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Oh pssh. There's no such thing as accent strength. There's only accent distance. Accent strength is just an artefact of distance from the accent of a socially dominant group.
Oh pssh. There's no such thing as accent strength. There's only accent distance. Accent strength is just an artefact of distance from the accent of a socially dominant group.
Oh pssh. There's no such thing as accent strength. There's only accent distance. Accent strength is just an artefact of distance from the accent of a socially dominant group.
That group has a vast range of accents, but it's believable that that range occupies an identifiable part of the multi-dimensional accent space, and has very little overlap with, for example, beginner ESL students from China.
Even between native speakers, I bet you could come up with some measure of centrality and measure accent strength as a distance from that. And if language families exist upon a continuum - there must be some point on that continuum where you are no longer speaking English, but say Scots or Friesian or Nigerian Creole instead. Accents close to those points are objectively stronger.
But there is a lot of freedom in how you measure centrality - if you weight by number of speakers, you might expect to get some mid-American or mid-Atlantic accent, but wind up with the dialect of semi-literate Hyderabad call centre workers.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
(Minor nitpick, but I think "dialect" is a more appropriate word than "idiolect" here—at least according to Wikipedia, "idiolect" refers to a single person's way of speaking, whereas AAVE et al. are shared and are therefore considered dialects.)
OK, good read for me here. Based on your feedback and some research, I think I should have use ‘sociolect’ for both in that I was less complaining about ChatGPT’s unwillingness to use, say, finna, in a sentence, and more complaining about the vocalized accents. Anyway good catch, thanks!
This is so cool. Real-time accent feedback is something language learners have never had throughout all of human history, until now. Along similar lines, it would be useful to map a speaker's vowels in vowel-space (and likewise for consonants?) to compare native to non-native speakers. I can't wait until something like this is available for Japanese.
Oh pssh. There's no such thing as accent strength. There's only accent distance. Accent strength is just an artefact of distance from the accent of a socially dominant group.
The article defines accent strength in precisely this way, as the difference "relative to native speakers of English". That group has a vast range of accents, but it's believable that that range occupies an identifiable part of the multi-dimensional accent space, and has very little overlap with, for example, beginner ESL students from China. Even between native speakers, I bet you could come up with some measure of…
Also, the USA writing convention falls short, like "who put the dot inside the string."
crazy. Rationals "put the dot after the string". No spelling corrector should change that.
Oh pssh. There's no such thing as accent strength. There's only accent distance. Accent strength is just an artefact of distance from the accent of a socially dominant group.
The article defines accent strength in precisely this way, as the difference "relative to native speakers of English". That group has a vast range of accents, but it's believable that that range occupies an identifiable part of the multi-dimensional accent space, and has very little overlap with, for example, beginner ESL students from China. Even between native speakers, I bet you could come up with some measure of…
> Even between native speakers, I bet you could come up with some measure of centrality and measure accent strength as a distance from that
Is that what BoldVoice is actually doing? At least from the article is saying, it is measuring the strength of the user's American English accent (maybe GenAm?), and there is no discussion of any user choice of native accent to target.