Hey everybody!
Before I begin this post, a quick blurb: my dear, dear friend Salma who I met on my NSLI-Y Turkish program was recently featured on the Humans of William and Mary website and Facebook page, and gave a brilliant interview full of rationality, honesty, and love that are so crucial in this time of deplorable hatred and political repression. I will link you to her interview, and highly encourage you to check out her interview as well as her blog.
Okay, friend shoutout over (hey Salma).
Here on my blog I've frequently gushed about the different languages I love and what I aspire to do in my future with regards to languages. But today, I wanted to do something that I don't believe I've done before, which is talk about my favorite accents within the different languages I've studied or am familiar with to significant extents.
I'll be listing seven today, my two mother tongues of English and Italian, plus the five I've studied to significant levels later on in life, those being Spanish, Arabic, Turkish, Russian, and Icelandic. I've also studied Latin for a year and a half in middle school and Hungarian for a semester in college, but I won't be including those. (This is because the former has been dead for thousands of years (let's face facts), not to mention that I was only really taught to read and translate it, not speak, and I remember little even of what I learned in those capacities. As for Hungarian, due to the rather lackluster teaching style of the class I was in, I unfortunately learned very little beyond an arsenal of elementary pleasantries and smatterings of random vocabulary, and therefore I cannot really be considered conversational to any serviceable extent.)
I won't hold myself to naming any specific number of accents/dialects in each language, but rather will just name a couple that immediately come to mind, and talk about why I enjoy them. I will include a video exemplifying the sound of each accent I talk about.
Please keep in mind that this is purely and completely opinion based from my tastes and personal experiences. If I don't mention your accent/one that you like, I probably either like it but forgot, or just haven't heard it before. :)
With disclaimers and background info out of the way, let's begin.
1) English:
The thing that I find interesting about different English accents is that they exhibit strong phonetic variety, while still remaining almost completely comprehensible. If I hold a conversation with a person from London or Sydney, we will very likely understand each other with no difficulty at all barring occasional unfamiliar slang terms or unshared foreign borrowings, but will immediately know just by ear where the other speaker is from (or at least have a rough idea).
It's no secret that my favorite accents in the English language are Irish and Scottish. Something about them has always appealed to me. I enjoy their graceful, almost sing-songy cadences, and find their pronunciation of English to be quite beautiful. To me personally, Irish and Scottish accents share the same sort of refined charm as a typical British accent, but with an added fiery, down-to-earth flare. Between the two of them, I find that the Scottish one has a more untamed European allure, with an "l" pronounced higher in the mouth and a strongly trilled "r." Irish exhibits a kindred pronunciation and allure, but has a sort of softer-spoken touch, almost making it a bridge between the British and Scottish accents. I as an American can find them, particularly Scottish, a bit hard to understand, especially if spoken very fast! But their beauty is nothing short of captivating.
Here's a video from a great Youtube channel called "WonderWhy," which is operated by a Scot who does excellent videos about historical and contemporary geopolitical issues in his lovely accent.
Here's an Irish actor, Jonathan Rhys Myers, who played King Henry VII in the show The Tudors, who doesn't have a super strong Irish accent, but it gives the idea.
2) Italiano - Italian:
Italian has an interesting situation when it comes to accents and dialects. It came to be in a way very different from comparable Western European Romance languages, like Spanish and French. This is because Spain and France united comparatively quite early on in their history, during the Middle Ages, and their capitals of Madrid and Paris have been the political and cultural centers of their respective countries for much longer. Italy, conversely, was a collection of scattered duchies, principalities, and city-states that shifted in and out of control until the Risorgimento, or Italian unification movement, in 1861. Rome was not even the original capital of Italy; it was first Turin, then Florence, and then Rome, which came under Italian control and subsequently became the capital in 1871, previously a final remaining vestige of the Papal States.
