Sunny Days in Heaven
Spiritual/Political/Philosophical Blog on the Nature of Truth and Falsehood and Heaven


Friday, January 28, 2005  

Where is the speaker from?

From a PBS site on the show about The American Language, you can go hear and test your recognition of regional accents.

It was very difficult. I only guessed a few correctly. There were no twangy accents or like those in the movie Fargo, "oh yah su-oore", no Hahvahd pahk thah cah with vigah in Cuber.

When I was in Tucson last year, I heard about a dozen different Southern accents (it was lovely), and they all had more character than those on this test. So I'm not sure this test is a very good one unless you're a linguist like Henry Higgins who can hear the slightest difference in vowels and dipthongs from one London neighborhood to another two streets away.

posted by Mark Butterworth | 11:08 PM |

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