# Can you instantly recognise different accents from specific cities in your country?



## doddle

In the UK, the accents from:

Liverpool

Newcastle

Birmingham

Glasgow

Belfast

London

Cardiff

Bristol

_(...there are more, but these are probably the most obvious ones)_

are instantly recognisable by basically everyone from anywhere in the entire country.

If you heard the average person from, say, Liverpool speak, you wouldn't think "Oh, maybe he is from somewhere in the North of England, perhaps the North West, around those parts or thereabouts...", you'd instantly know he was from the Liverpool area. The same goes for Newcastle, Birmingham and the other places mentioned above.

Does this happen in your country too?

And I'm not talking about, for example, New York cab drivers being able to recognise several different NY accents, or people living in a valley in the Pyrenees being able to recognise the accents of the people who live in the adjacent valleys, but rather accents from specific cities or relatively small areas that are instantly recognisable throughout the whole country.

In my rather unscientific study of this, based on having lived for several months in student digs in Brussels with other students from all over Europe and North America, spending lots of time watching foreign cable TV channels with these people, and annoying them (for some reason, I've always been curious about this subject) by always asking if they could recognise the accents of the people who appeared on the TV channels from their own particular countries, I am yet to be convinced that this phenomenon happens anywhere near to the same degree as it does in the British Isles (I'm including the Republic of Ireland, because I know that most people there can also easily recognise accents from specific Irish counties).

So, if you're from Extremadura, can you instantly recognise a Bilbao accent? If you're from Lyon can you instantly recognise a Bordeaux accent? If you're from Washington DC can you instantly recognise a Denver accent? etc, etc.

I bet you can't  (but I really want you to prove me wrong ).


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## Moogey

I can recognize:

AE:
- Texan accent
- General Southern Accent

AustrE:
- I've heard two, but I'm not sure where they're from

BE:
- English accent
- Irish accent
- Scottish accent

There may be several "English" accents but I can only identify one. Maybe I've only heard just one!

-M


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## MonsieurAquilone

I can recognise Paris, from Marseille, from Bayonne, to Strasbourg from Le Havre.  All have various slight accent differences from place to place.


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## danielfranco

In English I can instantly recognize a New Yorker, a Bostonian, and a New Orleans-guy-person-thingy-whatever (sorry, I don't know the way to say "people from New Orleans")...
And in Mexican Spanish I can recognize people from Chihuahua, Mexico City (and I can even tell if they come from nice or hard neighborhoods!), and Mérida.
I read somewhere, not very long ago, that at the rate people are transfering back and forth in the USA, looking for the right job, makes it very difficult to identify a specific accent with a specific location in the country.
For sure, there are regional accents that are favored in many nearby cities and make it really hard to identify the city of the person in question. For example, in Mexico, the whole North region of the country seems to favor a specific accent (what we cheekily describe in Mexico City as the "rancher accent"), so it's really hard to tell for sure if a person comes from Matamoros or Ciudad Victoria or what...
Bueno bye.


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## panjabigator

I can generally make out certain regions in the US.  Texas, New Orleans, the South (in general), New York, Boston, Pittsburgh, and....Miami !

I can also tell Scottish, English, Irish, and Aussie.  Strangely enough, I cannot tell different Indian accents at all! I can identify a Panjabi accent in English but no other one.  I have no clue what to listen for.


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## coconutpalm

I can recognise the Northeastern and Southern accects. That's the best I can do. ! 
However, I can recognise that the speaker comes from a differen region if he/she has an accent. Only that I can tell WHERE?


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## CrazyIvan

I can tell people from the middle of Taiwan and from the south, but not specifically which city she/he is from. I guess Taiwan is too small.

For my Mandarine, I can tell people from North( Beijing) Tienjin, Chingdao.(I have met people from there so I kind of have the ideas how they speak)  And people from Shichuan have a special accent as well.

In south the way people speak are guite soft, and say general? It is quite difficult to specified the cities. But from some provinces still can I tell the difference..


