August 20, 2005

Sauce pans, size pants

First off, everyone has an accent. We all know this, right?

However, the particular accent I have is a basic East Coast American model. If you're an American, or perhaps a non-American whose ear is attuned to this sort of thing, you can most likely tell that I'm not from the Midwest, or the South, or California. Whether it's my accent, my manner, my dress, or a combination of all three, people know I'm from somewhere on the Atlantic Ocean. Other than that, thought, they generally can't pin down that I'm from New York City.

Why? Well, I don't tawk like a Noo Yawker. I say the "liquid u" in "new" and "Tuesday". I pronounce my r's on the ends of words: I say "her" and "mother" and "water", not "huh", "mothuh" and "watuh". And so on. Part of that is from growing up in Manhattan, (my parents, who were raised in Long Island and the Bronx, have more recognizably "New York" accents), probably another part of it was being sent to private schools, and some of it is certainly from taking speech and voice classes for my undergraduate degree in theatre.

Anyway, the point is that I have a very general American accent, and I've really never had any problems being understood when traveling or living abroad. Sure, I have to slow down sometimes, depending on the person I'm talking to, but in terms of pronunciation, I've never found that people had a problem understanding what I say — until I moved to Australia.

Now some of it is definitely a matter of syntax and idiom. For example, when I first got here, I kept asking store owners, "What time are you open until?" That's the way I've always said it in New York, but here all it got me were confused looks. Pretty soon I figured out I had to say "When do you close?" and then I was instantly understood.

But then there was the afternoon I went to The Big W downtown (that's Woolworth's version of K-Mart or Target) to buy some cookware. I found an employee and asked, "Excuse me, where can I find the sauce pans?"

"The what?"

"Sauce pans."

"Size pants?"

Try saying "sauce" and "size" out loud a few times. Even if it were the case that my vowels for the "au" and the "i" were a bit close (and they're not at all), the hissing "s" sound in "sauce" is nowhere near the buzzing "z" sound in "size".

Then again, it goes the other way too. Yesterday in a technical writing class, my teacher was talking about the documentation process and mentioned that there's always trouble when "the software is running light". I wondered if that meant something about not having a fully-featured version (like a shareware program will have certain functions disabled if you haven't paid for it), and asked him what that meant. "Well, you know, developers are always behind schedule, so it can take more time than you think to get the software." Oh, not LIGHT, but LATE. Or rather, "late" with an Australian accent. I'm sure the Australian students didn't blink an eye, but it sounded just like "light" to me.

The cool thing about Australian vowels is that they're really a world unto their own, where pure vowels get turned into drawn-out dipthongs (or sometimes even tripthongs). I used to love hearing my old Australian boyfriend say "no" as "ni-au" (see Wikipedia for the IPA symbols). Here's a native Sydneysider speaking (although keep in mind that this is more of a "Broad Australian" accent, whereas most Australians have a "General Australian" accent). Listen for the "snow" in "snow peas" and the "go" in "go to the store".

But then again, this is coming from the girl who clearly asked for "size pants", so who am I to talk?

Posted by wildsoda at August 20, 2005 05:26 AM
Comments

in 13 years of teaching ESL i've moved towards such a neutral accent --an "accentless american accent"-- that i am often thought to be canadian, and sometimes told i have a "fake accent" (when visiting places i "came from", because i don't sound like the others there). i'm almost always the group spokesperson when in non-english countries, though, because non-native speakers seem to understand me very well. i can't imagine what it would feel like to suddenly be misunderstood in english, after years of priding myself on my clarity. i get easily crushed enough when people don't understand me in czech.

Posted by: anne at August 20, 2005 08:42 AM

I am more surprised by the word order. I have never heard the sentence with "until" at the end, but always at the beginning.

But don't worry - it was just a word they didn't understand. Here in Vienna (I think I posted this somewhere on LiT) I once wanted to have my eyes checked and in the shop they answered my German question in English. Although I speak standard German without dialect and am from Germany.

Posted by: novala at August 20, 2005 10:33 AM

your post made me think about accents again and how weird the whole concept is,

being born german i do obviously have a german accent when i speak english,
ever since i moved to england i have coincidentally always lived with foreigners, greek, portuguese, danish,
now people usually detect some german accent there somewhere but they get confused by something else they can't quite pinpoint,
so whenever people try to guess my nationality they very cautiously ask if it could be german,
but people have also mistaken me for being irish,
when i first heard that i thought it was a completely strange idea,
but after a while i realised they were picking up on kind of melodic way of speaking that stems from my slight regional accent in german,

i used to think i would be nice to get rid of my accent,
but really i like it,
i like the fact that my accent seems to say so much about me and my history,

p.s. in the US people told me my accent was mostly british with a less prominent german touch to it, well ...

Posted by: cecilia at August 20, 2005 11:43 AM

Although I lived overseas, the most trouble I had getting someone to understand my American accent was when I, a northerner, lived in the American south for three months.

My mother had asked me to get pecans for a pie for Thanksgiving. Since Georgia is lousy with pecans, I went to the farmer's market in Macon, where I was living.

"Can you tell me where I can find pecans?" I asked. I pronounced the word the way I'd always heard it: Pih-CAHNs

"What?"

"Pecans"

"I don't know if we have them."

"Really? I thought pecans were all over the place -- you know, for pies for Thanksgiving?"

"Oh, you mean PEE-cans! Sure, they're right over there."

Posted by: Sarah at August 20, 2005 05:57 PM

I like this post!

As an Aussie living in Britain (for the seven years now) I still get weird looks because of the occasional long vowel I drop into words. I'm sorry but I refuse to call pronounce pasta in the British way, which is paas ta, to me it is par sta. Ditto for pastie (paastie/parstie). Hee, hee.

Posted by: kimbofo at August 21, 2005 05:12 PM

What the heck is a pastie? Just kidding.

It was good to hear Anne's comment. After graduating from college in Los Angeles, I lived in East LA for years (learned some Spanish and picked up a slight "street" edge). Then I taught ESL to Chinese students (mainly) for a couple of years. Ever since that time, I have run into MANY people who ask where I'm from (the most recent instance was quite recently). These are Americans, and they don't mean what state in the USA but what country I'm from. Usually, they think I'm Canadian, but some peg me as "somewhere" in Europe.

I personally like accents. I don't know if I lost mine or just picked up lots of features from the accents I was exposed to.

Now I live in Japan, and I know my vowel sounds have become even softer than before.

Posted by: Andy at August 22, 2005 01:39 PM

I suppose you've heard the one about the American tourist and the Aussie tour guide trapped in the desert?
Tourist: There's no water for miles. Did we come out here just to die?
Guide: Naow, we've been out here since yester-die!

Posted by: michael at August 22, 2005 04:29 PM