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Member Countries and Known Languages

Posted: Tue Oct 22, 2013 9:09 am
by Servia
Hey everyone, I think it would be cool to know where everyone is coming from. Everyone can get some sort of idea then of how someone else may be pronouncing something, dialects, etc.

Just put down something relating to the thread subject.

E.g. I live in the United States or more importantly the Midwest. People from the Midwest of the US are considered to have a "neutral" accent. I am also currently studying Spanish and Norwegian....quite the pair.

Re: Member Countries and Known Languages

Posted: Tue Oct 22, 2013 9:51 am
by Torco
I live in central Chile, southwest shore of south america. milklang is spanish, of the local variety naturally, I'm good at english, bad at french.

Re: Member Countries and Known Languages

Posted: Tue Oct 22, 2013 10:02 am
by linguoboy
Servia wrote:E.g. I live in the United States or more importantly the Midwest. People from the Midwest of the US are considered to have a "neutral" accent.
Nobody thinks working class Chicagoans, Yoopers, or people from Fargo have a "neutral accent". The Midwest is a meeting place of at least three different dialect zones not to mention the epicenter of the Northern Cities Vowel Shift. If you want to talk dialects, be specific.

Case in point: Aside from a year abroad in Germany, I've lived my whole adult life in "the Midwest". But my accent is such a hodgepodge that when I took this survey, it placed me as being either from New England or North Texas.

Re: Member Countries and Known Languages

Posted: Tue Oct 22, 2013 10:33 am
by cromulant
I'm an American and I speak English!

Re: Member Countries and Known Languages

Posted: Tue Oct 22, 2013 10:39 am
by Pole, the
I am Pole, I am a Pole, I live in Poland, I speak Polish.

Re: Member Countries and Known Languages

Posted: Tue Oct 22, 2013 10:49 am
by Travis B.
I am from Milwaukee, Wisconsin and I speak some idiolect of an Inland North dialect such that even people from my own city often perceive me as having an accent (ironically enough I think it is my careful speech that gives people here that impression, but my non-careful speech sounds like it is channeling Danish and seems to be heavily accented to everyone outside this corner of the Midwest).

Re: Member Countries and Known Languages

Posted: Tue Oct 22, 2013 11:25 am
by Astraios
I'm from Chester, UK. Between the ages of ten and eleven, I lived in a trailer, and now I live in a single room in Manchester.

I speak fluent English and Hebrew, my French is steadily worsening, and I have more or less conversational knowledge of a few other languages (at the moment Persian and Russian are my strongest). I've been told I have an Israeli accent in English, a Hebrew accent in Russian, and a French accent in Hebrew, so I probably sound a bit funny in every language, but my native dialect is some sort of North West English crossed with a bit of Estuary.

Re: Member Countries and Known Languages

Posted: Tue Oct 22, 2013 11:32 am
by vampireshark
I am from the US. I was born in Hawaii and presently go to school in northeast Ohio. I have spent appreciable amounts of time in western Washington State; northwestern Bavaria, Germany; southeast Texas; eastern North Carolina; Central Wisconsin; southern Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany; Wales; and Auvergne, France.

I fluently speak English as my mother tongue with some strange accent that people can't seem to pinpoint and am conversant in French (with some variant of a Parisian and/or German accent). I also speak a bit of German, albeit with a Bavarian accent.

Re: Member Countries and Known Languages

Posted: Tue Oct 22, 2013 11:52 am
by sangi39
From North Yorkshire, England, with English as the sole language I can speak at even a basic conversational level (despite living in the same area for all but 2 years of my life before I turned 18, I barely sound like I'm from here. The underlying accent is broadly "Yorkshire", but I don't have a number of features, mostly in the vowel (but not the bath-trap split) which come across as "southern" or "posh").