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## maxiogee

Depending on how much I get to hear, I can place an Irish person very close to the county they come from. The island has 32 counties and most people here can locate a speaker by county.
I'm not so sure that accent is the main factor in allowing us to do this, idiom and phrasing is also important. Sometimes people can be placed within their county with finer accuracy - the north/south or the coast/inland.

That we Irish can do this on an island of 32,604 sq miles (slightly smaller than Maine) makes the concept that there is an "Irish accent" risible.


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## belén

Yes, I can recognize accents from the different regions of Spain and even can  place people in their towns in Mallorca when speaking Mallorquin (not that I am special, but accents are really different even in such a small island)


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## jester.

maxiogee said:
			
		

> Depending on how much I get to hear, I can place an Irish person very close to the county they come from. The island has 32 counties and most people here can locate a speaker by county.
> I'm not so sure that accent is the main factor in allowing us to do this, idiom and phrasing is also important. Sometimes people can be placed within their county with finer accuracy - the north/south or the coast/inland.





			
				belen said:
			
		

> Yes, I can recognize accents from the different regions of Spain and even can place people in their towns in Mallorca when speaking Mallorquin (not that I am special, but accents are really different even in such a small island)



Although this might be fascinating for all language lovers, it is certainly a bit discourageing for all language learners who wish to be understood and, even more importantly, wish to understand other in people in their target language. Such a vast quantity of dialects might certainly make that a bit difficult... (but of course not impossible)


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## maxiogee

j3st3r said:
			
		

> Although this might be fascinating for all language lovers, it is certainly a bit discourageing for all language learners who wish to be understood and, even more importantly, wish to understand other in people in their target language. Such a vast quantity of dialects might certainly make that a bit difficult... (but of course not impossible)



We all understand each other - and foreigners speaking English.
Getting a foreigner's ear 'tuned in' to the more unusual pronunciations doesn't usually take very long if they are staying in the locality.


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## ireney

Regions yes, towns no. I can't always tell but there are some regions with rather distinctive accent.
Macedonia
Ionian islands
Thessaly and Sterea Ellada (the mountainous part of south Greece)
Mani (rocky region near Sparta)
Crete
are the ones I can distinguish.


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## Outsider

I can often recognize people from Lisbon and Porto by their accents, and, within the region where I'm from, I can broadly place a person by their accent, too. If you speak of regions instead of cities, then I can usually make out whether a person is from the South, the North, or the Centre of mainland Portugal, or from one of the two Atlantic archipelagos (Azores and Madeira).
However, Portugal is a small country, and in recent years there's been a lot of migration inside it, mostly from the rural areas of the hinterland to the big cities in the coast, so there's been a lot of mixing, which makes it harder to identify people by their accents. Furthermore, apart from the exceptions I mentioned above, the inhabitants of large cities have been slowly adopting the pronunciation of Lisbon, it seems to me.


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## Outsider

j3st3r said:
			
		

> Although this might be fascinating for all language lovers, it is certainly a bit discourageing for all language learners who wish to be understood and, even more importantly, wish to understand other in people in their target language. Such a vast quantity of dialects might certainly make that a bit difficult... (but of course not impossible)


Don't be discouraged. I've lost most of the regional accent I had, but I know I still have a little. However, I've had people from Lisbon tell me that I speak without an accent! I guess outsiders just don't notice the little differences.

When I think about it, I couldn't tell English accents apart either, when I started to learn the language. And in French, which I don't speak as well as English, it was only recently that I started to be able to identifity a few traces of accent.


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## pickypuck

belen said:
			
		

> Yes, I can recognize accents from the different regions of Spain and even can place people in their towns in Mallorca when speaking Mallorquin (not that I am special, but accents are really different even in such a small island)


 
Yes, the Spanish of Spain accents are so typical that it is really easy to know where a person comes from. 
Inside Extremadura, I can also recognize people from Don Benito-Villanueva, Trujillo, Campanario, or if a person is from a fala-speaking place... and the "singing" accent of Badajoz city is very characteristic too.

