SO is not a forum, it's a knowledge repository. One of the sites biggest problems (aside from the company not listening to its users) is that confusion. It's not a help desk, it's not a code writing service, and most certainly not a forum.
I have a buddy who learned English as a second language early in life and he has a fluent Irish accent. I’ve never been able to wrap my head around that one.
I once took a short trip through the south of Germany near Nuremberg … we were just on a random trip not knowing what we were doing in a rental car. We stopped at a gas station to get gas and got some help from an attendant, a young German teenager who spoke some English.
He talked to us in the weirdest accent I ever heard … a combination of English with a German accent and a touch of southern Texan or southern American. He had grown up learning English from army personnel from the American US base nearby.
I’m Canadian in Ontario and the first five years of my life, all I spoke or heard was my cultural language Ojibway-Cree. I went to school where I learned English but continued to only mostly speak my language.
Then I spent an awkward period as a teenager speaking English with a Native accent … a classic TV stereotypical Native accent and it was horrible. It took me about a decade to get over that phase, now I speak English as boringly as any Canadian. Not bad eh?
I once did one of those quizzes that figures out where your American accent is from and I got mostly LA and midwest. Makes sense since I learned from watching TV shows.
There’s many regional differences in American English.
First, pronunciation is always changing, and changes tend to happen regionally.
For example, there’s the Mary-merry-marry merger. A bit over half of American speakers pronounce all three of those words identically, as mɛri. About 17% of Americans have a full three-way contrast. In NYC, for example, they’d say meɹi, mæɹi, and mɛɹi. And other people merged two of the three.
The pen-pin merger is a famous feature of southern American dialects.
Some words have regional pronunciations - crayon can have one or two syllables, for example.
And then there’s regional words, like pop vs soda, bucket vs pail, firefly vs lightning bug, you vs y’all vs yinz vs youse vs you lot vs you all vs you guys etc.
By asking about all of those sorts of things, you can figure out where someone’s from.
Dialect tests. Think about how someone from boston might say “park” like “pahk” vs other parts of the country, or if someone uses “y’all” where they might be from. The way people pronounce o,a, ai, ough, augh type of sounds is very telling. Also phrases are very regional. There are many studies that compile that data. One famous dataset is used in a Times article that is behind a paywall, here are some people talking about it: peabodyawards.com/nytimesdialectquiz/
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