Alison Keenan

[BusyLizzie]

Received a letter once from a Richard Sole.....signed R Sole!

 

[loveheart]

Cleopatra's had her sister murdered it seems. I watched a documentary last year and they pronounced the name as R seen Oway, the a was silent.

Wouldn't that still sound the same?:mysmilie_17:

 

[countrymaid]

I knew a Donald Duck and Anne Teek. Wonder what happened to them.

 

[loveallthingsitalian]

I'm amused how it became trendy to take quite normal names and add y or i in the oddest places, spoken the same but written looks like a foreign language.

I would love to have the opportunity to study how accents happened, particularly in colonised countries. And also why some people can live in a country for 3 or 4 times more than in their country of birth and hardly lose their accent whilst others can visit for a long weekend and come back home with an accent!! Fascinated (in a car crash way) how some people mesh accents in the worse possible way. Thinking here of my local golfers Graeme McDowell (cringeworthy) and to a lesser extent Rory McIllroy.

 

[Pick-a-Lily]

Wouldn't that still sound the same?:mysmilie_17:

Not if the R is short, as the R in Red, for example.

 

[loveheart]

Not if the R is short, as the R in Red, for example.

Fair point

 

[ERICS MUM]

Fascinated (in a car crash way) how some people mesh accents in the worse possible way. Thinking here of my local golfers Graeme McDowell (cringeworthy) and to a lesser extent Rory McIllroy.

Others spring to mind - Lulu, The Skagen woman who speaks English with an American-Danish accent, the Bronzo Italiana woman American-Italian etc. Then there's Kathy (Kanga ?) with that skin care brand (name ??)

 

[loveallthingsitalian]

It does seem to the the stronger accents teamed with the American one which I find hard on the ear.

 

[maymorganlondon]

Others spring to mind - Lulu, The Skagen woman who speaks English with an American-Danish accent, the Bronzo Italiana woman American-Italian etc. Then there's Kathy (Kanga ?) with that skin care brand (name ??)

Cathy Kangas - Prai. Born in UK - somewhere like Cleethorpes, I think she once said. So she's got a touch of the Jessica Fletcher's about her accent.

Yes some people end up with rather hybrid accents - sometimes because it helps them to be understood. I've had to adapt my accent on occasion to ensure I'm understood, and if you live somewhere for a long time it could become ingrained, I imagine.

 

[loveallthingsitalian]

And then of course is the "telephone voice" a la Mrs Bucket. We've all been there to some degree or another

 

[Loveinamist]

I'm amused how it became trendy to take quite normal names and add y or i in the oddest places, spoken the same but written looks like a foreign language.

I would love to have the opportunity to study how accents happened, particularly in colonised countries. And also why some people can live in a country for 3 or 4 times more than in their country of birth and hardly lose their accent whilst others can visit for a long weekend and come back home with an accent!! Fascinated (in a car crash way) how some people mesh accents in the worse possible way. Thinking here of my local golfers Graeme McDowell (cringeworthy) and to a lesser extent Rory McIllroy.

TLDR When two speakers become more similar in their speech this is called convergence or accomodation (opposite: divergence). This can occur on all levels of language, phonetics and phonology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. When mutual intellgibility is not an issue, accomodation mainly occurs when speakers like each other or want to appear likeable.

Q: Has there been research on the process of unconsciously imitating accents?
Phonetic accommodation has been documented for a range of cases, for example for

mean intensity (Natale 1975)
perceptual similarity of individual lexical items (Pardo 2006)
vowel duration (Kim 2012, Pardo 2012)
voice onset time, fundamental frequency and the frequency of the first formant in vowels (Kim 2012)
Most studies have not studied spontaneous interaction and were mostly based on special elicitation techniques, but accommodation has also been documented in spontaneous speech (Levitan et al. 2012).

Q: What causes individual differences in the tendency to unconsciously take on accents?
We converge with interlocutors that we like or that we want to like us (shown by, for example, Babel 2009). We diverge from those that we don't like, although this may be rarer - In general, speakers adopt pronunciations that they think are socially desirable in a situation (see Mather 2012 and the classic study by William Labov it is based on).

I beg to disagree with @Skippy's opinion that people "without a firm sense of identity or an underdeveloped ego" are more likely to accomodate or converge with another speaker. It rather appears that converging with an interlocutor is a social skill connected to empathy. You speak more like your interlocutor or a group you interact with so that you will be accepted as one of the team. This will make social interaction and achieving your aims easier than if you did not accomodate.

I don't mean to say that there are not people with "a firm sense of identity" that are particularly unlikely to converge with other speakers. But I do disagree with the implication behind these phrases, namely that "a firm sense of identity" (and not accomodating) is something desirable and an "underdeveloped ego" (and accomodating) something undesirable. On the contrary, converging with other speakers is an important and valuable social skill that helps us connect with other people and establish common ground. Those who (even unconsciously) insist on not accomodating to other speakers could also be characterised as having problems in adapting to new people or groups they come in contact with and lacking in empathy.

But I do see the point that those who are desparate for the approval of other people might go to great lengths to get it - including accomdating their speech to a high degree.


http://cogsci.stackexchange.com/que...o-unconsciously-imitate-the-accents-of-others

 

[louise66]

There used to be one in Bude called Dr Blood.

We had a GP called Dr Mort.

 

[spartacus]

My GP used to be Dr Payne

 

[Brissles]

I never have a problem with accents, but what DOES get my goat is 'upspeak', and a lot of guests are guilty of this. Making a statement then ending it as though a question is being asked. Drives me nuts.

 

[loveallthingsitalian]

Jilly Halliday is guilty of this. I find it spoils what otherwise is a decent enough presenters.

I blame Neighbours - we didn't do that before it came on to you TV screens!!

 

[Samsmum]

They used to tell you to be sure that Christian name and surname worked together. They didn't seem to take into account the fact that once married that put the spanner in the works. In a lot of cases that wouldn't apply now as even if married many females keep their own names.

Does anyone have an example of really bad name combinations.

I wanted to call my (now 6 year old) Noah as although I am not a Christian I still liked the name. However when I paired it with my OH surname (Needham) it came out as no I need 'em! I also liked Max but again it sounded too similar to Max Spielman ( the now defunct photograph processing shop!) - ended up with Sam as it was the only non embarrassing name we could agree on ! Lol!

 

[Vienna]

I live in Lancashire and depending on the area the Lancashire accent can be very broad. When I was a teenager and still living at home, we had a Dr called Dr Hiddosay (sp) but whenever my Mum talked about him, the H was dropped and she called him Dr Idiocy.

 

[Jonesy]

I once saw a Dr. G Roper.

 

[loujareth]

The doctor who delivered me was Dr Brain and my husband wanted me to mention a headmaster of his Isaac Hunt (!)

 

[shopperholic]

The doctor who delivered me was Dr Brain and my husband wanted me to mention a headmaster of his Isaac Hunt (!)

Isaac Hunt :mysmilie_15: I know I shouldn't laugh but that's absolutely the most unfortunate name ever! :mysmilie_15: and the funniest! :mysmilie_17: