journal lik
Accents
By Delany Barrera
In this interview our author Maria Inês Teixeira interviewes creator and administrator of the Speech Accent Archive, Professor Steven H. Weinberger. To start off with, when you talk to someone you can notice the difference in-between their vocabulary, body language, and accent of course. Like Weinberger says, " It tells you a lot about the speakers’ native language." The way I see it is that the way a person speaks can tell you a bit about their identity, character, and background. We all have an accent and there isn't a thing called the perfect accent as well.
In this interview, Teixeira asks Weinberger how he created The Speech Accent Archive. The Speech Accent Archive is a website that allows for over 381 languages to be transcribed, read and recorded from 175 different countries all just to hear the different accents. Explained by Weinberger "If we’re hearing and speaking species, for the most part, that’s the first thing we pay attention to—how someone says something. We always have an idea, we have a bias, we make a judgement about something as soon as you open your mouth." It is interesting how a project in the 90's turned out to have an inspirational message about the how diverse language can be.
The way we speak and think influences our pronunciation and fluency in a language. I remember one time when a salesman with an Arab accent was trying to promote their heatless curling irons and my mothers insisted I try it. So I did and while the man was explain my mother cuts him off and asks, "Where are you from?"He tells my mom he is from Cali and she she just side eyed and she asked again, " Where are you really from, like your parents? It's because you have an accent." I was so embarrassed by my mother asking the man but he proceeded to explain how his parents were from Israel and English was his second language. I ended up buying the heatless curling iron and asking my mom why she would ask a question in that way. She just told me, " I love hearing peoples accents and asking about their English learning experience."
You see, my mother transferred to an American high school from Mexico. She learned English in her late age but she did struggle. She ended up being a primary teacher with two bachelors in education and loves to tell me how important ESL is. She also has a thick Mexican accent if you ask me. That it why learning how linguists influences a persons speech and person is fascinating to me, just like Professor Steven Weinberger.
" By learning to listen to people’s speech, I think we can become more understanding of different kinds of variety of language."
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Works Cited
Weinberger, Steven H., and Maria Inês Teixeira. “What’s in an Accent?: An Interview with Steven Weinberger: Unravel Magazine.” Unravel, 5 Oct. 2019, unravellingmag.com/articles/whats-in-an-accent/. Accessed 2023.
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