I thought I might share a small phonetic game/challenge with you. All 3 individuals in the attached clips were born and raised in the same non-Anglophone country and speak the same native language. Can you tell, based on the peculiarities of their English pronunciation, what language it is?
I would like to know why a 1 day old account is asking us to classify various business facing videos?
Everyone’s account is 1 day old at some point. And only one of those clips is even remotely business-related. My general question is purely language-related - the specific contents of these clips are purely incidental.
The first two sound native UK to me, but I’m a yank.
I can clock the third one as foreign because she overdoes our rhotic r which isn’t uncommon for assiduous US-English learners.
No idea where they’re all from… but I will say blended accents are so delicious to my ear; like a Korean who learned English in Texas or (much more common), a German who learned UK pronunciation.
[And, yes, I know it’s bias to not hear one’s native accent as an accent.]
“but I will say blended accents are so delicious to my ear”
Yes, they sound unique, hence I’m interested in the question of the degree to which they can be decomposed into their individual elements in the ears of linguistically sensitive listeners. Insofar as they can’t - which seems to be the case here, at least as far as you are concerned - they can be said to add an authentically novel quality to the phonetic repertoire of human speech. Also, I have an impression that, unsurprisingly, they tend to be particularly clear and crisp, since they are used by individuals who consciously want to be understood. As a result, the phonetic features of their constitutive languages tend to be articulated very distinctly, which is a pleasure to listen to.
The correct answer is:
spoiler
Polish
If I only listened to the first one, that Matt guy sounded rather Dutch from his first words alone. The two ladies have artificial accents but I can’t tell where they could come from.
non-Anglophone country
That takes out British, Danish, Norwegian, & German.
If they studied British, I want to say either African, or Russian. Otherwise I can’t tell the accent.
I would not have guessed that any of these people were non-native speakers or didn’t grow up bilingual. They have an exaggerated way of speaking but without your context, I would have assumed that was because they were deliberately enunciating their words for a presentation/demonstration.
I was told once when I was learning a new language that I have a “tv” way of speaking because the only exposure I had to the language until then were courses where the instructor was speaking very clearly in a way that sounds unnatural in casual conversation :)
What for you are the giveaways that they are not native speakers?
“What for you are the giveaways that they are not native speakers?”
Their native language is the same as mine, so I presume I’m just sufficiently attuned to its sound to hear its influence peeking through. However, I suppose that the main giveaways for native English speakers might be the following ones in particular: No. 1 is mixing up several British accents, No. 2 puts too much emphasis on dropping the T and there is a certain Continental European hardness to her consonants, No. 3 devoices consonants at the end of words and her pacing might seem unnatural.
