The idea that "some people have accents, but I speak the pure (or a purer version of the) language" plays right into the notion of accentism.
Bit of a nitpick, but I think that's only true of so-called native accents. [0]
If a community speaks the language natively, in a certain distinctive way, that's called a native accent, and as you say it's meaningless to refer to any native accent as more or less accented than another. (edit I suppose in the extreme cases this might not be true, as a community's dialect might evolve into a distinct language, but that's by the by.)
With non-native accents though, the accent is the result of a limited linguistic ability. If you learn French, you'll have less of an English accent as you become more skilled, as the accent is the result of your native English leaking into your French pronunciation.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accent_(sociolinguistics)#Non-...
case in point: Standard German doesn't pronounce syllable-final "r", so someone who speaks English with a German accent will tend to speak with a non-rhotic accent, as most English accents. If they subsequently move to the US and adopt rhotacism, are they now having "more" or "less" accent?
I think the issue is explained quite nicely here: https://web.archive.org/web/20081008000501/http://linguist.e...
- Russian, Italians
- English RP (BBC)
- "Educated" American English (politicians, etc.)
- rural accents from the US
- India
- Ireland
- Australia
- UK popular accents
Pretty sure what the parent meant by "the more of an accent a person has" was "the more a person's accent deviates from my own andthe majority of my community", but wanted to be more concise (if less precise).
Is there anything research to support that claim? Seems like it is just a regular tribal thing (us vs them, in-group vs out-group).
Imho it's also kind of reductive to make "accentism" out as something purely discriminatory, when the matter of fact is that particularly a lot of regional accents are often unintelligible for people who are not familiar with them, even when they are native speakers of the language without ascent.
In Germany one can grow up and live in the middle of a state for their whole lives, and still heavily struggle with understanding the local accent of a smaller nearby town.
And while that is certainly an enrichment on the cultural diversity side to have that many, and so different, accents, it also makes communication more difficult, more prone to fail, thus ultimately more likely for misunderstandings to happen.
Not understanding, or having more trouble with, certain accents doesn't make you an "accentist", but thinking that this is a fault on the other person's side is.
> In Germany one can grow up and live in the middle of a state for their whole lives, and still heavily struggle with understanding the local accent of a smaller nearby town.
Does this really still happen nowadays?
> And while that is certainly an enrichment on the cultural diversity side to have that many, and so different, accents, it also makes communication more difficult, more prone to fail, thus ultimately more likely for misunderstandings to happen.
Sure, but I guess that's the price you pay for diversity, one I'm personally glad to pay.
Not a direct answer to your question, but I live in the Netherlands which is a lot smaller than Germany, about 300x200 km. Every village has their own accent/dialect and every region often has their own words or even sub-language. I live 50km from Fryslan, but I cannot make any sense of Frysian language. The same for Limburg or Flanders when people have a deep accent.
Sometimes people with such a strong accent get on tv, and they provide subtitles, otherwise it is just incomprehensible to most Dutch people. It is often a culture of relating to someone, like "We are from the same background". At my chess club there are 3 persons that know Frysian, when they decide to talk Frysian, it is better to just walk away :)
It usually directly translates to pronunciation as that's a rather big part of spoken Hochdeutsch.
> Does this really still happen nowadays?
Yes, a lot. Thick Bavarian accents are often considered intelligible in the rest of Germany. Even inside Bavaria dialects can range from "easily understandable" like a lot of Franconian, to something so thick that even other Bavarian's might struggle with understanding, like some regional Upper Palatine dialects.
Often even small towns will have their very own accents.
> Sure, but I guess that's the price you pay for diversity, one I'm personally glad to pay.
I guess I'm just too utilitarian for that, my ideal version of humanity would speak one common language to improve cooperation and understanding among each other.
Dialects are cool and interesting, but there are already so many languages to learn, expecting people to learn a whole bunch of dialects for each of those, in addition to the language itself, is quite an impossible task for the vast majority of people who don't learn languages for a living.
Somewhat related story about Swiss German, although it is more of a dialect than accent.
I self-studied German for two years - Duolingo, consuming a lot of German media, chatting via video with different speakers online. I thought I had a pretty good grasp on basic conversational skills.
When I finally went to Germany for the first time, I had a connecting flight in Zurich on Swiss Air. After boarding the flight I realized I could hardly understand anyone. Most of the staff and passengers were speaking Swiss German. I panicked a good part of the flight about my misplaced confidence in my fluency.
Luckily on the trip through Germany I had no problem with Hochdeutsch. However there definitely were very noticeable differences in accent and word usage as I moved from Schleswig-Holstein in the north to Bayern in the south via the east.
Not really, since there are lots of small pronunciation differences (e.g. the pronunciation of "ä", the quality of "i" in words like "Kirche", etc.) that are not distinguished in writing. At the same time, some "Bühnenhochdeutsch" pronunciations are not even captured by orthography, e.g. syllable-final -ig being pronounced as -ich or the voicing of the s sound before vowels at the syllable onset. In fact, especially with phenomena such as reduction of "-er" etc. in standard German, Swiss people will usually claim that they speak "German as it is written" even though that is wildly different from how most Germans speak.
Also, I mean, modern German and its orthography was modeled in large parts after Saxon, but nobody would think nowadays that Saxon constitutes "standard German" in terms of pronunciation.
> Yes, a lot. Thick Bavarian accents are often considered intelligible in the rest of Germany. Even inside Bavaria dialects can range from "easily understandable" like a lot of Franconian, to something so thick that even other Bavarian's might struggle with understanding, like some regional Upper Palatine dialects.
> Often even small towns will have their very own accents.
But that wasn't your claim. You claimed that dialects are unintelligible from town to town which is usually very rare, since dialects tend to form a continuum.
> I guess I'm just too utilitarian for that, my ideal version of humanity would speak one common language to improve cooperation and understanding among each other.
That's not a linguistic question anymore, but one of personal values. However, it is worth noting that cases of language death often are accompanied by culture death as well, and deep feelings of shame and guilt within the respective communities.
Most of the local students I talked to spoke German that was very close to Hochdeutsch plus some linguistic peculiarities and slang terms. As far as I could tell this was the dialect they used at home, when drunk, talking with childhood friends, etc., and I could understand it easily.
Every once in a while, though, I would meet someone (usually of a slightly older generation) whose dialect I found completely unintelligible.
I'm not sure how easily the average local German could understand the different dialects. Most of the local people I talked to regularly were computational linguist students, German teachers, or worked in the international student office, so they had a particular interest in learning languages.
I assumed it was obvious that I meant "relative to my accent", which is what Europeans have noted as a "California accent".
The explanation above is somewhat long, so I would like to shorten this. I have been saying “I have an accent” instead.
Is “accent” the right word to use in this case? If not, which word is?
> I do not pronounce the words in the way people around me expect to hear.
This is an interesting way of putting it - an accent is a collection of linguistic tendencies that together can clue a listener in on your social class, geographical origin, or other biographical information. However, I think it is possible to make a distinction between "having an accent" and simply mispronouncing words. Stressing the wrong syllable is an example of the latter. Both having an accent and mispronouncing words can lead to misunderstandings, but one is easily correctible and the other is not.
The reason I pointed it out, though, is because the reverse direction - "you have an accent, which is why I don't understand you" - especially when directed at actual native speakers implies (even if not intended) some sort of deficiency on the part of the interlocutor.
you can't just assume that everyone finds the same accents easy or difficult
I do assume (and believe correctly), that the further an accent strays from what you would hear on your standard American news channel, the more difficult it is for the average native speaker of American English to understand.