born of needing to blend into the scenery quickly. i pick up other people's accents quickly. i moved around so much, and got so much trouble for being the newbie loner that i started picking up accents as second nature. i hadn't really thought of it for years, since i've gotten older. but a couple employees of dave's came by to help him move some stuff and head for their project in arizona. one is from georgia, one is from alabama. after being around them for a couple hours, shane asked me if my family was from alabama, because i sounded like i was. dave said "yeah, it's a trip, she sounds totally different. if i'd heard her in a different room i'd think she was a different person." i had no idea. it's so pathological! it's such a deeply ingrained habit that i had no idea i had it, really, or rather, i'd forgotten. how deeply embarassing and sorta sad, huh? i feel like the same person, but i'd adapted so much so quickly that it sorta broke dave's heart. he's always so sad about my history that i can't even talk about it. i don't think it was that bad. i'd always thought that being able to adapt quickly was a good thing. but on the same note, how icky is it when you see someone deliberately trying to take on an accent that is not natural to them? like some american teenager trying to sound british so that they'll seem classier or something? ew! what the hell? how do you change a habit you didn't even know you have? well, i guess i know now, and i'm comfortable enough to do something about it. but it really is sad and pathetic.
Hey! Im like that too.... when i hung over brooklin a lot... for the next 6 months when i was home, people would ask me if i was from brooklyn. i was just in the south and i kinda got a south thing on.... my accent changes a lot and is really a weird mix of a lot of different places....
my sister talks like she is from jersey and she has lived in NC her whole life......................... dunno where she got it from. I do know an irish guy who has lived here for years but the drunker he gets the thicker his accent gets.
well, you know, it made me feel like a liar, and i never, ever want to be a liar. it wasn't intentional dishonesty, though. now i know it, and can catch myself.
seriously, i can't stand people who try and do the boston accent. i can't stand them. i feel like hitting them to shut them up. then they try to get me to say some famous line so they can hear the accent. if i'm talking to them, they already hear it,so what's the point of me saying some stupid line.
The only accent I pick up is my native Boston accent - which I haven't lived there in 14 years. I had a very thick Boston accent and then as I've moved around the country it disappared. I pretty much don't have an accent right now, but I suppose that has to do with me living in Vermont, Conneticut, New York, Colorado, Ohio, West Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania and now Florida over the last ten years. I never picked up any of the accents of those locations while living there, but if I'm surrounded by people from Mass, you would never know that I had left.
i think that naturally falling back into an accent you're used to is a part of it. i've lived a lot of places and picked up a lot of cant. but at the same time, i feel like such a social retard.
Its interesting to note that from my point of view, all American accents sound the same except for a really hard core Southern accent. But I can tell wether someone from New Zealand is from the North or the South Island genereally just by a slight difference in the way they talk. Crazy.
yeah, you just tune your ears to something you're used to, and picking up subtle differences is a lot easier. i can tell if someone is northeast or southeast coast, northwest or southwest coast, inland, georgia, alabama, midwest, tulsa has a really strong accent all it's own. and all the minute variations in between, though i can't pin a new accent down completely to location until i'm told, but i can always tell a difference.