I have GCSEs in German and Russian but can only handle them at a grammatical level, i.e. I never really learnt much in the way of vocabulary but I have much less trouble inflecting words and forming simple sentences. I've had experience with French and Welsh at school but all I know of them is a couple handful of words and some ability to handle Welsh syntax and mutations but not really inflection of either. Basically, what I know of most languages I've had experience with or know elements of is highly focused on grammatical aspects rather than on vocabulary, which could explain why I can never hold on to a conlang for all that long :P

Re: Member Countries and Known Languages

Posted: Tue Oct 22, 2013 12:12 pm
by finlay
Um, well I'm from Scotland. Lived there until I went to university, then spent 5 years in northern england, then went back to Edinburgh, then moved to Tokyo almost two years ago. Although I did have a Scottish accent at one point, for various reasons it's become increasingly diluted, especially over the past ten years or so. My mother always had an English (ish) accent and I didn't usually place much stock in having a particular accent really right from the beginning, but especially after I went down to England people were often surprised (more and more as the years went by) when they learned where I'm from. Some people placed me in the southwest of england, because I still had a rhotic accent. Many people would listen for a few more minutes and then declare that they did actually hear the lilt or twang of a Scottish accent. This still happens occasionally, but not as much. I think one major factor was that people often had only heard a Glaswegian accent, which is much stronger than Edinburgh.

The reasons were multiple, I guess: one is just that the accent grew naturally weaker when I lived away from home, another is that I have a natural tendency to accommodate to how others speak, another is that studying linguistics has warped my perception of what is "correct" and how I "naturally" say something so much that I don't really know for sure anymore, and the last is probably that when I started teaching English I had to speak in a way that wouldn't cause communication errors.

So now in Tokyo I often speak in a different manner when teaching than when not: I tend to use non-rhotic pronunciations and monophthongs more (but interchangeably) to roughly match how Japanese speakers say things, and outside of class my colleagues are mostly English and my other friends a mixture of Japanese, American and Canadian – with them, again, I tend to accommodate, to the point that someone I met recently thought I was American until I "put on" a Scottish accent and found that when he complemented me on my accent skills, I actually had to explain that the accent was semi-natural for me because I'm from there. (the biggest culprits in this that I'm likely to pick up when speaking to someone are t-flapping, rhoticity of course, and probably pronouncing <o> like /A/ sometimes)

Oh and as for other languages, Japanese because I'm here of course, improving slowly but probably still only A2/pre-int level (although I haven't tested this or taken any lessons recently), French (maybe was up to int level at one point but now rusty as hell, although I can still read it reasonably well), German (not really done any since high school so maybe A1 level at best - again I can kinda read it sometimes, as long as there aren't any long words), and I also did Latin in high school. I can also understand and read some Dutch, just through having been to the country once for two months and it being similar to German and French, and I can fumble my way through short phrases of Italian and Spanish because they're similar to French and Latin.

Re: Member Countries and Known Languages

Posted: Tue Oct 22, 2013 12:33 pm
by Jipí
27/m/Germany/German, English (C1-ish, probably), French (B1-ish, I guess).

I grew up in northern Hesse, speaking more or less a northern variety of Standard German. English was taught to me in school from age 11 on, French from age 13 on.

Re: Member Countries and Known Languages

Posted: Tue Oct 22, 2013 12:56 pm
by ObsequiousNewt
I'm 15, male, and I live in Iowa, but with Southern US grandparents. My <r> is something like [ɻʷ]. I speak English primarily; I'm Polish by ethnicity, I've studied a bit of Latin, I'm taking Spanish and German at my school, and I go to the same school as Servia (just convinced him to join the forum!) so his Norsk rubs of on me.

And of course our accent is neutral! Ours is the only right accent! (says everybody everywhere)

Re: Member Countries and Known Languages

Posted: Tue Oct 22, 2013 1:45 pm
by prettydragoon
I live on the sunny South Coast of Finland and I've lived here all my life. My first language is Finnish. I'm fluent in Swedish, I get by in German, and I struggle with Hindi.

Re: Member Countries and Known Languages

Posted: Tue Oct 22, 2013 1:55 pm
by din
I'm Dutch, my native languages are Dutch and Limburgish (the EU recognizes it as a regional language, so there you go), and English pretty much feels like a native language because I've been speaking or writing it on a daily basis for a really long time (about 12 years, so a little less than half my life). I speak with a southern-ish American accent because my partner's from NC.

After English, my strongest language is probably French, because I'm forced to speak it every day (I live in Brussels), followed by German (which is a lot easier to understand for me, even though I rarely speak it).

Oh, and I'm 25.

Re: Member Countries and Known Languages

Posted: Tue Oct 22, 2013 2:19 pm
by Ser
I'm some Salvadoran-born guy living in Canada, perfectly literate in Spanish and all, who also speaks some okay French. I've also been studying Latin a lot recently.

Re: Member Countries and Known Languages

Posted: Tue Oct 22, 2013 2:20 pm
by Radius Solis
36/m/Seattle, USA. Born and raised here, though I did once spend three years in Arizona. PNW English is boringly similar to standard American. My German has rusted almost to the point of complete uselessness; I can still just about manage to say "Guten Tag!".

