27th February 2004, 8:52 PM
Dark Jaguar Wrote:What, you wanna see if I talk "north talk" OB1? Aren't you from a rather standard accent place yourself? Wouldn't it be very hard for you to tell? It's not just that a person can't distinguish their own accent for what it is, it's that others with the same accent also can't tell.
I can only say I never notice an accent in people on TV, nor do my family and friends. I WILL add this. Recently watching some old home videos of Christmas past (let's just say a spirit wasn't happy with me starving little Tim, or whatever that kid's name was, well he's dead now so whatever...), I will notice that I used to have a horrendously southern accent. Never noticed it then, but it seems my accent changed over the years from when I was like 4 or something to now, so now listening to those tapes the accent REALLY just kinda screams at me. Weird. I'm not sure if TV is to blame (or thank as the case may be) or if that's the consequence of surrounding myself with people who are mostly from outside this grand old land of Oklahoma (my family on both sides are from much further north, and asking of the original stories of my friends tells me they are all from various lands themselves, one even from the distant land of Norway).
Well when I lived in Europe and came back to the U.S., American accents really stood out. I still sound "normal" to myself, but I realized that there's no such thing as a non-accent, which I used to think American was. I'm just curious if you have a southern accent.