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Old 06-02-2010, 03:43 AM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Liam
My job is to sell clothes to middle aged American women over the telephone. I never realized how prevalent some stereotypical American accents are.

The southern accent is huge, as is the Orleans accent, or as I call it: "Sassy Fat Black Lady"

Lots of drawl

You've also got the people who pronounce the word "pen" as "peeen" Or basically any "en" sound as "een"

Ten is teeen, den is deeen, when is weeen! It's actually crazy. But basically the two most frequent accents I hear are the Southern Drawl and SFBL.

Americans also use a lot of bad slang like the 'word' "y'all"

I've also noticed that speakers of SFBL use a lot of ebonics grammar like "now that don't make no sense" "no that don't work" "y'all don't do this do y'all"

Also sometimes I ask people what color they want their item, and they reply with the size. And vice versa.

I ask American's - do you experience this kind of thing with any Canadians? Because we've got those people too, but I'm not sure your exposure to them would be near our exposure to you. I had one woman ask me where I was from, and was shocked when I told her Nova Scotia because I didn't "sound Canadian! A lot of you guys have french accents!"

A lot of youth from the East Coast are in fact losing the East Coast accent (small town accent I suppose.)


I think I know what you're talking aboot with the Canadian stuff.

The Southeast is a great place to think about when you want to feel better about yourself as a person. My entire family speaks with a thin-to-middle Southern accent with me being the exception. We live right next to a bunch of people with a ridiculously thick accent. I doubt you've heard anyone speak the really thick accent because I'm sure you would think they were drunk and mumbling and just hang up after trying to understand them for about twenty seconds.

Our community is fairly sheltered, as is most of America. We're very focused inward and I have to say it's not really all our faults. Our government, media, and education systems are a big part of it. The fact is, we don't know about most of the world, and we probably never will. There are always people who like to understand how the rest of the world works and acts and we break away from our communities for a more ambiguous lifestyle, but in this region you'll hardly find any of those people.

There are many people who say "irregardless", "supposebly", and "used to could" that don't know the right thing to say and more importantly have no desire to learn. We're probably about 99% fundamentalist Baptist Christians that don't trust what anyone says unless it's coming out of the mouth of a far right Republican.

Every region will always have its little quirks and we're undoubtedly the most infamous. There are people like me that wish they could have a bit more pride about where they were born. I lost my accent by the age of ten and my religious burdens by eighteen. A lot of people from my generation are adapting; at least in the city I live in. Middle aged women are definitely representing the last of a very long and embarrassing era.
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