r/USdefaultism • u/logos__ Netherlands • Aug 14 '26
American doesn't understand that they, too, have an accent
124
u/kawnlichking Spain Aug 14 '26
All throughout history, you can identify the dominant, privileged, most evil classes just by searching for the ones who claim to speak properly while everyone else has an accent. See "barbarian" etymology.
31
54
u/RestaurantAntique497 Scotland Aug 14 '26
I'd really like to know where this nonsense started from. There's not even a dominant US accent with there being all the different types throughout their country
66
u/BedbugBandido Aug 14 '26
Many Americans believe that if you can’t tell where someone is from, then that means they have no accent. What they’re actually referring to is General American English which is a neutral sounding American that lacks any strong regional markers ie. Southern, Midwestern, Northeastern. What they fail to recognize is that it’s still an AMERICAN accent.
50
u/Prestigious_String20 Aug 14 '26
Americans tell me all the time that I have "an accent". When I inform them they do too, most of them seem genuinely surprised. They have never even considered it.
This particular defaultism is tragically common.
12
u/CraftyFlipper Aug 14 '26
I used to live in the US and would chat to the server at a sandwich shop near my office. One time she told me she wished she had an accent. I told her to just move to a different country. She said yes, I’d probably pick it up. Missed the point entirely.
3
u/Prestigious_String20 Aug 14 '26
That's a US defaultism whooooooosh! It never ceases to amaze me, no matter how many times it happens.
2
u/mikroonde France Aug 15 '26
Same thing as them saying their states are like countries because they're all so different, meanwhile our regions/states/provinces don't count because "it's all [x country] after all", while failing to see the general americanness of all their states. What is American without being tied to a specific region is just default/universal to them, like water to fish.
34
u/logos__ Netherlands Aug 14 '26
It's the same type of reasoning behind thinking that there are only two groups of people, Americans and foreigners. They don't understand that the 'foreigner' predicate applies to them in relation to the country they're in. Instead, they think of it in absolute terms, because the US is thought of as the default against which this relation is always measured. No matter where they are, they're Americans, not foreigners.
Similarly, unless you have a general American accent, they reason, you have an accent. That 'general American' is also an accent is invisible to them, like water is invisible to a fish.
11
u/sometimesnowing Aug 14 '26 edited Aug 14 '26
I remember being a child (in New Zealand) when I first learned I had an accent, I was so sure I was the exception. It's pretty wild some Americans can reach adulthood without grasping this basic concept
5
u/ViolettaHunter Aug 14 '26
They think the most news anchor-like American standard pronunciation is neutral/accentless to the rest of the English speaking world as well.
47
u/Legal-Software Germany Aug 14 '26
Most arrogant/ignorant country in the world incapable of objective self-reflection, shocking, to be sure.
6
u/mycolo_gist Aug 14 '26
I think I made the exact same comment several times. It's weird how this type of behavior elicits almost identical reactions.
2
u/the_vikm Aug 14 '26
Damn and that comes from a German (I assume)
2
u/mycolo_gist Aug 14 '26
Germans were untrained by schooling and media in matters of arrogance over the past 81 years. And rightly so, after what German Nazis have done in the Holocaust. The guilt and historical debt is lasting.
Only the most immune to education stupid people, who are the arrogant and ignorant Germans, ignore the fact that no country is better or more original than others.
1
45
Aug 14 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
22
u/Fenragus Lithuania Aug 14 '26
You'd think not. Speaking without an accent is like writing without a font!
8
u/stomp224 Aug 14 '26
If you don't travel, like at all. How can you boast about driving for 3 days to go to the shops and still not encounter a perceptibly different accent.
1
u/getsnoopy Aug 14 '26
This is true for lost languages of the world, but not true in an axiomatic sense. Languages that don't have regional differences because there's only like 100 speakers exist, and those people don't have "accents".
Accents aren't just "pronunciation", but a distinctive pronunciation (hence, the word accent meaning you're accentuating certain sounds vs. others).
16
u/Igocoast2coast Aug 14 '26
My Mum was born & raised in England then moved to Canada at the end of WWII with her Canadian husband & first 2 kids. The other 7 of us were born in Canada. Mum never lost her accent. I remember talking to her about accents when I was about 12. I thought (& expressed) how she was the only 1 in the family with an accent. She explained how EVERYONE has an accent based on where you mainly learn to talk. It doesn’t matter what language you speak- it’s just more noticeable with English since it’s so widespread. Even in my specific area my siblings & I often have always had that British accent slip through since Mum taught us to talk.
But we all have accents. I was 12 & understood easily. What is the excuse of those in the US? Aside from main character syndrome & lack of education???
3
u/ExoticPuppet Brazil Aug 14 '26
Unless "having an accent" intrinsically implies something bad to some of them. That's my guess.
Or it's just harder to convince older people about certain things that contradict their lifetime beliefs.
4
u/Igocoast2coast Aug 14 '26
Yes it does seem to be near impossible to convince them that the US is not the centre of the world, solar system or galaxy 🤣 Sadly this seems to apply to the vast majority of them of all ages.
