In your language how easy is it to know where a person is from based on how they speak?

General discussion about learning languages
golyplot
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Re: In your language how easy is it to know where a person is from based on how they speak?

Postby golyplot » Sat Oct 17, 2020 3:38 am

eido wrote:
Kraut wrote:Another one of these tests, from the US: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/201 ... .html?_r=0

I was born and raised in the West of the US, but this test placed me in Minnesota, Michigan, and Illinois, probably because my mom is from around there.

I have an ear for hearing other languages being spoken around me, like radar, but I can't recognize the specific dialects people are using.


I just took the test again. It did better than I recall it doing before, but still not all that accurate in my case.

My parents are from Michigan and I grew up in Atlanta, but the test placed me in Kansas or Nebraska or maybe Texas or North Dakota. It did have a little red dot in the Atlanta area so it wasn't completely off, but it didn't exactly localize me either, with half the country painted equally red. Perhaps my family moving at a young age left it confused, but it's not like moving is exactly uncommon nowadays.
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Re: In your language how easy is it to know where a person is from based on how they speak?

Postby DaveAgain » Sat Oct 17, 2020 8:53 am

The three most similar cities for me were Jersey City, Newark and New York. There was also a broad red patch covering Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia, and another hot spot in N.Carolina.

I'm from SE England.
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Re: In your language how easy is it to know where a person is from based on how they speak?

Postby jimmy » Sat Oct 17, 2020 2:32 pm

well,

although I am kurdish I can way easily understand whether anyone is originally from turkey. Because I am highly professional in turkish language.

in fact the tone of usage allows me to realise it even if that one has lived in turkey for more than 5-10 years. (This amount of time may change/vary)

Turkish language has very aesthetical property on this issue.
foreign people generally tend to use the letters not sufficiently correct ,commonly oblique or wrong.
as I am using istanbul accent of turkish, I can easily understand sometimes some people where they are not from (Ankara and istanbul and also izmir and the center of antalya and somewhere like these cities generally use very aesthetical turkish.)

but somewhere for instance rize, diyarbakır , bartın or somewhere like these generally tend to use non aesthetical turkish , this is being said or defined with the use of accent.

...

Kurdish is a bit different but surely ,there are more accents or more correctly "dialects" of kurdish than turkish if we limit the region to turkey and around of it
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Re: In your language how easy is it to know where a person is from based on how they speak?

Postby sillygoose1 » Tue Oct 20, 2020 11:18 pm

Rather easy, I'd say. I have pretty much all of the anglophone countries pinpointed simply from watching so many movies and TV series from England, Ireland, Scotland, Australia, and so forth. The upper Midwest is interesting because sometimes they sound Canadian depending on where they're from exactly. I can also tell French, Quebecois, and Italians with ease but sometimes I have trouble differentiating between Dutch/German natives as well as Polish/Russian natives.
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Re: In your language how easy is it to know where a person is from based on how they speak?

Postby Uruguayan » Mon Oct 26, 2020 12:36 am

I am from Uruguay, it is very easy except languages from Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland.
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Re: In your language how easy is it to know where a person is from based on how they speak?

Postby smallwhite » Mon Oct 26, 2020 11:32 am

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Re: In your language how easy is it to know where a person is from based on how they speak?

Postby Montmorency2020 » Tue Nov 03, 2020 7:43 pm

As far as British English is concerned, it depends on the person's education (and to some extent "class" - yes, it still exists in Britain in 2020...).

If they went to the sort of private school known for historical reasons as a public school, then they will speak a particular variety of "Received Pronunciation" ("R.P.") which is pretty identical wherever they come from. This is more true of older people, say mid-forties or older, than younger people (whose speech is still technically R.P. but a bit "sloppier").

I didn't go to a "public" private school myself, but I went to the kind of school that liked to imitate public schools. You soon learned to speak like everyone else, without even realising. Hence my accent ended up very different to that of my parents or the kids who lived in my street.

For normal people :-) it's a bit the same as Iversen says about Danish accents/dialects: they are not what they were in days gone by. Nevertheless, it's very easy to tell a northerner from a southerner, a north-westerner from a north-easterner, or a west-country person from an East Anglian, for example.

It's very easy to tell a Welsh person from a Scots person, and both of them from an English person.
(It's also possible to tell a North Walian from a South Walian, but you have to know what to listen for).

If you speak a regional accent yourself, you might well be able to tell the accents of specific towns within that accent area, or even villages in some cases. I think I can do this for some accents, but I would not swear to accuracy.

The accent of Northern Ireland is very distinct from that of Southern Ireland. On the other hand, the accent of Northern Ireland can sometimes be confused with some Scottish accents.
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