So changing your "gender" is fine, but changing your accent is *weird*...

[Taupeness]

If you want a laugh amongst the stress of getting ready for Christmas, then can I point you to this thread on trans Reddit which asks the question:

so im british and have had a british accent my whole life, but it has been causing me a lot of dysphoria recently. im amab and non binary and i want to have a male-sounding voice but for it to be softer and have a more feminine tone (i cant really explain it that well), and i can only really do that voice well while using an american accent. so is it okay to change my accent and if so would other people who already know me be weirded out by it?

The answers are comedy gold. Because changing your "gender(s)" is cool, obvs, but changing your accent is weird 😆

https://www.reddit.com/r/transgenderUK/comments/1psn646/is_it_okay_to_change_my_accent/

I might be moved to say that cheese makes him throw rings round him 😉

It is possible to tell ethnic background for accents from certain parts of the Province.

And there's always the good oul ethnic shibboleth of how they pronounce 'H''.

Catholics tend to pronounce it as Haitch and Protestants tend to pronounce it as Aitch.

what i mean is that i dont think the voice i want is accessible with a british accent, not that i specifically cant do the voice i want in a british accent (if that makes sense)

Make it make sense 😜

(Yes I know that's impossible 😆)

There are some definite localisms, like pronouncing hand as haun is a very East Belfast thing.

Mostly these days I have remember to avoid certain turns of phrase that might confuse English friends. Like making tea and asking "would you like a drop in your hand?"

And, when sending a work email proposing a course of action, never say "for thon would be deadly crack"

😂😂

I was told to try and picture Iain Paisley in my minds ear as the sort of template for Protestant. Which was mercifully better than using the minds eye.

There is a folk story somewhere in the back of my head about using how a word is pronounced as a way to spot spies. I mean getting a German to say Featherstonehaugh was presumably an idea. Although I wonder if anyone here would get it right either 😆

Once when in France I was complimented on how good my English is, by a German. We were quite perplexed as we thought the car would have explained things, but it sadly was not helpful.
MtTamednotdomesticated has worked with lots of people from all over the world who learnt their English through American culture, films etc, and who, on finding that they have also learnt American accents, were doing their best to lose it and sound English. And why America gets let off the hook for colonialism I do not know, humph.

I have heard a story about German spies in WW2 who had learned about English culture from reading PG Wodehouse, and were discovered on landing in England because most English people didn't wear lavender spats and say "what ho!"

That may be made up, but it is true that Kaiser Wilhelm was a huge Wodehouse fan and, in exile in Holland, used to amuse himself by reading Jeeves stories to his bemused courtiers.

I mean yeah, I do think people who already know you will find it weird, and depending on how realistic it sounds it can easily come across as fake to strangers.

Do they even hear themselves? So, so close to getting it...

Someone on the thread’s called troll, but none of them seem to have noticed yet that MN is having a good laugh.

I’m in ROI but my neighbour and my friend both have very similar accents even though they live 200 miles apart and always have. The only thing they have in common is they’re both COI.

The Rest Is History Lads have a theory about Kaiser Wilhelms inappropriate footwear starting WW1.

It may not have been the accent, but all German spies in WW2 were quietly identified and either captured, or just fed a load of carefully crafted nonsense (department XX - I leave it to the amateur codebreakers to guess why).

There are some clanging mistakes on this, but it's a lovely illustration.

https://www.openculture.com/2015/06/the-tree-of-languages-illustrated-in-a-big-beautiful-infographic.html

Poor old P-t-d. He's always shouting into the void over there. Mind you, he thinks he's a woman, so he's not all sense.

For Christmas, will we invite Reddit over here?

If you keep your ears, eyes and (most importantly) mind open, with a dash of school French and Latin, plus allowing words to stick from reading history and/or foreign language websites, it's surprising how far a supposedly monoglot person can get.

I often think about these mens voices, no matter what they do they will never ever have a the tiniest chance of hitting a top C. a la Queen of the Night. Lots of women may not be able to but we all have the possibility, and one can always try squeaking it.
They will never have our voices no matter what they try.

This is something I've noticed in videos of trans rights protests - an unexpectedly large number of the trans identifying men they interview have an effeminate American sounding voice. I assumed it was because they'd learnt to copy a female voice from watching American YouTube videos.

Protect-the-dollz...he is truly a voice of reason amongst them. I would love to talk to him in person.

I've just remembered when everyone went batshit when they discovered Hilaria Baldwin wasn't Spanish. I wonder what reddit thought about that.

So that's why my mum pronounces it Haitch, and is probably also why my paternal grandmother kept telling me that I, having copied my mum, was saying it wrongly.

I have spent my whole life puzzled by this.

I love reading about language evolution.

I speak very basic Gaeilge (Irish) and I know a few basic words & phrases in Gaelic, Welsh and Hindi too. And I was very pleased to find out, when I was picking it up, that Hindi has quite a few basic words in common with the three Celtic languages.

Although, Hindi seems to have more in common with Welsh because Welsh is a P Celtic language and kept more of the original Proto-Celtic language sounds. Whereas Gaeilge and Gaelic are Q Celtic because those languages modified those particular sounds. And then away back in the mists of time, Proto-Celtic would have developed from Proto-Indo-European as would Hindi.

I bore poor DH to death with this stuff 😬

https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/display/document/obo-9780199772810/obo-9780199772810-0115.xml

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/4328733.stm

What is more interesting are the islands of languages that have no apparent descent from proto-Indo-European[1],

Basque and Hungarian spring to mind. (And Finnish ?)

It's also beyond irritating that English worked so hard to eliminate (grammatical) gender only to have the trans clown car rock up and try to undo it.

[1]Probably best spelled out in full.

Yes, that is a fascinating aspect of some languages.

And yes, pronouns were not something English speakers had to worry about much beyond the basics until Trans mucked that up 🙄

I found that my school Latin came in handy when I was in Romania. I can't speak Romanian, but I found that if I thought of it as Italian with some Russian mixed in (which is sort of what it is) then I could puzzle it out.

I've picked up a little bit of Manx, but since it's very similar to Ulster Irish (just with an English style spelling) I could probably bluff my way with a Manx speaker. And I found the place names are easy if you say them out loud - it's not difficult to figure out what Slieau Dhoo is.

Can we find a country that is not tied to anything at all that is in any way offensive? Anywhere?

It would obvs have to be one with no history, no population, no politics, no language, no accent, no imports, no exports...