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Accents, Accents and Did I Mention Accents?
By Gabby Zonker
Everyone who speaks a language speaks it with an accent. A particular accent essentially reflects a person's linguistic background. Accents typically differ in quality of voice, pronunciation of vowels and consonants, stress, and prosody. For this assignment I chose to go to the “speech accent archive” website. The Speech Accent Archive website is established to uniformly exhibit a large set of speech accents from a variety of language backgrounds. At this website, native and non-native speakers of English all read the same English paragraph and are carefully recorded. I chose to listen to Turkish, Japanese and Arabic and compare the accents of the different English speakers. Throughout the paper I will discuss the different speaker’s pronunciation of vowels, consonants, and phrasing intonations.
The first speaker I listened to was a 27 year old lady who was from Bingol, Turkey. She began to learn English at the age of 26 and has been living in the United States for almost a year. The first thing I noticed after listening to her Turkish accent was that she did a lot of devoicing. Devoicing involves turning consonants that are supposed to be voiced into either a voiceless or its voiceless counterpart. A good example of this is when she said the word “Bob.” When the final consonant in Bob was devoiced, it sounded like she said the word "Bop." I also noticed that she did a lot of consonant voicing by changing the s to a z. So for example all the words in the paragraph that ended in an s (things, spoons, peas, cheese, plastics, kids, and bags) she pronounced the ending sound with a z. So it sounded like she was saying: thingz, spoonz, peaz, cheeze etc. The last thing I noticed that she did was interdental fricative change, where she changed the “th” sound and made it a “d” sound. When she would say the word “the” it sounded like she said “da.”
The second speaker I listened to was a 25 year old woman who was from Tokyo, Japan. She started learning English at the age of 12 and has been a residence in the United States for 2 years. Two major things I noticed that she did were: pronounced words incorrectly and interdental fricative stops. Some of the words she pronounced incorrectly were: for “peas” she said “pears,” for “snack” she said “snake,” and for “for” she said “from.” The second thing I noticed that she did a lot while reading the paragraph was interdental fricative stops. She would change the “th” sound and make it a “d” sound. So for the words: these, things, with, the, thick, brother and three, it sound like she said “dese, dangs, wid, da, etc.
The last speaker I listened to was a 38 year old lady from Riyadh, Saudi. She learned to speak English at the age of 12 and has been a residence in the United States for 4 years. The first thing I notice while I was listening to her Arabic accent was that she used alveolar approximant change r to trill. The r to trill is made by curling the tongue up and back a bit. It sounded like she was rolling the r sound with her tongue. She showed r to trill with the following words: her, bring, from, fresh, brother, for, frog, train, red and three. The second major thing I noticed was that she did a lot of consonant voicing. For the letter p she changed the sound to a b sound. So for the words: please, spoons, peas, plastic, and scoop, it sounded like she was saying, “blease, beas, scoob, etc. These were the 2 major differences that I noticed was different from the way I would say the words.
I thought listening to all the different accents and dialects was a neat experience. It made me more aware of how many different ways there is to say a word. It also helped me better understand the other languages and their different accents and dialects.

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