Because of this hugely localized cultural development throughout much of its history, Italy has not had a history of unity comparable to Spain and France with the dialect of a capital to serve as the foundation for a standardized language. When Italy was united, it was agreed that one dialect needed to be picked to serve as the base for the country's new standardized language in this way, and the one that was selected was the Tuscan dialect, due to its longstanding literary tradition spanning all the way back to Dante Alighieri, and its perceived spoken beauty. There's actually a proverb in Italian, "lingua toscana in bocca romana," meaning "Tuscan tongue in Roman mouth," to describe what its purportedly the ideal, most beautiful spoken potential of the Italian language.
With that historical background out of the way, my opinions:
I honestly find Italy's abundant dialects and accents to be fascinating, but I'm not sure about favorites. I really like southern dialects in general, particularly Sicilian and Neopolitan, as swift rhythm, strong bounce, and musical expressiveness make them very nice to listen to (though at times somewhat difficult to understand). In Sicilian specifically I can also identify a number of Spanish influences due to a long standing history of Spanish occupation of the island, so that is interesting as well. I do enjoy the dialect in southern Lombardy where my family is from, as it's familiar and homey to me, with a distinctly coarse earthiness and comical honesty that I have yet to find in any other dialect or tongue the world over. I can understand it fairly well, but definitely not speak it. I love it while still recognizing that it's not the prettiest though. xD
In general though, check out this great video! I haven't been able to find a lot of great videos comparing different accents of languages to each other, but fortunately this great one for Italian exists. Check them all out, super fascinating!
3) Español - Spanish:
The main divide in Spanish, which pretty much everyone familiar with Spanish to any significant extent knows about, is Castilian Spanish, as it's spoken in Spain, versus Latin American Spanish. Though the rhythms, pronunciation, and general cadences of the language vary significantly even within Spain and Latin America, the most noted defining factor between the two is the "lisping" of certain consonants in Castilian Spanish - "z," "ci," and "ce" being pronounced with a "th" sound, rather than in Latin America, where they're all pronounced as an "s" sound.
Personally, I would say the Castilian accent is my favorite I'm currently familiar with in the Spanish language. I love how crisp and melodious it is, I like the difference present with the lisped consonants, and also the greater clarity they can offer - for instance, casar (to marry) and cazar (to hunt) sound exactly the same in Latin American Spanish, whereas in Castilian Spanish a difference between them can be clearly heard ("casar" versus "cathar" respectively).
This is going to sound quite random, but I would say a close second is the Venezuelan accent. One interesting feature is that much of the time, the "s" will be pronounced as a gently aspirated "h" in the Venezuelan accent, giving it a very light and airy feel. It shares many of the musical rhythms and laid-back vibes of many Caribbean accents of Spanish like Dominican and Puerto Rican, while (at least in my opinion) not being nearly as difficult to understand as a foreign learner.
Another Spanish accent that I'll mention, which I only have started to become familiar with more recently, is that of the only African country where Spanish is an official language, Equatorial Guinea. Equatoguinean Spanish is quite unique, with wider, more relaxed vowel pronunciation likely originating from some of the major local languages such as Fang, Bube, and Combe. Its "r" sound is almost guttural, giving an effect comparable to the letter as it's found in French or German. Overall, despite the fact that Spain is Equatorial Guinea's closest linguistic point of reference for Spanish, the accent has a distinct African sound that reminds at times of some Caribbean varieties as well, likely due to the fact that a great majority of the country's population does not speak Spanish at home as a first language, but learns it later in life from school and the media.
A final very interesting case, in my humble opinion, is the Filipino accent of Spanish. Spain colonized the Philippines, and because of this Spanish has had a number of influences on local languages, with many of them still bearing ample Spanish vocabulary to this day. But in the decades following a period of American occupation and eventual independence, the Spanish language has steadily declined in use in the Philippines, replaced largely by English. The dialect itself is, in fact, on the brink of extinction. But a few Hispanophiles still continue to use the language and keep this unique register of it alive. It resembles Mexican Spanish, due to Latin American immigration to the Spanish East Indies and a shared colonial history. Unsurprisingly, it is accented in a way that closely resembles the phonology of local languages like Tagalog, such as pronouncing "v" as "b." In my opinion, it sounds quite interesting and unique.