¡Olé!


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## papillon

I think Russian may be an exception in that it tends to be fairly uniform. There was a discussion of this topic in the Slavic forum here.
I find it particularly surprising  to find this uniformity in such a huge counry. We can usually pick up an accent from St. Peterburg and Moscow. Also people living on the perifery, s.a. Ukraine and Belarus have a slightly different accents when speaking Russian. However, for the most part, I find that people from Brest to Vladivostok (~5 000 km) speak in a very much the same way.


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## Suane

Most people in Slovakia don't (or try not to) speak with accent (mainly created by putting stress on different syllables or pronouncing speacial words as nechty (nails) or syllable le, li) in formal environment, because it is generally seen as inappropriate. I can recognise someone speaking in western (Bratislava) or eastern accent, if he(she) does speak with accent. The central accent is viewed as a proper accent, but if someone overaccent it (speaks too soft), it is viewed more like different (or recognisable) accent. I cannot probably recognise accent from Zahorie (northwest part) as I'm not so exposed to it. 

And I can also recognize (probably) someone with Magyar (Hungarian) or Moravian accent. But I cannot tell if the Moravian accent is seen as something that could be a part of Slovakian language accents (?) or more like a foreign (czech rep.) accent.(of course I'm speking about speaking Slovak with Moravian accent, not speaking Moravian itself)


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## french4beth

I’m a language phreak – I’m also a Connecticut native, and can usually tell what part of the state some people come from based on their regional accent. I’m fascinated by all kinds of accents, and am constantly trying to figure out where someone is from based on their accent!
 
Naugatuck Valley; Norwich/eastern Connecticut along Rhode Island border/New Haven area/New Britain area
 
In the general area, there is the Eastern Massachusetts accent (Bawstun, chowdah, etc.), Rhode Island accent (similar to Boston & Norwich), Maine, New Hampshire, and of course, New York/Long Island & New Jersey; I can also distinguish Pennsylvanian (I believe from the western half of the state, Maryland/Baltimore, in addition to the southern accents and Texas accent.


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## Honeypum

I can easily recognise different accents, not only from different regions of Argentina but also from Spain.

In Argentina, the accents of people from Córdoba are inmediately recognised.

Some similar happen in Spain with the accents of people from Andalucía, they are recognised inmediately.


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## Bettie

In Mexico I can recognize Mexico DF accent, Nuevo Leon, Jalisco, Veracruz (the state has different accents within, people from Jalapa speak closer to people in Mexico City than from people in Veracruz City or Cordoba), Campeche, Yucatan (most people don't see the difference between Campeche and Yucatan, but being from Merida I know) and for me all the center is the same.


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## stephyjh

I live in the US, in North Carolina. I can tell you that even the so-called southern accent isn't a homogenous thing. A Virginia accent is different from a Mississippi accent, which is different from a piedmont South Carolina accent, which is different from a South Carolina lowcountry accent. A piedmont North Carolina accent is different from a NC mountain accent, and Florida is a different game altogether. So yes, it happens in the US. I promise.


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## fenixpollo

doddle said:
			
		

> Does this happen in your country too?
> 
> And I'm not talking about, for example, New York cab drivers being able to recognise several different NY accents,[...], but rather accents from specific cities or relatively small areas that are instantly recognisable throughout the whole country.
> 
> ... I am yet to be convinced that this phenomenon happens anywhere near to the same degree as it does in the British Isles
> 
> If you're from Washington DC can you instantly recognise a Denver accent? etc, etc.
> 
> I bet you can't  (but I really want you to prove me wrong ).


I'm not sure how I can "prove" you wrong, because the only proof that I can offer is my anecdotal evidence: I, and other Americans (native and non-native), can recognize an accent from Chicago, New York or Boston and attach it to the city rather than a general region.  Even more people can identify an Illinoisian but not distinguish between a Chicagoan and Springfielder. Conversely, people from Massachusetts can distinguish between Worchester and Boston accents, but most Americans can't.