Re: Member Countries and Known Languages

Posted: Tue Oct 22, 2013 2:34 pm
by Travis B.
Radius Solis wrote:PNW English is boringly similar to standard American.
Somehow I'm glad my speech isn't too GA-ish except when I really want it to be, even if it means people have to put up with the mush that is my informal speech.

Re: Member Countries and Known Languages

Posted: Tue Oct 22, 2013 2:52 pm
by WeepingElf
Born and grown up in northern Germany (district of Lippe, North Rhine-Westphalia), native language a northern variant of High German (not Low German - that is essentially a foreign language to me, though I understand it in written and spoken form); now living in Braunschweig (Lower Saxony), i.e. still in northern Germany, but about 150 km from my birthplace. Fluent in English; some basic knowledge in Dutch, Latin, French and Spanish. Age: 43.

Re: Member Countries and Known Languages

Posted: Tue Oct 22, 2013 3:21 pm
by ObsequiousNewt
Travis B. wrote:
Radius Solis wrote:PNW English is boringly similar to standard American.
Somehow I'm glad my speech isn't too GA-ish except when I really want it to be, even if it means people have to put up with the mush that is my informal speech.
Yeah, isn't it amazing how kludgy informal speech can be?

Re: Member Countries and Known Languages

Posted: Tue Oct 22, 2013 3:36 pm
by Mednij
Born in Israel, now live in Toronto, Canada. I have a standard Canadian English accent (with cot-caught merger and all). I also speak Russian (standard dialect) and (somewhat) French (whatever dialect they teach us).

Re: Member Countries and Known Languages

Posted: Tue Oct 22, 2013 5:16 pm
by ----
I'm from the U.S., I've been living in the state of Georgia my whole life. I speak English and a little bit of German. I also have a passive understanding of Spanish just from the social environment but that doesn't entirely count, I suppose. I also know small amounts of a whole bunch of other languages.

My English is pretty close to SAE, but it's apparently pretty obvious where I'm from. I do say y'all sometimes, and my vowels get a little broken up. I don't speak *too* Southern though because it was stigmatized in the environment I grew up in.

Re: Member Countries and Known Languages

Posted: Tue Oct 22, 2013 6:26 pm
by dhok
American, age 18. I spent some time in Brazil last year, so I speak nearly fluent Portuguese, with the occasional error. I'm learning Russian, Latin and Farsi and might add Norwegian or Finnish to that sooner or later. My accent is northwestern US, except for my /æ/, which is a monophthong as in Britain, not a diphthong as most Americans have it. This is quite odd, as I've never lived in either the northwestern US or Britain.

Re: Member Countries and Known Languages

Posted: Tue Oct 22, 2013 6:58 pm
by Drydic
linguoboy wrote:Case in point: Aside from a year abroad in Germany, I've lived my whole adult life in "the Midwest". But my accent is such a hodgepodge that when I took this survey, it placed me as being either from New England or North Texas.
Grrrrrrrrr disappointment at the quiz being shut down

Re: Member Countries and Known Languages

Posted: Tue Oct 22, 2013 9:29 pm
by Arzena
Born in California, moved to Texas for school. To quote Torco, my milklang is English and the first language I studied was Spanish. I study Arabic now (MSA, Egyptian, and Moroccan) at the expense of my Spanish. I've lived in Morocco and I so I often slip into Darija when I speak Arabic. This is very frustrating for other Arabs (especially my language partner who's Iraqi)

Re: Member Countries and Known Languages

Posted: Tue Oct 22, 2013 10:13 pm
by Hallow XIII
I'm a Swiss national, my mother is half-German and my father is Albanian. My age is squarely in the "obnoxious teenager" bracket. I am fluent in German (both my ancestral North German and Northwest Swiss dialects), English and, to a lesser extent, French. I also have a limited, but conversational, knowledge of Italian and I am currently in China to learn Mandarin. I also have limited knowledge of Spanish and Scottish Gaelic.

A special case is Albanian, which is technically my native tongue but which due to shitty circumstances has deteriorated to the point that I cannot hold anything but the most basic conversations in it or read even a children's story without needing a dictionary, which is decidedly ass.

As for dead languages, I specialized in Ancient Greek and Latin in high school and I like to think that I have at least a good working knowledge of them.