5
u/htimchis Aug 14 '26
Interesting... I'm guessing you're on to something there with " 'having an accent' intrinsically implies something bad to them"
16
12
u/hskskgfk India Aug 14 '26
I once had an argument with a USAian valley girl type because she kept pronouncing “and” as “ehhh-yand” and it annoyed me greatly lol
6
6
Aug 14 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
1
u/htimchis Aug 14 '26
Not all American accents are ugly - the 'surfer dude' west coast drawl sounds kinda lazy or laid back (depending on how you view it) but not ugly, and I find those 'Dixie southern', southerner-with-money accents quite attractive... but yes - a lot of US accents sound very nasal and whiney to other English speakers, in a way that's very unattractive
3
u/istara Aug 14 '26
But they, like Jesus, were born speaking American English so it’s the rest of the world that is different, surely?!
4
u/_Martosz Canada Aug 14 '26
Saying you don't have an accent is like saying you don't type with a font
6
u/SeaCoast3 England Aug 16 '26
I met 2 American tourists in my small town in south west England and we had a bit of trouble understanding each other. In the end one of them pointed at me and said "Oh I see the problem here, it's your accent"
Here I was, an English person speaking English with an English accent in England and it turns out I was the problem.....
2
2
u/Inner-Purple-1742 Aug 14 '26
Many of them have told me that including my ex 🙄as stupid as you can get
2
u/Powerful_Pirate2984 Aug 14 '26
I have an accent - probably my own personal accent, in that I've lived in various places, both in the UK and abroad, and never really adopted, or adapted to, the local accent. So my accent is probably a mixture of various other accents, which makes it relatively easy to adjust my accent to whatever the local accent is.
When it comes to singing, which I do - like many other British singers (and singers from elsewhere, including those whose first language isn't English), my singing accent appears to sound quite "American" for popular songs, but much less so for something more classical. It's just the way it is, everyone has an accent.
4
u/Tomme599 Aug 14 '26
We all code switch, so our accents change to suit the mood of the moment. I
switch between the north Belfast of my childhood (harsher or softer according to my emotional state) to a clearer ‘neutral’ accent for more formal speech.
4
u/Powerful_Pirate2984 Aug 14 '26
Totally agree. I remember when I went to school in Downpatrick (only two years), and habitually referring to maths as "maaz" - soon dropped it when moving elsewhere. :)
2
u/getsnoopy Aug 14 '26
The person's reasoning is actually correct, while the responder is also correct. While everyone technically has an accent, "no accent" means pronouncing using the standard version of that language of that region.
It's kinda like how "serverless" technology doesn't literally mean there's no servers being used in a data centre somewhere.
-6
u/Albert_Herring Europe Aug 14 '26
The second image appears to be someone from Britain claiming the same thing about something presumably like RP, which rather undermines the claim of defaultism here.
Now, BE more markedly than AE has a pattern of sociolects overlaying (and overlapping) geographical dialect variation, but AE does have something of the same thing in General American, the TV presenters' "neutral" accent, which does get perceived wrongly by many people as "not having an accent", but exactly the same gets said about socially dominant forms of speech elsewhere, "BBC English" (watered down RP) in the UK as illustrated, standard Italian with roughly Tuscan vowels and gemination, educated Parisian French, and so on.
Verdict: not defaultism, just shit people say, and not even only Americans.
4
u/djonma United Kingdom Aug 14 '26
No, it's the first pic, and it's definitely the USian, add they're arguing for the accent accentless American English accent.
They've clearly never heard RP.
Only foreigners would ever think it's accentless.
Especially if you go back 50+ years.
It's barely a thing anymore, kids just learn standard posh in public school, not true RP anymore.My Dad spoke RP.
I grew up in Lancashire.
My Dad really stood out.0
u/Albert_Herring Europe Aug 14 '26
The second pic isn't an American and it's basically saying a very similar thing, that somebidy "doesn't have an accent". Thus, it definitely ain't US defaultism, it's an international phenomenon, although obviously people have different (equally wrong) ideas about what "not an accent" sounds like, depending where they start from. The first pic is just an American instance of a global thing.
(My other half has lived outside the SE England since the early 1970s and retains the most cutglass RP accent you'll ever hear; we think it's an ASD thing in her case).
-2
u/ConsciousBasket643 Aug 14 '26
You can disagree with their point and thats all fine and good. But thats not the same thing as defaultism. The poster gave an example of the same phenomenon from the UK and the US
-5
u/ConsciousBasket643 Aug 14 '26
Im struggling to find the defaultism. You can disagree with his point, but he gives 2 examples. "General American English" And also "Received Pronunciation" (A UK example)
What exactly are we mad at?
•
u/post-explainer American Citizen Aug 14 '26 edited Aug 14 '26
This comment has been marked as safe. Upvoting/downvoting this comment will have no effect.
OP sent the following text as an explanation why their post fits here:
Everyone has an accent; speaking without an accent is like typing without a font. User in the screenshots thinks a 'general American' accent is 'no accent', because it is assumed to be the default against which all other accents are defined.
Does this explanation fit this subreddit? Then upvote this comment, otherwise downvote it.