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When I came to America one of the first things I thought I'd do was drop
my New Zealand accent and pick up an American one. There were
three things I didn't count on: first, it's not easy for an adult
to change accents, second, there's more than one American accent and third,
women keep telling me what a great accent I have. It's true
that the "almost British" New Zealand accent is considered classy over
here, so why change it? So far as American accents are concerned,
I thought there was only a Southern accent and a Northern accent.
Perhaps I might have said there's also a New Jersey (or should I say "Noo
Joisey") accent. In fact, however, there's also a New England
accent, a Californian accent, Ebonic accent and lots more variations in
between. In fact, a Southern accent would be much easier to
master than any of the others, because it's more regular and consistent.
However, rightly or wrongly the Southern accent carries quite a strong
stigma of poor education with it so it would take a deliberate effort to
use it.
What to do? Well, I figured I'd knock off some of the most
grating aspects of my accent, and pick up American equivalents.
If you want, you can learn about my
beautiful American accent, as well as some of the differences between
the pronunciation of American English and British Commonwealth English.
And just in case you imagine that pronunciation is the only difference
between the languages, check out my ever expanding list of the differences
in vocabulary. Every time I say something to someone and
they look blankly back at me, I know that I'm about to have another language
learning experience! You can see some of the results in this
page of American phrases I've
learned. |
