)

i have an audio file of me ordering pizza. it shows my accent.
http://kiwi6.com/upload/hotlink?id=bepsb61w

it is 1.4 megs

i just listened to it and it is cut off where i say "caption" for me. that bloody damned site must have just posted 1 minute of my file although it said up to 50 megs free.

It sounds American.

wow... yes absolutely. This is me exactly!

For starters, I was born in the United Sates and raised in suburban Florida. Mother and Father were from California. There is no reason why I should have an accent that derives from anything other than these.

Yet all the time, I am asked: "Are you English? Are you from Australia? Where are you from? You sound like my friend from Canada! What kind of accent is that?"... I am always a bit confused. Do I really sound like that? I'm not trying to put on any kind of accent. At least, not consciously...

One thing I do notice quite often is how my accent changes depending on my company. If I am around people with a Southern accent, I toss in certain inflections and sounds to match. If I happen to be around people with a New England accent, the same thing happens.

I often think that I must have no distinct voice of my own... that it changes depending on the environment around me. The most common accents I notice tend to be vaguely English. Perhaps that is because I have historically kept a great deal of media around which does feature accents of that nature.

This all lends itself to the idea that the sound of my voice is a direct and immediate function of the voices I hear around me... that I don't seem to have any innate accent that was constructed during childhood, as would be customary of most people. It's like that process just didn't work with me, and my accent has remained fluid, when in other people it becomes naturally fixed.

This trait has been a very strong indicator of AS to me, as a number of diagnostic criteria (odd prosody and voice characteristics) relate to it. I've never understood any of it until I came to WP and found that, "oh! lots of other people do this crazy stuff!"


Yes. I have always been predisposed to listen to the SOUNDS of words, rather than the perceived continuity and content of speech. This is why people accuse me of not listening to them. I AM listening. But I'm listening to the sounds of their words and not necessarily the message they are trying to get across. It takes a good deal of effort to make sure that I do get whatever they are really saying.

Whoopi Goldberg refuses the label Afro-American because it would imply she isn't American or wasn't born there she said. She is born there so she uses the name American of whcih she is proud, stop the labelling and political correctnes labels.

I have two accents... When I am in normal conversation, I have a Cosmopolitan American accent (The accent of most newspeople on TV). When I am emotional, I sound like a stereotypical New Yorker (Like Joe Pesci or Archie Bunker)

I have a fairly unplaceable English accent, like "BBC English", but vary intonation and vocabulary depending upon circumstance and intention. It can go from very cold to very warm, smart to simple.

Another one of those "I do that" moments. I pick up the accent and the rhythms of speech of whoever I'm speaking to, as if I'm not really anchored in the accents of where I grew up (edge of Liverpool) or where I've been living as an adult (mostly in the English Midlands). If someone has a strong accent I have to struggle not to sound too much like them when I reply because I know they will think I am taking the Mickey out of them.