My Russian friends and other Russians whom I am introduced to have all noticed that, in the past year or so, I've started speaking with a Moscow accent. Now, my gf is from Moscow, and although she hasn't noticed a change in my intonation, HER friends and other people are now telling her that she's losing the slight NY accent she has when she speaks English. This evening, as we were leaving a party in Manhattan (pronounced mn-HAT-n if you live in the area), she said she's now started speaking English with "an Iowa accent" ...

So...here are some questions:

1. What accent do you speak in when you speak your native language? Don't tell me you don't have one, because everyone has an accent, even if it's the "standard" accent for the language in question.

well... dialect, rather. the dialect of my home town, molde, slightly tempered and ...um... "finer" than the older dialect.

2. Do you mispronounce words because of your accent? I'm not talking about simple variant pronunciation. I'm talking about the way people in Boston say the word "career" like "Korea" and "Korea" like "career" (or, for example, the way Billy Joel sings about "Brender & Eddie" in "Scenes from an Italian Restaurant" ).

um. no. not that I know. I may do it in English...

3. Do you speak any other languages fluently enough to have a distinctive local accent in that language? For example, my Moscow accent, my friend's Parisian accent when he speaks French, etc.

My spanish accent is peruvian. My English accent is britishish I suppose, but I tend to adapt it to the person I am talking to. I once talked to a londoner and came home talking cockneyish to my English-teacher, who looked at me as if I was mad. I am very impressionable. I suppose I do the same with spanish. when I have been guiding spaniards all summer, I get a lisp and the like.

4. Are any of your accents "looked down" upon? (For example, Cockney or similar accents in England, Algerian accents in French, Caucasus accents in Russian, Long Island accents in American English, etc., etc., etc. )

not that I know.

5. As long as we're speaking about accents, are there any foreign accents which, when you hear your native language spoken in, turn you on/sound pretty ?

french, perhaps? french accents always sound pretty. and there is nothing I hate as much as a Norwegian pronounced accent in English. I have been known to avoid welsh-english at times due to that.

6. Are there any foreign accents which make your language sound awful?

ummm. not that I can think of. or if there are, I cannot place them.

Okay, that's it. 'Twas a short survey.

indeed.
by the way. you probably know: when thackeray lets all kinds of people say "egad", is that a variation of my god?


Magnus Alexander corpore parvus erat
Dissenting voice of wotmania
Frightfully stubborn pacifist

Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent