Joined: 25 Feb 2006 Age: 38 Gender: Male Posts: 28,897 Location: Lancashire, UK
09 Apr 2006, 6:48 am
I've been accused of being a Yorkshireman before, does this count? (When you cross over the 'border' from civilisation to Yorkshire it's like being in another country!)
I'm from the US and live in Australia. People find it very hard to pinpoint where I'm from. Some guess Ireland, some S. Africa, some Canadian. When I lived in the US I was asked where I'm from a lot, too, though. Happened a LOT when I was a kid, it used to embarress me very much.
I don't assume an accent, though...I don't know why it's like that.
Joined: 9 Mar 2006 Gender: Female Posts: 20 Location: University of Louisville
09 Apr 2006, 10:07 am
I always pick up the accent of who I'm listening to which means if someone tries to talk to me after I've been watching my brit coms I'll sound british, and I tend to use words my friends and peers think of as british.
I also pick up on people's speah impedaments; if I'm talking to someone with a lysp, I develope one to. I do the same thing with broken english even though I normally have perfect english. If I'm talking to someone with bad english I imitate them without trying. people have gotten offended before but I'm not trying to mock them, it just happens.
Joined: 23 Mar 2006 Gender: Male Posts: 34 Location: Calgary, Canada
09 Apr 2006, 11:45 am
I've got the habit of picking up other people's accents too, but I consciously try to avoid it. My natural accent is Geek, but I can do good Indian, Caribbean, English, Australian, Scottish, German, French, Austrian & Southern US accents.
Joined: 8 Mar 2006 Age: 51 Gender: Male Posts: 4,875 Location: Earth
09 Apr 2006, 12:06 pm
I act like I'm nothing on earth.
No-one can mistake my accent as being anything other than Scottish. And as far as I know, I don't act like any other nationality.
The only times I can recall when I've been mistaken for something else are:
Travelling around Spain, I was asked if I was inglés at least once. And on one occasion in a café, they gave me my receipt in German, suggesting they thought I was German.
On Yahoo Messenger once, I received a series of abusive offline messages where some girl kept calling me a 'Swedish fag'.
Joined: 8 Dec 2005 Age: 44 Gender: Male Posts: 4,540 Location: Dave's Toilet
09 Apr 2006, 2:15 pm
Tequila wrote:
I've been accused of being a Yorkshireman before, does this count? (When you cross over the 'border' from civilisation to Yorkshire it's like being in another country!)
Christ you haven't experianced yorkshire till you experiance barnsley. There a sub-sub culture of yorkshire
Joined: 6 Feb 2006 Gender: Female Posts: 140 Location: England
09 Apr 2006, 3:04 pm
When I was in high school, the other kids in my class used to say I talked like an American, although I could never see it for myself. I have to admit though, I do sometimes pick up habits that seem more based around other cultures, for example I eat mainly with chopsticks, and I pronounce certain words in what I guess is a sort of Canadian-ish accent, plus I often tend to pronounce "r" and "l" in a Japanese way.