Do you think an Accent makes a person superior?

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Bec
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08 Nov 2004, 10:45 pm

Everyone has an accent! I don't think any sort of accent makes a person sound superior. Other people might think so though.

I live in the US, and my dad is American, but my mum is Australian. My aunt (her sister) also lives here. So I have kind of a mixture of both accents. When I was younger other kids thought I spoke funny (ex. I say tomato like 'tom-ah-to' not 'tom-ay-to') and used the Australian word for things (ex. cutlery vs. silverware or windscreen vs. windshield). I've also been told I say 'bloody' a lot, but I've never noticed.



cin
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26 May 2005, 1:58 pm

depends on the accent.

a lot of accents make you seem hotter - anything british, irish, scottish, etc.

and a lot of accents make you seem smarter or dumber. a guy with an irish accent will seem about 30 IQ points higher than the same guy with a brooklyn accent.

i think it's something to do with the sexual attraction of the just-different-enough-to-be-exciting-but-familiar-enough-to-be-safe thing...

i'm not sure about the dumb/smart thing, why i mean. it's definitely true.

something dangerously charming about the irish accents, at least to americans....



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26 May 2005, 2:43 pm

I am fairly influential so my accent will quickly start changing if I go abroad, funny thing is, after using the internet for so long and speaking so little, when I came out of my room people would ask if I was from america 8O



pizzaboss
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26 May 2005, 4:41 pm

an accent does not make a difference to me.



Sean
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27 May 2005, 12:17 am

JayShaw wrote:
I personally find any accent that entails a deviation from proper enunciation to be unattractive.

That's an interesting remark coming from someone in Virginia. :lol: Doesn't proper enunciation vary a little from regoin to region?



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20 Jun 2005, 5:38 pm

My accent (Northern New England) does tend to stick out downhere.Depending on my mood, my accent can be really obvious, other times it's not that bad.

I've also noticed that accents can change quite easily as well. I knew a girl who was an exchange student from Scotland. When she first came here, she had a very thick Scottish accent. We dropped out of contact for over a year, and when I saw her again, you wouldn't even know that she was Scottish.

A few years ago, I used to have a 3rd shift job, where I had fairly limited contact with other people. I would listen to NPR's Live feed of the BBC World Service, After several months of this, I apparently picked up the accent, because people started asking me things like "How long have you been over here?" Even though I didn't notice anything amiss with my accent.



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21 Jun 2005, 4:46 am

Why do you ask this? Did someone recently in your experiance demonstrate the belief that they're superior due to an accent or did someone express that they believed that people with accents were superior in some way? Because it is almost universally obvious that accents have nothing to do with superiority. There are idiotic british people, which i will affectionately term twits. They may be able to speak fluently and articulately but they're stupidity shines through and that is merely ONE way of defining superiority.

So in answer to you question, no i don't think an accent merits superiority or inferiority, and i am fairly amused by anyone who behaves as though it does.



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21 Jun 2005, 5:50 am

I made a statement to my collegues who were in my College Programme, about ten years ago that a British Accent didn't make me better than the rest of the people in the room, and that we were all equal. A lot of my Classmates said different, but I was told not to talk through my nose when I was Twelve. (Some variations of the Cockney Accent are very nasal) And I was sternly told by my Mom that I wasn't any more important than anybody else in my Family, just because I had an Accent and nobody else did, and that I should get off my High Horse, a summer later, when I was Thirteen. I didn't talk much, after that, until I started College. I know that Mommy cares for me ant that she's a great person, now. I just didn't know it at the time. :oops:



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21 Jun 2005, 6:33 am

well, normal people who have pride generally immediately react to difference as being inferior. If they pride themselves as being the best, if someone talks differently, they arent adhering to their standard of excellence and must be inferior. It is just an accident caused by ignorence.



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02 Jul 2005, 4:17 am

I don't think an accent makes a person better or worse than anybody else except when someone pretends to be better than everybody else by putting on a fake posh accent eg. some people I worked with must have taken speech lessons and then I think they sounded pretentious because the accent didn't kind of "go" with who they were.

I know this could sound confusing but I don't know how else to put it.


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02 Jul 2005, 6:57 am

My accent is rough as a bear's arse (working-class West Yorkshire) - if people assume I'm not very bright because of that, I take great pleasure in making them look like idiots... :twisted:


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02 Jul 2005, 3:41 pm

No. I dont think an accent makes sumone superior.


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08 Jul 2005, 5:35 am

I think the upper english accent is really cute to hear from a girl. A lot better than our ocker aussie accent down under, mate! 8)

I think accents give people an impression of what you might be like, but after time, it fades and you get to know the real person behind the voice.

I remember I told a family friend some 'requirements' when she told me she would set me up with a girl. Thinking I could have some fun, I said 'funny, smart, beautiful, long blonde, wavy hair, and definitely a british accent'.

She actually found a candidate who matched all these requirements... unfortunately she was already in love... with her girlfriend.

Only a guy's luck, huh?


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08 Jul 2005, 6:04 am

lol

What are the odds? :P


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08 Jul 2005, 6:10 am

In my experience, pretty good!

I get a lot of 'If only...'s, if you know what I mean.


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09 Jul 2005, 11:33 am

Mich wrote:
One time, at day camp, I was in this playhouse with a younger boy. We started playing a game where he had to be smart and I had to be stupid. He said, and I quote: "I'm so smart I have an English accent." Then he started talking in his version of one. I joined in and started talking in a hillbilly accent. Laughing After the game was over, we started talking in our normal voices again.


For a moment there, I though you were going in a whole different direction with that. "And one time, at band camp..." :wink:

I've always had a somewhat different accent from the people around me. My mum was from the western Isles and my dad had some fairly plain sounding blend of Irish and Glasgwegian. They'd both moved around a lot and both had mixed accents, which when combined with me being very soft-spoken and quiet meant that I never sounded quite like the other people I knew. I guess I have a sort of Ayrshire/Glaswegian/Highland/Irish/Asperger blend.

There was a girl I knew at uni who had a really cute Liverpool Geordie accent which I loved the sound of. Russian too can sound really good to me, and French at times. I don't know enough about them though to say which Russian and French accents I like; just that there are ones.


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