Cities like Denver, Las Vegas and Phoenix have grown too rapidly in the last 50 years for a distinct local accent to have developed, but in those places the Western American dialect and pronunciation are the general rule.

You suggest that one can tell whether someone is from Liverpool proper, and not the outlying areas, by their accent. How far from the city center are you talking about? Is there really a line on the map that can be marked around a city and its local accent?  Or are there degrees of "Liverpudliness" to the accents that are close to the city but that lessen by degrees the further out you go?


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## englishman

fenixpollo said:
			
		

> You suggest that one can tell whether someone is from Liverpool proper, and not the outlying areas, by their accent. How far from the city center are you talking about? Is there really a line on the map that can be marked around a city and its local accent? Or are there degrees of "Liverpudliness" to the accents that are close to the city but that lessen by degrees the further out you go?


I suspect that it would be nigh-on impossible to identify a Liverpudlian (or the inhabitants of any other city) with any precise locality these days, even it was possible in the past. We all mix too much, and travel too much, for the question even to make a great deal of sense. It may have been a valid question to pose back when "Pygmalion" was written, when physical and class mobility were more limited, but even then I suspect the supposed linguistic abilities of Higgins were a caricature-like exaggeration, for theatrical purposes.

And with that, I'll say "cor blimey, guvnor, yor a reel gent an' no mistike. Gud nite to ya !" (that's the Wandsworth accent, BTW


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## doddle

englishman said:
			
		

> I suspect that it would be nigh-on impossible to identify a Liverpudlian (or the inhabitants of any other city) with any precise locality these days, even it was possible in the past.


Are you kidding? 
Maybe in the South East where almost everyone speaks with an Estuary English accent these days, but definitely not anywhere else.
Come on, a Liverpudlian is instantly recognisable(!), you might not be able to tell that he's from, say, Bootle (although someone from Liverpool probably could) but you'd definitely know he was a scouser... same goes for brummies, geordies, etc,.


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## Kräuter_Fee

I can tell from what are a person comes in Spain, sometimes I can also tell what province exactly (for example Córdoba is easy to recognize).

As for other countries that speak Spanish... I can tell if they come from Mexico, Argentina, Uruguay, Cuba, etc.

With Spanish is quite easy.

As for Portuguese I can also tell the difference between some regions.


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## vince

With the exception of the Newfoundland accent, it is difficult to tell Canadian accents apart. The vowel in "ab*ou*t" is pronounced slightly differently in some regions but that's about it. There are some vocabulary differences but they are very specific and minor. Supposedly the English in northern Minnesota and Michigan is the same as Canadian English.

So basically, Canadian English is very undiverse, itself being a dialect of English that, for non-North-Americans is hard to distinguish from General American English.


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## panjabigator

Can Spanish speakers tell when a Catalonian and a Galician by their accent?  Same for a Basque Spanish speaker?


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## KateNicole

I'm surprised that no one from the US has mentioned a midwest (more specificially Wisconsin/Minnesota/Michigan) accent.  A lot of times midwesterners think their accent is very non-regional, but to me, it is one of the strongest American accents because it can be heard in nearly every vowel sound. However, it appears to me that nearly all people born and raised in the south have a recognizeable southern accent, while not all people born and raised in the three states I mentioned above have a noticeable Midwestern accent.  Has anyone else noticed this?


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## LV4-26

I would say like ireney : regions yes, towns no.
The only exception is Paris probably.
As Tony pointed out, the words used are also important. The same object isn't called the same depending on whether you're from the East, the North, the Southwest, North Brittany, South Brittany and so on....
And swear words are particularly region-sensitive.


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## sound shift

I live in Derby, England. The local accents in Sheffield (40 miles north), Birmingham (40 miles S-SW) and Stoke-on-Trent (35 miles west) differ quite clearly from the Derby accent and from each other. People who live further afield and people with no interest in language might not be able to detect the differences, however.


