What are the “ways of speaking” (like details of the accent) that make you immediately recognize someone from your country when you hear them speaking English?

4 comments

1. If the people haven’t been living in English areas for a long time, you realise after 10 seconds that they are German.

   Our pronunciation is considerably “harder” than in English, we can hardly hide that, I can’t either.

   What I always notice immediately, for example, is that the “i” is always pronounced the always same here. That’s not the case in English, exampel fish or wine it’s pronounced differently, which is unusual for us.

2. Sounds are less “nuanced”. Vowels are cleary marked, b and v get confused, sh turns into s or ch, etc.

3. A group of foreigners came into my store and their accent sounded Finnish or Swedish, but then one of them said their name was ‘AATU’ and the double AA gave it away. Random suburb in Los Angeles at a Dominos few nights ago.

4. I can not immidiately recognize someone from Cyprus, as our english accent sounds too familiar with other middle eastern/ caucasian accents. However, I can tell someone is from Greece by listening to them from a mile away.

   If you don’t know, both Cyprus and Greece speak greek. The reason I can recognize greeks so easily and not cypriots is because in the cypriot-greek dialect we have variations of the ‘sh’ sound and modern standard greek does not. So when a greek speaks english, he will say “tsance” instead of “chance”, “sooting” instead of “shooting” etc.

   If they speak without using a word that gives them away, or if they can pronounce it, I could easily mistake them for italian. Or vice versa, mistake italians for greeks.