I couldn't find any good videos of people just speaking European Spanish or comparing it to other ones, so enjoy this video of newscasters speaking a load of European languages. Spanish is at 13:00.
An Equatoguinean singer giving an interview of her own.
And here is a video made by a community of Hispanophiles in the Philippines.
4) العربية - Arabic
Arabic has a very interesting linguistic situation when it comes to dialects. Basically all Arabic-speaking countries share Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) as an official language, which, although it is used in all these countries as a language of official administration, education, and so forth, is highly antiquated and formal, and is therefore almost never used in any other context. Informally, Arabic speakers talk to each other in colloquial dialects that can vary immensely from one country to another, and within countries as well. I would say there are five main dialect groups: Masri (Egyptian), Shaami (Levantine, i.e. Jordan, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria), Khaleeji (Gulf, basically any country on the Arabian Peninsula), Maghrebi (anywhere in North Africa other than Egypt; these are infamously difficult to understand for other Arabic speakers), and Iraqi, which is something of an in-between of its own. For the most part, though there are distinct differences in pronunciation and vocabulary, Egyptian, Levantine, Gulf, and Iraqi dialects are fairly mutually intelligible, while speakers of Maghrebi dialects usually are able to understand these, though the reverse is not often the case.
Though I do have a special place in my heart for the Egyptian accent, as I lived in Egypt for a year and its accent is the only way I know how to speak Arabic, I would say that my favorite accent would probably be Levantine, specifically Lebanese, Arabic. The pronunciation of many consonant letters is quite soft, and the vowel pronunciation has a soothingly rich tone, giving the dialect a very mellifluous sound that is renowned throughout the Arabic-speaking world. I know from my time in Egypt at least that most Egyptians have very good things to say about Lebanon, including the fact that its accent is beautiful (and to this I very much agree).
Egyptian for me personally takes a close second. This is likely mostly for the sake of my own personal familiarity with that version of the language, but I am also genuinely of the belief that it sounds nice. The letter "qaf", which makes a guttural "k" sound pronounced at the back of the throat, is not pronounced in Egyptian, substituted with a slight glottal stop (a pause, like in "uh-oh), meaning for instance that the word for time, "waqt," is instead pronounced as "wa't" in Egypt, giving the whole accent an interesting, more vowel-filled flow. It's also the only Arabic accent to contain a "g" sound as present in English - the letter "jim" is "gim" in Egypt, so for instance jameel ("beautiful") becomes "gameel" in Egypt.
Here is a video from the Arabic Pod 101 Youtube channel about Coptic Christmas in Egyptian dialect, a uniquely Egyptian celebration. <insert language name here> pod 101 exists for a great many languages and I find them to be lovely resources, especially their very interesting subtitled videos about holidays in target languages like this one. Check them out!
And here's a guy speaking Lebanese Arabic!
5) Türkçe - Turkish:
To be honest, I'm not actually too versed on different Turkish accents. This may be in part because in both of my Turkish experiences, I have stayed mainly in the same region of the country, the northwest, which may have similar accents and dialects that I as a highly imperfect and intermediate-level Turkish speaker likely cannot intuit.
I got a little information from an insider, my dear friend Gianna who lived in Turkey for a year more than I did and is certainly more aware of these nuances than I am.
According to Gianna's immensely trustworthy expertise, there are a couple of main accents: the Istanbul accent, the Ege region (southwestern region around Izmir), the Anadolu (Anatolian) accent, the Karadeniz (Black Sea) accent, the southeastern accent, the Cypriot accent, and also (debatably) Azerbaijani. The Istanbul accent is essentially just standard Turkish, considered very clean and correct.
The Ege region's accent apparently uses a couple of grammatical functions that are absent from other parts of Turkey. These include the verbs gidivermek and gelivermek, which attach the suffix vermek (which usually means "to give") to the root verbs gitmek (to go) and gelmek (to come). The distinction is one of speed, where gitmek and gelmek mean to go and to come whereas gidivermek and gelivermek mean to go and come RIGHT NOW respectively.