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## englishman

doddle said:
			
		

> Are you kidding?
> Maybe in the South East where almost everyone speaks with an Estuary English accent these days, but definitely not anywhere else.
> Come on, a Liverpudlian is instantly recognisable(!), you might not be able to tell that he's from, say, Bootle (although someone from Liverpool probably could) but you'd definitely know he was a scouser... same goes for brummies, geordies, etc,.


I was referring to your claim that an inhabitant of Liverpool and other large cities could be located to a specific region of the city. I don't think that's possible these days except perhaps in a few rare instances.

And yes, of course, even southern softies such as myself can identify Liverpudlians - they're the ones saying "caaaaalllm down, caaaalllm down"


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## Xerinola

panjabigator said:
			
		

> Can Spanish speakers tell when a Catalonian and a Galician by their accent? Same for a Basque Spanish speaker?


 
Yes, yes yes! It's very easy to know when a Spanish speaker is from Catalonia from Galicia or from Pais Vasco!
I just need to say "HOLA" and almost all people will know that I'm Catalan...hehe!
X:


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## pickypuck

panjabigator said:
			
		

> Can Spanish speakers tell when a Catalonian and a Galician by their accent? Same for a Basque Spanish speaker?


 
Yes, but not only from these regions but for every region. As I said in my post, it is very easy to know in Spain where a person comes from. I don't know why you focus your question in only three regions.

¡Olé!


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## luis masci

Honeypum said:
			
		

> In Argentina, the accents of people from Córdoba are inmediately recognised.


That is because we are the only people in the country speaking correctly and with neutral accent.


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## LV4-26

englishman said:
			
		

> And yes, of course, even southern softies such as myself can identify Liverpudlians - they're the ones saying "caaaaalllm down, caaaalllm down"


Aye, 'n other stooff lich that.


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## Outsider

It's funny how some British accents actually follow the spelling of words closer than standard English. For example, those where "Sunday" is pronounced "Soonday", like in the other languages of the continent.


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## Xerinola

pickypuck said:
			
		

> Yes, but not only from these regions but for every region. As I said in my post, it is very easy to know in Spain where a person comes from. I don't know why you focus your question in only three regions.
> 
> ¡Olé!


 
Ah claro está lo que dices! Pero respondía a la pregunta de Panja, que preguntaba por estas tres zonas! Lee el post de Panja Pickypuck! 
Saludos
X:


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## pickypuck

Xerinola said:
			
		

> Ah claro está lo que dices! Pero respondía a la pregunta de Panja, que preguntaba por estas tres zonas! Lee el post de Panja Pickypuck!
> Saludos
> X:


 
Sí, sí, yo respondía a Sean (aka Panja  ). Los mensajes se cruzan con tanta rapidez que a veces esto es un lío ^_^

¡Olé!


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## Xerinola

pickypuck said:
			
		

> Sí, sí, yo respondía a Sean (aka Panja  ). Los mensajes se cruzan con tanta rapidez que a veces esto es un lío ^_^
> 
> ¡Olé!


 
OK! Sorry sorry!
Saludos
X:


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## panjabigator

Solamente pregunto sobre estas regiones porque ellos hablan otros idiomas.  Pense que quizas estos hablantes tuviesen un acento muy pronunciado y distinguido de otras regiones espanolas.  Disculpadme


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## pickypuck

panjabigator said:
			
		

> Solamente pregunto sobre estas regiones porque ellos hablan otros idiomas. Pense que quizas estos hablantes tuviesen un acento muy pronunciado y distinguido de otras regiones espanolas. Disculpadme


 
¡No hay nada que disculpar!  
Lo que pasa es que esos idiomas se hablan también en otras regiones y hay gente en las regiones que mencionaste que no habla esos idiomas. Y en España existen más idiomas que esos, aunque muchísimo más minoritarios como el aranés y la fala. Asociar idioma y territorio no es válido en este caso. 

¡Olé!


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