Sunday, March 02, 2008

YouTube - 21 Accents

YouTube - 21 Accents

Fun video. While native speakers of English have no problem hearing most of the distinctions she makes in the video, non-native speakers often don't have an ear for most of those distinctions. It might be fun to show this to your students and ask them various questions about the quality of the accents (which is the most American? British?)

I'm going to use this with my pronunciation class.



Dan

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

The various British accents were interesting.

For the US she can add Boston, and there are East and West Texas "Twangs"... that texas one was more stereotypical..but nice try! Also Cajun, Louisiana and an urban one. I think there are a couple variances in New York as well.
On a global perpective, maybe asian and indian.
Oh! and hispanic (one from Mexico and another from Puerto Rico).

umm I guess she'd be on "the Tube" for an hour!
;-P

Dan said...

I'd love a Chicago-south one too :)

I thought that many of her accents were a little stereotypical, yet they are often stereotypes for a reason :)

The Speak Accent Archive has an incredible collection. I suggest you check it out.

Dan

Mary Spaeth said...

Mahhhvelous Daniel.

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