Quote:
Originally Posted by SignalHillHiker
I'm not sure why you seem to get some sort of satisfaction from posts like that? I don't understand the impulse to imagine today's youth are faking their accents, and that they're choosing uneducated fishermen as their inspiration?
In my experience, it's a roll of the dice. We're all taught to talk like Canadians in school. Some of us can, some of us can't. Jeddy1989's friend Beth could not fake her accent with a gun to her head. It's the thickest I have ever heard, and she's from Paradise. My parents sound exactly the same to me, but when they visited me on the mainland everyone said my mother had no accent and they couldn't understand my father. None of it is "fake", or put on for show.
You can tell when people dive into the accent for emphasis. It's just as obvious as Oprah speaking ebonics. Most people don't.
You really think, for example, that these families in the little town of Branch are researching English from the 1700s and purposefully choosing which accent they'd like to speak? And then deciding amongst themselves who should use the Wexford expressions and who should use the Waterford ones? That's just... ridiculous. And I don't understand the motivation for implying it.
There are lots of individuals, and even whole areas, of Newfoundland without a strong accent. Marty_McFly sounds like he's from Ontario to me. Doesn't change the fact that people like Beth are real, and not faking it.
As for accents being comparable in Nova Scotia, absolutely. Generally it's a little more Valley Girl than here, but there are pockets of Nova Scotia, especially on Cape Breton, that sound like the weakest Newfoundland accents to me.
Like if you labelled this video and told me it was Newfoundlanders, I'd believe it. Accents might be light, but they're the same as ours. The style of comedy is the same. They even look like us.
"They sees us up here freezin', now freezin's lookin' good!"  Love that. |
Well said. Being a native Nova Scotian, I think I have a pretty good handle on which part of my province a particular dialect is from. However, there can be extreme variances, and you can't judge any particular person by their accent or dialect (i.e. educated, etc.).
People typically speak how they learned to speak as kids, typically from their friends family and neighbors, but also may have been influenced by their teachers, television, etc. For example, I've been told by some of my colleagues in Toronto that I don't have a NS accent, whereas my brother, who has lived in Alberta since the 1980s definitely continues to carry his NS accent (I've noticed). We both grew up in the same household, but I had always taken a greater interest in language than he did and thus I always tried to speak English as I had been taught by my English teachers (can't say I've been entirely successful in speaking 'proper' English, but that's another story entirely).
The stereotypes that the rest of the country appears to carry about those from the Atlantic Provinces are about as accurate as 'the Americans' thinking that all Canadians pronounce 'about' as "aboot", or every Canadian saying "eh" after everything (though I am often guilty of he second affliction...
).
You can't ever paint everybody with the same brush...