The Anadolu accent is considered something of an unrefined country accent, as it comes from the more undeveloped, rural, and conservative areas of central Anatolia.
I have little information about the distinctions of the Karadeniz accent other than the fact that it's apparently quite unique.
The southeastern accent is one of the more distinct, as many living in this part of the country are in reality ethnic Kurds who only learn Turkish as a second language. It's a bit deeper and sharper-sounding, and features guttural pronunciation of certain letters like k and h due to influence from sounds found in Kurdish.
The Cypriot accent has a significant Anatolian base, as many of Cyprus's Turks are descended from immigrants hailing from that region, but it has naturally evolved significantly with four hundred years of isolation. It also apparently preserves a number of features and vocabulary typical of Ottoman Turkish, and features gone from standard Turkish that mirror some found in informal vernaculars in other regions of the country. Also it seems to switch a couple of consonant sounds, so that for example the standard Turkish "Kıbrıs" (Cyprus) becomes "Gıprıs" in local parlance.
And now to illuminate on why I used the "debatable" qualifier in reference to Azerbaijani. Azerbaijani, sometimes interchangeably called Azeri, is the language of Turkey's neighbor and close compadre, the former Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan. Azerbaijani nationalism and identity was somewhat perpetuated by the USSR as a divide and conquer method to separate the Azeris from Turkey. In a modern context, Azerbaijani is once again written in Latin script after a long Cyrillic stint during Soviet times, and is largely mutually intelligible with standard Turkish, though it does use a number of distinctive letters not found in Turkish. Overall the languages have a degree of about 90% mutual intelligibility, so it is sometimes argued that Azerbaijani is a Turkish dialect rather than a true language of its own, but this is debated.
I know that there are unique Turkish dialects in the Balkans as well, as there are Turkish minorities in many Balkan countries dating back to when they were part of the Ottoman Empire. But I have no knowledge of what distinguishes those dialects from others linguistically and phonetically.
Unfortunately, I have not been able to find any sort of video that parses out these various accents in a comparative fashion, but I will definitely leave you with a few to get a better impression of the language.
Here a video of an Azeri man speaking Turkish, Azeri, and Russian.
And here is a video of a man speaking Cypriot Turkish.
And here is a video of a Turkish teacher from a school in Prishtina, Kosovo, speaking the Balkan Gagauz Turkish dialect.
6) Русский - Russian:
I admittedly am not too informed about Russian dialects. But according to my research, the standard is the Moscow dialect. In some of the northern dialects, there is apparently a phenomenon in which unstressed "o"is pronounced clearly as when it is stressed, as opposed to merging with "a" as it does in standard Russian. I honestly wasn't able to find too much more, but I will inform myself and get back to you about it.
Couldn't find a good comparative video of Russian accents, but to give you guys an idea, here's a video of a Moldovan beauty Youtuber speaking Russian.
7) Íslenska - Icelandic:
One of the many features defining Icelandic as a highly unique language is the fact that it almost entirely lacks any dialectical variation at all. This is due largely in part to geographical and logistical realities of living in Iceland for much of its history - as much of the country's population lived in small, far-flung rural settlements, it was in people's interest to ensure that they could communicate as effectively as possible with those in other parts of the country that they relied upon for supplies. But it also had to do with the fact that many of these settlements consisted of old turf farms. It was normal for people to move all around the country very frequently from farm to farm, and interact with people originating from different areas of the country, so this high degree of interaction largely ensured the language would develop little regional variety. In addition, Iceland has a literary tradition dating back to even before its colonization by Viking settlers around 870, and this long-standing literary tradition has helped the language remain uniform through the unchanging use of an accepted written standard.
For all of these reasons, Icelandic essentially has no dialects to speak of. There are, however, minimal variations in pronunciation in different parts of the country. The one I'm personally most qualified to talk about pertains to the Westfjords, where my language immersion program took place last summer.
