An interesting encounter

[valarltd]

This week I bumped into an interesting driver. I showed him a little about how doubles and lift-gates worked. He looked and asked "Where are you originally from? You have the most interesting accent."

Turns out he used to program speech recognition software with the major American accents. Apparently mine is midwestern, with a heavy TV overlay.

I told him that I learned to talk in rural Missouri and learned not to talk like a hick by watching TV. He said the TV overlay was common among whites between the age of 50 and 25. After that, there were enough dialects on TV that most people didn't lose their accents.

Comments

I wonder what he'd do with mine

[dakiwiboid.livejournal.com]

I know for a fact it has traces of New York and Texas in it from my parents, then there's the smoothing the nuns gave the speech of all the kids in my grade school. They wanted all of us to sound cultured.

My sister Mary had a drunk come up to her in a bar in Boston once, listen to her and say, "Hey honey, you went to a convent school in the Midwest, didn't you?" She asked him how he knew. He told her it was because she had no accent. He just didn't listen long enough.

[kadath.livejournal.com]

I was born in Florida, lived in both New Hampshire and North Carolina during my formative years, and my Mom is a Quebecoise ESL speaker. No one ever places my accent, ha!