The ways we speak English

[darkemeralds]

kispexi2 and I have been talking about our respective accents, and how much fun it would be to get everyone to record and post some little snippet that would reveal their particular brand of spoken English.

Kis suggested the phrase "a pound of brown and purple worms" as playing up her own regional accent. Me, I don't have an accent! Ha! So not true, but I think of myself as speaking "plain American" and I'm at a loss for a particular phrase, except that I live in a state whose name people from other states frequently mispronounce.

Of course, IDEA, the International Dialects of English Archive, has already done this on a grand scale. They have recordings of people from all over the world reading a standardized text: most regions of every English-speaking country, various ages (age makes a huge difference!) and the accents of non-native speakers on every continent. If the ways we speak English interest you, IDEA is a fantastic way to kill a Saturday morning spend half an hour.

So, "I bought a pound of brown and purple worms and buried them in Oregon, where they are doing very well" is going to be my phrase. My first voice post is coming up.

Comments

[nwhepcat.livejournal.com]

I was just listening to a podfic by a reader I've heard all kinds of times before, and when she got to the word "dragon," I KNEW she was from Wisconsin! I looked up her user info, and it's true, even though she lives elsewhere now. Hee!

(I think dragon/bag/flag are words that are a tell for Pacific Northwesterners, btw, though I don't know for sure if that includes Oregon, but it sure does WA and the ID panhandle.)