A bit of context: Icelandic has two "a" vowels, one is "a," which sounds like the "a" in "father," and the other is "á," which is pronounced like the "ow" in "cow." So in much of Iceland, certainly in the Reykjavik area, there are apparently some words, such as "ganga," meaning to walk, that are pronounced as "gown-ga" instead of "gahn-ga," even though they're written with "a" and not "á." In the Westfjords, they're pronounced as they're written - "gahn-ga."
I'm told that Akureyri Icelandic (Akureyri is the second largest city of the country, located on the northern coast) also has some distinctive pronunciations of its own, some of which are apparently easier for foreign students of Icelandic to reproduce than the ways in which they're pronounced in other parts of the country. But I'm currently not knowledgeable to talk about that in depth to any real extent.
Unfortunately I can't find any videos concretely explaining or demonstrating the differences in Icelandic accents either. But I will still show you guys what the language itself sounds like overall.
And that's it for now.
I hope that you guys enjoyed reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it! :) I intend to keep making posts like this as I grow and learn and continue learning languages, especially with my study abroad year in Russia and Finland coming up!
Take care for now,
Nico
Before I begin this post, a quick blurb: my dear, dear friend Salma who I met on my NSLI-Y Turkish program was recently featured on the Humans of William and Mary website and Facebook page, and gave a brilliant interview full of rationality, honesty, and love that are so crucial in this time of deplorable hatred and political repression. I will link you to her interview, and highly encourage you to check out her interview as well as her blog.
Okay, friend shoutout over (hey Salma).
Here on my blog I've frequently gushed about the different languages I love and what I aspire to do in my future with regards to languages. But today, I wanted to do something that I don't believe I've done before, which is talk about my favorite accents within the different languages I've studied or am familiar with to significant extents.
I'll be listing seven today, my two mother tongues of English and Italian, plus the five I've studied to significant levels later on in life, those being Spanish, Arabic, Turkish, Russian, and Icelandic. I've also studied Latin for a year and a half in middle school and Hungarian for a semester in college, but I won't be including those. (This is because the former has been dead for thousands of years (let's face facts), not to mention that I was only really taught to read and translate it, not speak, and I remember little even of what I learned in those capacities. As for Hungarian, due to the rather lackluster teaching style of the class I was in, I unfortunately learned very little beyond an arsenal of elementary pleasantries and smatterings of random vocabulary, and therefore I cannot really be considered conversational to any serviceable extent.)
I won't hold myself to naming any specific number of accents/dialects in each language, but rather will just name a couple that immediately come to mind, and talk about why I enjoy them. I will include a video exemplifying the sound of each accent I talk about.
Please keep in mind that this is purely and completely opinion based from my tastes and personal experiences. If I don't mention your accent/one that you like, I probably either like it but forgot, or just haven't heard it before. :)
With disclaimers and background info out of the way, let's begin.
1) English:
The thing that I find interesting about different English accents is that they exhibit strong phonetic variety, while still remaining almost completely comprehensible. If I hold a conversation with a person from London or Sydney, we will very likely understand each other with no difficulty at all barring occasional unfamiliar slang terms or unshared foreign borrowings, but will immediately know just by ear where the other speaker is from (or at least have a rough idea).
It's no secret that my favorite accents in the English language are Irish and Scottish. Something about them has always appealed to me. I enjoy their graceful, almost sing-songy cadences, and find their pronunciation of English to be quite beautiful. To me personally, Irish and Scottish accents share the same sort of refined charm as a typical British accent, but with an added fiery, down-to-earth flare. Between the two of them, I find that the Scottish one has a more untamed European allure, with an "l" pronounced higher in the mouth and a strongly trilled "r." Irish exhibits a kindred pronunciation and allure, but has a sort of softer-spoken touch, almost making it a bridge between the British and Scottish accents. I as an American can find them, particularly Scottish, a bit hard to understand, especially if spoken very fast! But their beauty is nothing short of captivating.
