[HPFGU-OTChatter] Accented English

[Sean Dwyer]

On Mon, Feb 25, 2002 at 01:53:30PM +0000, John Walton wrote:

[snip classic accent/geographical confusion]

Apart from the unnerving experience of attempting to converse with fascinated
Americans ("That word is *wonderful*, what does it mean again?"), my biggest
run-in with accents was regional.

As Tabouli mentioned, even here we differentiate on regional accents, and when
I was small we moved from Melbourne to Far North Queensland (the caps are
intentional: the rest of us have taken to referring to it as the Deep North),
where my clean Melbourne accent was taken by all to be "sissy" and several
unprintable descriptions, which basically boil down to an opinion that I knew
too much for my own good, and a healthy beating would soon cure my malady. I
very quickly learnt to be silent.

One of the oddities of Northern Australian English (to coin a dialect) is the
common rising inflection, or ending every sentence as if asking a question,
which at first got me into trouble too:

NA (northern australian): This is a really good book.
Me: I don't know, I haven't read it.
NA: What? You being smart again?

Sigh. It's hard to keep your intelligence a secret from the suspicious when
your accent and dialect give it away. I'm sure this kind of thing is very
nearly universal; it makes world peace a bit of a challenge.

Sean
-- 
Sean Dwyer <ewe2 at can.org.au>
Web: http://www.geocities.com/ewe2_au/