Accents Based in British or American English

When learning the accent of a speaker for whom English is a second language, you have to consider what kind of English they learned, which can influence pronunciation, especially if its a lighter accent.

I once interview a young Swede who moved to the west of Ireland for an internship, and he spoke minimal English before he went there, so Galway had a HUGE influence on his spoken English. Similarly, I was once puzzled by the speech of a woman from Spain - turns out her husband was Australian and she lived there for a year as well. So there are lots of possible versions of English for people's speech to be based in, beyond varieties of American accents and British accents.

Here's a transcript of the video:

Hey, Jim Johnson for Accent Help here, and I want to talk about accents and when people are learning to speak English do they tend to go more the direction of British English or American English? And it certainly could go other directions as well, but those two would be the big influencers.

So when someone's learning English what is it based in? Through most of the world you're gonna find that it's gonna be based more in British English, and that's probably due to colonization happening. And so that British influence is certainly going to have an influence on the way that that person speaks English, even though they were maybe born and raised in France or Germany or the Middle East or Asia or Africa, South America. All over, you're dealing with people who will have learned their English from someone. In fact, they may be learning it from someone who learned their English from someone else who may not be a native speaker themselves, so sometimes you're dealing with it's sort of second, third level away from someone.

But there can be a big influence on the way that people speak, if it's British or American or Australian, South African, elsewhere. S

o if you're dealing with American versus British speech, one of the things you need to think about, if it's more that British influence, you're probably going to deal with, do they say they're Rs or not. Do they say, more likely, "clear" or do they say "clear," where they drop the R sound, where it may go away. So is it a rhotic or a non-rhotic accent. So that's certainly one of the big things that it can occur.

Another thing that commonly happens is that certain American vowels, there can be a big difference. One of them is the ASK or BATH set of words. Does it tend to go towards AH: ask and bath, or does it tend to be ask and bath. Now when you're dealing with another language someone based in another language learning English, it's very possible actually that they struggle to make this vowel, so they may be more likely to do something like this, or this "park you car in Harvard Yard" sort of sound. They may be more likely to do one of these anyway. But are they going to be hearing more speakers speaking like this, or words like ASK and BATH, or more in this direction, and that can certainly have an influence on their speech.

Other major ones that can have an influence are some that Americans will tend to say as AH and people from England will tend to say with this rounded sound. Many many British speakers will say this, where a word like LOT. Americans will tend to say like an AH sound whereas many people from England will tend to say AWH LOT LOT. So there's a rounding to that at the back, a rounding to many of these, and pretty consistently these things are spelled with the letter O. So that's a big hint in that. Another one is that Americans don't tend to round a great deal when we say our aw sounds as in LAW SAW. So we tend to unround, whereas some British speakers will tend to round it even more. LAW SAW. Almost feeling like it goes towards an O. So there can be some confusion in this.

I would say this is a big one to consider, this one and this one as well.

So are you dealing with someone learning their English from a British speaker or from an American speaker? or perhaps a person who was influenced by them?

Or a great dialect recording that I loved was a woman from Spain that I was recording who had some unusual vowel sounds. Her husband was from Australia. So that can have a big influence on the way that someone speaks.

For more info about accents overall, check out AccentHelp.com.