2) Italiano - Italian:
Italian has an interesting situation when it comes to accents and dialects. It came to be in a way very different from comparable Western European Romance languages, like Spanish and French. This is because Spain and France united comparatively quite early on in their history, during the Middle Ages, and their capitals of Madrid and Paris have been the political and cultural centers of their respective countries for much longer. Italy, conversely, was a collection of scattered duchies, principalities, and city-states that shifted in and out of control until the Risorgimento, or Italian unification movement, in 1861. Rome was not even the original capital of Italy; it was first Turin, then Florence, and then Rome, which came under Italian control and subsequently became the capital in 1871, previously a final remaining vestige of the Papal States.
Because of this hugely localized cultural development throughout much of its history, Italy has not had a history of unity comparable to Spain and France with the dialect of a capital to serve as the foundation for a standardized language. When Italy was united, it was agreed that one dialect needed to be picked to serve as the base for the country's new standardized language in this way, and the one that was selected was the Tuscan dialect, due to its longstanding literary tradition spanning all the way back to Dante Alighieri, and its perceived spoken beauty. There's actually a proverb in Italian, "lingua toscana in bocca romana," meaning "Tuscan tongue in Roman mouth," to describe what its purportedly the ideal, most beautiful spoken potential of the Italian language.
With that historical background out of the way, my opinions:
I honestly find Italy's abundant dialects and accents to be fascinating, but I'm not sure about favorites. I really like southern dialects in general, particularly Sicilian and Neopolitan, as swift rhythm, strong bounce, and musical expressiveness make them very nice to listen to (though at times somewhat difficult to understand). In Sicilian specifically I can also identify a number of Spanish influences due to a long standing history of Spanish occupation of the island, so that is interesting as well. I do enjoy the dialect in southern Lombardy where my family is from, as it's familiar and homey to me, with a distinctly coarse earthiness and comical honesty that I have yet to find in any other dialect or tongue the world over. I can understand it fairly well, but definitely not speak it. I love it while still recognizing that it's not the prettiest though. xD
In general though, check out this great video! I haven't been able to find a lot of great videos comparing different accents of languages to each other, but fortunately this great one for Italian exists. Check them all out, super fascinating!
3) Español - Spanish:
The main divide in Spanish, which pretty much everyone familiar with Spanish to any significant extent knows about, is Castilian Spanish, as it's spoken in Spain, versus Latin American Spanish. Though the rhythms, pronunciation, and general cadences of the language vary significantly even within Spain and Latin America, the most noted defining factor between the two is the "lisping" of certain consonants in Castilian Spanish - "z," "ci," and "ce" being pronounced with a "th" sound, rather than in Latin America, where they're all pronounced as an "s" sound.
Personally, I would say the Castilian accent is my favorite I'm currently familiar with in the Spanish language. I love how crisp and melodious it is, I like the difference present with the lisped consonants, and also the greater clarity they can offer - for instance, casar (to marry) and cazar (to hunt) sound exactly the same in Latin American Spanish, whereas in Castilian Spanish a difference between them can be clearly heard ("casar" versus "cathar" respectively).
This is going to sound quite random, but I would say a close second is the Venezuelan accent. One interesting feature is that much of the time, the "s" will be pronounced as a gently aspirated "h" in the Venezuelan accent, giving it a very light and airy feel. It shares many of the musical rhythms and laid-back vibes of many Caribbean accents of Spanish like Dominican and Puerto Rican, while (at least in my opinion) not being nearly as difficult to understand as a foreign learner.
Another Spanish accent that I'll mention, which I only have started to become familiar with more recently, is that of the only African country where Spanish is an official language, Equatorial Guinea. Equatoguinean Spanish is quite unique, with wider, more relaxed vowel pronunciation likely originating from some of the major local languages such as Fang, Bube, and Combe. Its "r" sound is almost guttural, giving an effect comparable to the letter as it's found in French or German. Overall, despite the fact that Spain is Equatorial Guinea's closest linguistic point of reference for Spanish, the accent has a distinct African sound that reminds at times of some Caribbean varieties as well, likely due to the fact that a great majority of the country's population does not speak Spanish at home as a first language, but learns it later in life from school and the media.
