(Still OT) Nationalism, language and monoculture [was Re: Python Worst Practices]

[Tim Delaney]

On 5 March 2015 at 07:11, Steven D'Aprano <
steve+comp.lang.python at pearwood.info> wrote:

>
> As for your comments about spoken accents, I sympathise. But changing
> accents is very hard for most people (although a very few people find it
> incredibly easy). Even professionals typically need to have voice coaches
> to teach them to change accents successfully. One of the problems is that
> most people don't hear their own accent. My wife usually has a fairly
> generic English accent that most people think is American, but within
> seconds of beginning to talk to another Irish person she is speaking in a
> full-blown Irish accent, and she is *completely* unaware of it.


This is very much the case - any time someone is reacquainted with their
native accent they tend to strongly slip back into it, and it takes some
time to get their more neutral accent back.

A related thing is when you have multiple multi-lingual people talking
together where at least two of their languages match (or are close enough
for most uses e.g. Spanish and Portuguese). They'll slip in and out of
multiple languages depending on which best expresses what they're trying to
say, and no one will involved realise.

Tim Delaney
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