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Old July 10th, 2019 #16
ColdFire
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Join Date: Aug 2017
Location: Bremen ,Germany
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Breanna View Post
I don't contest that the USA has an Irish influence but to me it does not seem like it was the main influence. The accent and the culture is very different and I say so because I live in a place that has an accent/culture that is a direct blend of English and Irish and the dialect is so different from the standard American accent. Some words have the exact opposite pronunciation for example the words tie and toy. Here, tie is pronounced like "toy" and toy is pronounced like "tie" which is the same as how it is in Ireland, the exact opposite of America. Likewise boil is pronounced like "bile," boy like "bye" and words like right are pronounced like "roight" and life as "loife" which is how it is in Ireland and in England. If I could point to a more well-known accent that is a direct blend of England and Ireland it would probably be in Australia which is also very different from the USA. There's also the regional differences between the North and the South in the USA with the accents what does that come from? Surely it must come from a different ethnic origin of the two regions?

Interesting with what you say about the r's and the t's in some words here the t is pronounced very hard, much harder than in America but in some words the t is not pronounced at all. A double t in the middle of a word won't be said at all for example the word kettle will be said "keh-ul" or battle "bah-ul" or little "lih-ul." But in other words the t will be pronounced very exaggerated in a word such as shout, water, wait, which to me sound like "shoud," "wadder," "waid" when an American says it.

The rs here sound much more exaggerated than the American rs too in words like car, heart, and so on. Then we have h's pronounced here in words a lot for example in "white" you will hear the h but even in words that don't have an h for example water sounds more like "what-her" and red like "rhed." All that comes from Ireland if I'm not mistaken but those are things I really don't hear in an American accent.

The stereotypical American to me and Americans I met lack the stereotypical Irish personality of being very merry and jovial, they're more stereotypically impatient, always in a rush, and not as happy or polite.
Sis , concerning your scepticism about American English having been influenced by Ireland . .

Largely two things separate British and American ( in the long run ) . .

That the Americans much more emphasize the 'r' ( like I said , "car park" - - > British "cuh puk" ; American 'carr parrk' ) and that t's are often made d's ( 'city' - - -> 'ciddy' ; 'sexuality' - - > 'sexualeddy' . .) . .

Listen to many Irish people speaking , that accent in the long run originates in Ireland . .


Concerning the rest of what you wrote . .

Yes , the USA has different dialect zones.

I once heard that for example the Boston area still has an accent which sounds a lot like British , that New York has its own accent and , most of all , that people in the American south have a characteristic accent.

Well .. Boston is in the New England states , New York has seen lots of European ethnicities and , concerning the south . .

I once heard that the American South was heavily influenced by Scotland ( most people there seem to have had that ancestry ) even to the point that many claim the American Southern dialect was influenced by Scottish.

I have never been to the U.S. (even though I plan to . .) yet these are interesting facts.