Foreign Accents

Jenie

Jenie

Jenie

Associate
Joined
28 Dec 2005
Posts
250
This is going to sound like a really stupid question I'm sure!!

Me and my o/h were chatting last night and were wondering wether people in countries like France and Spain for example had accents.

In the UK people in Scotland talk with a scottish accent and we know they are from Scotland. People in Liverpool talk with a Liverpool accent and we know they are from Liverpool, people in Sheffield talk with a Northen accent so we know they are from Sheffield, and so on and so on so

So do people in the South of France have a different accent to the people in the North of France? But we perhaps dont notice so much because they are speaking in a different language?

Jen x
 
I live in China and the 'problem' is much 'worse'.

Mandarin is the official language and the writing is all the same. But Cantonese, Shanghainese and other dialects exist where it not only sounds different, but it is entirely different. I mean, the words.

But, within the official language, Mandarin Chinese, there are many accents. I live in Shenzhen where people from all over China come to work. I can understand some Chinese but others, they have such a difficult accent.

Shi becomes Si, the Ts sound becomes Ch... the U becomes O...

It's annoying because one slight change of a sound could change the whole meaning of a sentence and, being a foreigner, I'm not used to hearing things just by the context. It has to be delivered clearly or I struggle a lot.

But yes, I have studied German for a long time and they also have many different and difficult accents as we do in the UK.
 
In Norway there are many different accents and even two nearly seperate languages. There is Bookmal which is the main language and then there is nynorsk(New norwegian) which is a new version of the ye olde Norwegian that used to be spoken(Confusing I know.)
 
I am not sure that accents are as diverse as they are in Britain, I mean, here you can travel 20 miles and the natives sound completely different. For instance, in Gloucester and Cheltenham the standard accent is a harsh west country one, but travel to Bristol and the accent changes to a much softer version. In the Forest of Dean they even have their own dialect yet despite being only 15 miles for Gloucester hardly anyone can understand them. 25 miles up the road people in Worcester sound like brummies!. :p

I can get by with passable French and on my numerous visits to northern France and Paris in particular I had no problems at all. However, on a recent trip to southern France I struggled to understand them because the accent was so different and not being fluent I really struggled. Of course, my pigeon French with a regional English accent didn't help I suppose. :D
 
Supposedly there are different accents amongst the towns in stoke-on-trent.
There was a bloke on Radio 4 who could tell which street people lived in!

.
 
Jenie said:
This is going to sound like a really stupid question I'm sure!!

Me and my o/h were chatting last night and were wondering wether people in countries like France and Spain for example had accents.
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Yes it does sound silly, and of course people in other languages speak in different accents :rolleyes: :p
 
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Yup every country, although maybe Britain is more diverse than others.
I only have to travel 100 miles or less to encounter Cockney, Midlands, Southern, West Country and Welsh accents which is remarkable when you consider that 100 miles is nothing in larger countries such as Russia, USA and Australia for example.
 
Here in Switzerand there are four official languages, French, german, Italian and Romansch. But The french is slightly different to French french, and the German is very different to high german. But then each canotn has its own dialects and are culturally very different, and even each commune within each canton is like a different country.
 
D4VE said:
Yup every country, although maybe Britain is more diverse than others.
I only have to travel 100 miles or less to encounter Cockney, Midlands, Southern, West Country and Welsh accents which is remarkable when you consider that 100 miles is nothing in larger countries such as Russia, USA and Australia for example.
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Yes, but if you normalize with respect to surface area and population size then it is not very surprising. But even in the US you can get big differences in 30 miles, espeiclaly in diverse places like the SF Bay area.
 
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