Do you think there is a relationship between someone’s accent and to our course of language and culture?
The reason why I am thinking this is that by listening to someone's accent, it may give us a chance to see in to their culture and character of the person that is speaking it, even if they speak the same language it could still sound different.
What do you think?
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
accents
check out on youtube (21 accents ) before reading
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I saw the video , and I was amazed how she can do all these accents .
ReplyDeleteIn my point of view , knowing the accent of country is knowing part of their culture , not only by the way he or she speaks , but also by the way they use the face expressions and body language .
What an amazing talent!! It is obvious that she must possess strong observation abilities, and like Muneera mentioned above it was not only a matter of changing her voice. I can only conclude that this talented lady is extremely knowledgeable about the different cultures related to each of the accents she has presented in her video. In my personal opinion I think that this was the key to her stunning imitating ability. I want to wrap up my comment by saying that She has actually changed her character for each accent, some accents were accompanied with a spontaneous relaxed expression (e.g Sydney Australia ) while others were accompanied by sharp humor and pride (e.g Scotland ), I also noticed that the Californian accent was delivered in a casual and a confidently laid back manner . Thank u for showing us this video, it really makes one think
ReplyDeleteThe person accent may convey the social class, educational level, regional and so forth. For example, if we only listen to a person voice speaking English we could tell whether they are native or nonnative speakers of English. Speakers from Kuwait stressing particular letters may convey their regional background.
ReplyDeleteAnd on the video above, it's a talent which not so many people have especially the fact that she was changing her accent along with her face expressions. So this talent comes with lots of practice and knowledge of other cultures.
This video is really interesting, good for her to have known all these accents. However, if I was going to relate this video to Applied linguistic or ESL/EFL, surely I would say that she cannot speak using all the aspects of these accents in proper or real life communication. We have studied that to acquire a language the learner should be introduced to the language before reaching the age of 12. Thinking about it reasonably I don't think that she has been introduced to all these accents during her early age.
ReplyDeleteKnow back to our topic, accent is one part of the culture as groups will identify you as being part of them or a stranger just by listening to your accent. Furthermore, they can know your cultural, ethnic, social and even your economical background.
Another thing about accent that you can actually identify if the speaker is a man or a woman by his/her accent even if they were using a device to change their voice. So, we can realize that accent is also related to the gender of the speaker.
Additional Information : Last course I was doing a presentation about language and gender in sociolinguistics and one of the things I discovered that women tend more to use the standardized forms of the language, while men would prefer to use different dialect forms.