A final very interesting case, in my humble opinion, is the Filipino accent of Spanish. Spain colonized the Philippines, and because of this Spanish has had a number of influences on local languages, with many of them still bearing ample Spanish vocabulary to this day. But in the decades following a period of American occupation and eventual independence, the Spanish language has steadily declined in use in the Philippines, replaced largely by English. The dialect itself is, in fact, on the brink of extinction. But a few Hispanophiles still continue to use the language and keep this unique register of it alive. It resembles Mexican Spanish, due to Latin American immigration to the Spanish East Indies and a shared colonial history. Unsurprisingly, it is accented in a way that closely resembles the phonology of local languages like Tagalog, such as pronouncing "v" as "b." In my opinion, it sounds quite interesting and unique.
This is one of my favorite comedians, Joanna Hausmann, who is Venezuelan American, giving an interview and showing off her lovely Venezuelan accent.
4) العربية - Arabic
Arabic has a very interesting linguistic situation when it comes to dialects. Basically all Arabic-speaking countries share Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) as an official language, which, although it is used in all these countries as a language of official administration, education, and so forth, is highly antiquated and formal, and is therefore almost never used in any other context. Informally, Arabic speakers talk to each other in colloquial dialects that can vary immensely from one country to another, and within countries as well. I would say there are five main dialect groups: Masri (Egyptian), Shaami (Levantine, i.e. Jordan, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria), Khaleeji (Gulf, basically any country on the Arabian Peninsula), Maghrebi (anywhere in North Africa other than Egypt; these are infamously difficult to understand for other Arabic speakers), and Iraqi, which is something of an in-between of its own. For the most part, though there are distinct differences in pronunciation and vocabulary, Egyptian, Levantine, Gulf, and Iraqi dialects are fairly mutually intelligible, while speakers of Maghrebi dialects usually are able to understand these, though the reverse is not often the case.
Though I do have a special place in my heart for the Egyptian accent, as I lived in Egypt for a year and its accent is the only way I know how to speak Arabic, I would say that my favorite accent would probably be Levantine, specifically Lebanese, Arabic. The pronunciation of many consonant letters is quite soft, and the vowel pronunciation has a soothingly rich tone, giving the dialect a very mellifluous sound that is renowned throughout the Arabic-speaking world. I know from my time in Egypt at least that most Egyptians have very good things to say about Lebanon, including the fact that its accent is beautiful (and to this I very much agree).
Egyptian for me personally takes a close second. This is likely mostly for the sake of my own personal familiarity with that version of the language, but I am also genuinely of the belief that it sounds nice. The letter "qaf", which makes a guttural "k" sound pronounced at the back of the throat, is not pronounced in Egyptian, substituted with a slight glottal stop (a pause, like in "uh-oh), meaning for instance that the word for time, "waqt," is instead pronounced as "wa't" in Egypt, giving the whole accent an interesting, more vowel-filled flow. It's also the only Arabic accent to contain a "g" sound as present in English - the letter "jim" is "gim" in Egypt, so for instance jameel ("beautiful") becomes "gameel" in Egypt.
5) Türkçe - Turkish:
To be honest, I'm not actually too versed on different Turkish accents. This may be in part because in both of my Turkish experiences, I have stayed mainly in the same region of the country, the northwest, which may have similar accents and dialects that I as a highly imperfect and intermediate-level Turkish speaker likely cannot intuit.
I got a little information from an insider, my dear friend Gianna who lived in Turkey for a year more than I did and is certainly more aware of these nuances than I am.
According to Gianna's immensely trustworthy expertise, there are a couple of main accents: the Istanbul accent, the Ege region (southwestern region around Izmir), the Anadolu (Anatolian) accent, the Karadeniz (Black Sea) accent, the southeastern accent, the Cypriot accent, and also (debatably) Azerbaijani. The Istanbul accent is essentially just standard Turkish, considered very clean and correct.
