On Tuesday evening, the family was out until 9 o'clock, I was listening to music fairly loud and had Obsessive Compulsive Cleaners (a TV programme) on silent.
A new character was introduced, and as soon as he started talking, I got the impression that he had a northern accent (i.e. Yorkshire/Lancashire) - even though the sound was off. It puzzled me, so I continued watching to see if I could guess the others.
Good old Hayley speaks pure Estuary/Essex, I would say that was obvious from the way her lips were moving but I knew the answer, so that doesn't count.
One cleaner clearly looked a bit foreign anyway, but when he spoke, it was also obvious that he had a foreign accent; one guy appeared to have a Welsh accent and the last lady to be introduced appeared to have a Brummie accent.
Having thus made my guesses, I turned up the sound again for the last bit to see where they came from and, basically, I got them all right. The even weirder thing was lady who I thought was a Brummie didn't have a strong regional accent at all, but she came from Derby (which is not that far from Birmingham).
No wonder he's never around
1 hour ago
21 comments:
Yorkshire folk can be recognised by their stoop, caused by the permanent chip on their shoulder.
Remember this Heineken advert? Try it with the sound off...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uz9_YfIQaz4
RT no they do not and even if they did, you can see that with sound on or off.
McH nice one, exactly.
My dad always used to turn the sound off when Moira Anderson was singing. He reckoned it gave him the best laugh of the week.
I sometimes turn the sound off for discussion programmes. I like to guess in general terms who is advocating what. People with wild hair are often a bit batty, probably not due to a strong link but because that's how TV folk select people.
L, that's before my time.
AKH, yes that is good fun as well. As is reading a newspaper article without reading the name of the writer and trying to guess whether it's a man or a woman writing it etc.
"and trying to guess whether it's a man or a woman writing it"
Having read several articles (I almost never read the author's name in any case) and thought that the author had to be a woman, I found I was always right. I haven't tried to analyse how women write differently, though.
Was it the lip-reading or were you seeing behavioural clues? You have to remember that a large proportion of communication (I have seen 50% mentioned)is entirely non-verbal, and there is no reason to suspect that the non-verbal element doesn't have a regional accent if you can concentrate on it.
B, that's the fun part, it's very subtle.
W42, it's just fairly normal people all stuck in the same houses talking to the camera. With the sound off, you watch their faces because nothing else is happening. Try it some time. Even I cannot imagine that you can tell somebody's accent from "non-verbal" stuff.
Not their accent as such (of course), but clues to where they were born and brought up, which you can use to work out their probable accent. Like one in a kilt having a scottish accent - but so subtle as to be subconscious.
But yes, I will indeed try it.
MW, read this
http://www.salon.com/2015/09/10/emasculated_white_men_love_donald_trump_the_real_reason_a_billionaire_bozo_rules_the_gop/
Nuts.
W42, good.
R< I don't know whose madder - Trump or the person who wrote that article.
On a somewhat related issue - picturing someone from their voice, I find that I'm invariably totally wrong.
Yesterday I was listening to someone talking on the radio about deaf actors. There was something odd about her voice and I thought that perhaps she was deaf, too, but she had an northern accent, so I thought she couldn't be. Turned out she was deaf. How does a deaf person acquire an accent?
Sometimes people become deaf as a result of accident or illness. I have two deaf friends, one who became deaf around the age of three as a result of meningitis and one who became deaf somewhat later as the result of measles. Both of them have regional accents.
D, I thought of that, but she had the strange intonation of someone who hadn't learnt to talk by hearing other people talk. Perhaps if you go deaf while you are learning to talk, you could pick up both the accent and the "deaf" intonation.
P, me too.
B, that is an even more extreme example, good one. I vaguely believe I have heard that story before (or read it).
D, people's accents are formed very early in life, age 3 or 4 or something and barely change after that. So if a family has moved around when the kids were young, different children will have different accents, depending where the family happened to be when the child was 2 to 4 years old. I can vouch for this from personal experience.
Bayard, that is true of my friends also. The one who went deaf earlier has a strong "deaf accent" mixed with an East-coast Scottish accent; the one who went deaf later has a Cheshire accent with only a tinge of deaf accent. In fact you probably won't notice it until you've been talking to her for a while.
But it wouldn't surprise me if even children deaf from birth end up with an accent. Little things in speech training make a difference. For instance every English speaker has to learn the difference between voiced "th" and voiceless "th" if they are going to pronounce "thin" and "this" properly. However only Scottish speakers generally learn the difference between voiced "w" and voiceless "wh". Most other English speakers pronounce both as voiced "w". So if you are taught to differentiate them, you will have one of the markers of a Scottish accent. Add in others like trilled or tapped "r" and dipthongless vowels and you could end up with a strong Scottish accent purely as a result of your choice of speech therapist.
B and D, there is another way of thinking about this.
Most French people speak English with a French accent and vie versa etc. This is because the way they move their mouth and tongue and shape their lips is ingrained from years of talking French. You can't change that very easily.
Anecdote: my Mum is originally German, has lived in England since 1963 (or something like that) still has a slight German accent when she speaks English… but she has been here so long that she also has an English accent when she speaks German. I pointed this out to het and she flatly refused to admit it or even countenance the possibility.
"Most French people speak English with a French accent and vie versa etc. This is because the way they move their mouth and tongue and shape their lips is ingrained from years of talking French."
I'm not so sure about this. I have met an Indian girl and a Welsh girl, both of whom came to England speaking no English and neither of whom had a trace of an Indian or a Welsh accent.
I guess that it's a very personal thing. Some people are really good at changing their accent. Some aren't. I find it very difficult to change mine but I have one friend who has lived in Scotland, England and Canada and switches her accent depending on who she's talking to.
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