Thoughts and Comments

[lierdumoa]

John's drawl. It gets mentioned in a lot of SGA fic. Tends to be described as Southern. Joe Flanigan is from Arizona Nevada (thanks for the correction in the comments, my memory, she is *tricksy*). He does have a drawl. It's just not a Southern drawl. The principle is the same. The vowels get kind of stretched out. The way the get stretched out, though, is different.

The way I hear it, a Southern drawl would turn Rodney into more of a Rawdnay. With Joe it's more of a Raaadney, the O sounding closer to the short A in bad or sad. If Southern drawls tend to round out vowels, Joe's drawl tends to flatten them.

What I really find fascinating is the whole Canadian accent. Whenever you hear people making fun of Canadian accents it always goes back to the whole saying about like aboot thing, but really, I've only heard like two Canadian actors do that to the point that I actually noticed it happening, and they were both nameless extras in some random Due South episode.

What I did notice was the way they pronounce their L's. They kind of curl their tongues more when saying that letter than Americans do. I first noticed it in Due South and assumed it was just a Paul Gross thing until I noticed that David Hewlett kind of did it too, Torri Higginson did it really obviously, and it showed up in varying degrees throughout the entire cast of Traders.

Both of my parents are from Trinidad, and though I can pretty much differentiate between Trinidadian and Jamaican I have a hard time drawing distinctions between the rest of the Carribean islands. But then, I didn't grow up there. I grew up in California. My parents never dropped their Trinidad accents. I remember getting made fun of in first grade when I still talked like them. Now if I try to imitate them it just comes out bad and completely off.

I'm completely lost when it comes to English accents, but then I think with tv I've heard more fake accents than real ones.

Comments

[moxie-brown.livejournal.com]

Heh, I'm from Texas, which isn't considered truly southern, but we certainly have the drawl down. I seriously wondered if my hearing was off when people describe Sheppard's southern accent, because I think of it as some sort of Western/California thing, or something wacky from the east coast (I'm not well travelled so...?)

And I giggle when I catch Hewlett's accent. There's something about the syllables or vowels that's just *Canadian*. :)

[amireal.livejournal.com]

He drawls all right. But it's got earmarks of the midwest or maybe some time in California.

Maaaaybe Maine.

[lierdumoa.livejournal.com]

I was totally wrong about Arizona. It's Nevada, which is West/Midwest.

Though being from CA, I guess everything sounds not *quite* as Western as what I'm used to hearing.

[kalikahuntress.livejournal.com]

I'm from Toronto and my parents are Jamaican and I can only tell the difference between Jamaican and Trinidadian accents too. I've never been able to see the difference with the other islands and I suspect it is because I don't know many people from other islands. I've never been able to talk like my parents sadly and I actually got bugged for that, not in a bad way but people seemed dissapointed.

John is definetely not from the South, I'm ahuge fan of the Southern drawl but I adore Joe's drawl too. ESpecially when he says Rodney:)

I've gotten pretty good with the British accents, then again I have a few relatives and some friends from there so that could be it. I never could tell before until I got to university and started watching foreign movies and knowing more British people. The people that have always fooled me though are James Marsters and Alexei from 'Angel', he played Wesley I believe.

[teaphile.livejournal.com]

The people that have always fooled me though are James Marsters and Alexei from 'Angel', he played Wesley I believe.

I'm not sure if you know this, but they had good examples. Alexis Denisof spent a few years in England, and James Marsters used Anthony Head's real accent.

[kalikahuntress.livejournal.com]

Seriously? That is so cool, thanks for the info:)

[lierdumoa.livejournal.com]

I think I've mainly learned to tell the difference between Jamaican and Trinidadian listening to reggae and steel band, etc.

I love all the drawls! Though I think the Texas one is my fav, which pops up a lot in Supernatural. Though that may have more to do with me liking the actor's *voices* than liking their accents.

And oh cool! I always thought Marsters' accent was pretty solid, but I had no way of double checking that with anyone.

[teaphile.livejournal.com]

Now I'm going to have to listen for the L thing when I get back to Canada. That's really interesting, because I'd only thought we had the vowels different (it's called Canadian Raising, by the way, if you want to find out exactly how the vowels are different).

When I hear Americans making fun of Canadian accents they always sound vaguely Scottish to me. Which makes a kind of sense, because Canada has a lot of Scots influence.

I didn't know JF is from Arizona; I had his accent pegged as midwestern.

[lierdumoa.livejournal.com]

I looked it up again. It's Nevada. I...don't know where the hell I got Arizona from.

[lierdumoa.livejournal.com]

I made the correction.

My brain? Sieve.

And yeah! Now that you mention it, I do kind of hear the similarities with the Canadian and the Scottish (or at least people's imitation). It never would have occurred to me to make that connection, though.

[imagechild.livejournal.com]

We've had many many debates about this in the RP group I play around with >_<

After extensive research (in which I say "Roooodddnneeeey" over and over in my southern Louisiana/Texan accent), we've sort of decided it might be a product of living in say somewhere like Tennessee at some point in his accent development, paired with a californian accent. I've had no contact with the Arizonan accent, but have quite a few New Mexican friends, and if it's similar, they have kind of a weird southern drawl thing going on too.

As for Southern accents turning "Rodney" into "Rawdney" it kind of depends on the area. My Louisiana/Texas accent turns it into "Raahdney" hell, I'd have to get you on MSN to let you hear.

