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Bob75 Posted 20 years ago
Speech & Pronunciation

Does this accent sound American, Canadian, Slavic or something else

The speech sample below was posted on a russian forum. The guy claims he's russian but his accent sounds a little wierd to me.

Could any native speaker of English take a listen and confirm the accent is of slavic origin?

http://www.mooload.com/new/file.php?file=files/010606/1149182427/aj1.mp3
  

Top answer

Well, his accent does sound somewhat Slavic, but I agree that it's odd (at least to me). Hopefully CalifJim or another person with phonetics training can have a listen to it. Hmm...

  • Well, his accent does sound somewhat Slavic, but I agree that it's odd (at least to me).
  • Hopefully CalifJim or another person with phonetics training can have a listen to it.
  • Hmm...
  • org/wiki/Non-native_pronunciations_of_English#Russian but I don't really have the desire to actually compare all the criteria to his speech.
  • If you happen to notice anything curious though, please post it here, because I'm somewhat curious as well.
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9 Answers
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Well, his accent does sound somewhat Slavic, but I agree that it's odd (at least to me). Hopefully CalifJim or another person with phonetics training can have a listen to it.

Hmm...http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-native_pronunciations_of_English#Russian but I don't re
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Here's a quote from the Wikipedia article :

"Voiced consonants may be devoiced in word-final position, this is normally done in Russian."

That's the way he seems to pronounce "skill(s)" and the final consonant in "language" sounds kind of devoiced to me.

Or maybe I'm just imagining things and he's just an American bilingual or something, but I feel something is off...
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Is that file available in another format by any chance? I've been trying to download Real player for about a month now but their download link has never worked for me in that period (with both Firefox and IE and with my firewall disabled).
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The file is in wav, I think Windows Media Player will play it.
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Oh, I thought the file extension was .ra, oops.

Edit: I tried extracting it with both Winrar and 7-Zip and they said the archive either doesn't exist or is an unknown format. Weird.
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Don't extract it, change the extension to .wav Molly.rar > Molly.wav

I should've mentioned that before, my bad.
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Hmm, very interesting. Like you said, their accents are obviously Slavic, but I wouldn't have guessed for either of them that Russian is their native language.
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I've no idea where the guy is from, but as I am Polish I can tell you for sure - he's not. I wouldn't say it's Russian either. Maybe I'm wrong becauese I haven't had many occasions to hear Russian speak English...
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The accent is clearly Russian.

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