Live data from Hacker News

Is Your English Accent British or American?

myaccent.cambridgeconsultants.com

11–20 of 144 posts

Re: Is Your English Accent British or American?

#13
Born in Washington DC and that is the southernmost point of my childhood. Father born in England to Eastern European immigrants. Mother is Italian American from Pennsylvania. West coasters semi-frequently think my accent is European, but nobody from back east or from Europe says that.

I got 84% British.

My wife was born in Russia and spent most of her life on the US west coast. She got 91% American.

Fun little app but given my results and some comments here I see it as a west coast accent detector.

Re: Is Your English Accent British or American?

#14
This seems like it'd be hard to do reliably - if I recall, there were significant variations in the regional makeup of the various thirteen colonies to start with, and some of those linguistic peculiarities have outlived their originators, besides England having it's own subdialects and variations over time too.

Get a Mainer, a New Yorker, a Virginian, and a Georgian together, and they're hardly mutually intelligble, and that's just on the east coast.

Re: Is Your English Accent British or American?

#15

I'm from Britain and it rated my accent as 99-100% British the few times that I tried it. So not bad from my point of view. Meanwhile, I wonder what Cambridge Consultants are going to do with a dataset of thousands of Hacker News users reading out the sentence "Please call Stella and ask her to meet Bob the frog at the store with three small red plastic bags".

Probably just make refinements to the model they're using to classify samples.

The sentence is obviously taken (with some modifications) from the sample used by the speech accent archive ( http://accent.gmu.edu/howto.php ), which was constructed specifically to include every relevant phonological context in American English. (Not that this was necessarily achieved, but it was the goal.)

Re: Is Your English Accent British or American?

#17

I'm from Britain and it rated my accent as 99-100% British the few times that I tried it. So not bad from my point of view. Meanwhile, I wonder what Cambridge Consultants are going to do with a dataset of thousands of Hacker News users reading out the sentence "Please call Stella and ask her to meet Bob the frog at the store with three small red plastic bags".

Leave them on random people's voicemail, probably.

Re: Is Your English Accent British or American?

#18

When I speak with my normal NY Northeastern accent it tells me British 80%. When I speak with a poorly done, make-believe Southern accent it tells me American 90%.

How? I tried it in my best city accent, my native suburban accent, and my best Rochester accent, and got >95% American each time.

Re: Is Your English Accent British or American?

#20

This seems like it'd be hard to do reliably - if I recall, there were significant variations in the regional makeup of the various thirteen colonies to start with, and some of those linguistic peculiarities have outlived their originators, besides England having it's own subdialects and variations over time too. Get a Mainer, a New Yorker, a Virginian, and a Georgian together, and they're hardly mutually intelligble,…

Other than some slang, I wouldn't call any of these accents mutually unintelligible.
Post reply on HN