Now I'm going to have to start listening for that curled "l" thing--I'm not certain what you're talking about there! I notice the Canadians mostly in the whole "again" thing--they make the word sound everso lovely when they say it :P

wow, I've rambled on several paragraphs about the imaginary accent of an imaginary character. This means something, I'm certain.

[bradcpu.livejournal.com]

My Louisiana/Texas accent turns it into "Raahdney"

Ditto for Alabama.

When I listen carefully it seems like Canadians say it more as "a-boat" instead of "a-boot".

[lierdumoa.livejournal.com]

Now that you mention, it makes total sense in my head. The raah sounds like something that would fall in between the raw (which I think I've heard only a couple of times, like from that one actor in Jarhead who's from Alabama) and Joe's raaa, (me and my ghetto phonetics ;P) . Which makes sense just given the relative position of the states, from deeper south, moving more westward and northward.


When I listen carefully it seems like Canadians say it more as "a-boat" instead of "a-boot".

I think I've heard it both ways? Like, depending on the person it may skew more towards one than the other. Half the time it just goes over my head, though.

[lierdumoa.livejournal.com]

Hee! That actually makes total sense to me. I was writing the Rawdney in reference to the *strongest* southern accents I've ever heard. "Raahdney" would fall kind of in between the raw sound and the raaa sound, which makes perfect sense given the relative location of the states.

[imagechild.livejournal.com]

Ha! I made sense!! Take that universe! n_n

I wonder, since we're on the subject, are all accents as changeable as I've found my southern one? Depending on where I've been and who I've been talking to, it'll be either Texan, southern belle/georgian, redneck or acadian. Is that a personal thing, or is it just that the southern accent is so "mixed up" anyway?

[lierdumoa.livejournal.com]

I think it's just a language thing. I know whenver I'm around someone with strong speech patterns, whether their dialect specific or just specific to that person, I tend to pick them up. I did a summer program back in high school and some of the friends I made in the program were from Georgia and when I got back to CA it took me a couple weeks to stop saying y'all.

[denyce.livejournal.com]

Now to me he doesn't have an accent no more than I do. Just a blend of a few states, or the influence of California's melding pot. But that could be my bad hearing ;-) Btw, according to his bio on scifi (which can be riddled with flaws that I haven't researched) he grew up near Reno, and then at 14 attended boarding school in Ojai, Ca. Later to attended college in Co & a yr in Paris. Shortly after he moved to NY to pursue a career as a writer.

Since I don't hear it like other people do, I'd never really write it, or maybe only a slight mention of a drawl to stress a certain point. I found myself more caught up in trying to not overwrite or underwrite Carson's accent more than anything else.

[lierdumoa.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the correction!

I remember reading it in wikipedia once, and I don't know how the hell Nevada became Arizona in my head. The brain. She is a sieve.

It is midwestern, but mild midwestern. I wouldn't have noticed it at all, I don't think, if not for reading fic where they were calling it Southern and thinking -- buh?

[denyce.livejournal.com]

Actually I heard something like 6 different states. I don’t write the SGA rps, so it’s not a stickler for me. The only thing I knew was it wasn’t a true southern drawl. Yeah seems to be a popular thing to write these days, and I can already tell its probably gonna become one my pet peeves like the over use of Spike using whelp.

Though I'd happily *drool* over an AU of Sheppard as a true Southern officer in dressed blues ::yum!::

[namastenancy.livejournal.com]

Actually, Joe Flanigan was born in California but raised in Nevada so he does have (to these California ears), a bit of a Western drawl.

[lierdumoa.livejournal.com]

Dude. You are so right. I don't know where the hell I got Arizona from. I made the correction.

And yeah, it's like Western/Midwestern.

I think from my experience growing up in CA I could tell it wasn't quite California, but it took me a while to put my finger on what it was I was hearing.

[tv-elf.livejournal.com]

Huh. I just figured he was a surfer.


The one that amazes me is Hugh Laurie on House.

[lierdumoa.livejournal.com]

Hee! The accent, Midwestern.

The attitude?

Aaaaaaall surfer.

[zoerayne]

The thicker Canadian accents (ones with more "aboot" in them *g*) are, I believe from the middle of the country—Ontario-ish. You can hear the accent more strongly in DH's early work; he's lost a lot of it either due to living a variety of places (including L.A. and Vancouver) or due to consciously smoothing out his accent, much like old-school British actors used received pronounciation.

I think the really obvious example of Canadian raising on SGA is Torri's pronounciation of "sorry," which has a much rounder "o" sound than we're used to hearing in America.

As far as JF's accent goes, it sounded very southwestern to me from the beginning; my time growing up was split between SoCal and Denver, and he sounds like I remember everyone sounding when we drove back and forth from California to Colorado. I wasn't surprised to find out that he'd grown up in Reno.

[eleveninches.livejournal.com]

ITA on the Torri thing; to me, her (obviously Ontario) accent is a lot stronger than Hewlett's. When I first started watching the show, I was like, "They got this woman to play an American?"

[carta.livejournal.com]

WRT Sheppard's non-Southern accent: THANK YOU. It's annoying to see it referred to as a Southern accent when it is not. This little southerner is pleased.

And about the Canadian accent: "literally" used to have four syllables for me. Lit-er-a-ly. Now, thanks to Hewlett, that bastard, it's all "lit'relly".