The Ege region's accent apparently uses a couple of grammatical functions that are absent from other parts of Turkey. These include the verbs gidivermek and gelivermek, which attach the suffix vermek (which usually means "to give") to the root verbs gitmek (to go) and gelmek (to come). The distinction is one of speed, where gitmek and gelmek mean to go and to come whereas gidivermek and gelivermek mean to go and come RIGHT NOW respectively.
The Anadolu accent is considered something of an unrefined country accent, as it comes from the more undeveloped, rural, and conservative areas of central Anatolia.
I have little information about the distinctions of the Karadeniz accent other than the fact that it's apparently quite unique.
The southeastern accent is one of the more distinct, as many living in this part of the country are in reality ethnic Kurds who only learn Turkish as a second language. It's a bit deeper and sharper-sounding, and features guttural pronunciation of certain letters like k and h due to influence from sounds found in Kurdish.
The Cypriot accent has a significant Anatolian base, as many of Cyprus's Turks are descended from immigrants hailing from that region, but it has naturally evolved significantly with four hundred years of isolation. It also apparently preserves a number of features and vocabulary typical of Ottoman Turkish, and features gone from standard Turkish that mirror some found in informal vernaculars in other regions of the country. Also it seems to switch a couple of consonant sounds, so that for example the standard Turkish "Kıbrıs" (Cyprus) becomes "Gıprıs" in local parlance.
And now to illuminate on why I used the "debatable" qualifier in reference to Azerbaijani. Azerbaijani, sometimes interchangeably called Azeri, is the language of Turkey's neighbor and close compadre, the former Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan. Azerbaijani nationalism and identity was somewhat perpetuated by the USSR as a divide and conquer method to separate the Azeris from Turkey. In a modern context, Azerbaijani is once again written in Latin script after a long Cyrillic stint during Soviet times, and is largely mutually intelligible with standard Turkish, though it does use a number of distinctive letters not found in Turkish. Overall the languages have a degree of about 90% mutual intelligibility, so it is sometimes argued that Azerbaijani is a Turkish dialect rather than a true language of its own, but this is debated.
I know that there are unique Turkish dialects in the Balkans as well, as there are Turkish minorities in many Balkan countries dating back to when they were part of the Ottoman Empire. But I have no knowledge of what distinguishes those dialects from others linguistically and phonetically.
Unfortunately, I have not been able to find any sort of video that parses out these various accents in a comparative fashion, but I will definitely leave you with a few to get a better impression of the language.
6) Русский - Russian:
I admittedly am not too informed about Russian dialects. But according to my research, the standard is the Moscow dialect. In some of the northern dialects, there is apparently a phenomenon in which unstressed "o"is pronounced clearly as when it is stressed, as opposed to merging with "a" as it does in standard Russian. I honestly wasn't able to find too much more, but I will inform myself and get back to you about it.
7) Íslenska - Icelandic:
One of the many features defining Icelandic as a highly unique language is the fact that it almost entirely lacks any dialectical variation at all. This is due largely in part to geographical and logistical realities of living in Iceland for much of its history - as much of the country's population lived in small, far-flung rural settlements, it was in people's interest to ensure that they could communicate as effectively as possible with those in other parts of the country that they relied upon for supplies. But it also had to do with the fact that many of these settlements consisted of old turf farms. It was normal for people to move all around the country very frequently from farm to farm, and interact with people originating from different areas of the country, so this high degree of interaction largely ensured the language would develop little regional variety. In addition, Iceland has a literary tradition dating back to even before its colonization by Viking settlers around 870, and this long-standing literary tradition has helped the language remain uniform through the unchanging use of an accepted written standard.
For all of these reasons, Icelandic essentially has no dialects to speak of. There are, however, minimal variations in pronunciation in different parts of the country. The one I'm personally most qualified to talk about pertains to the Westfjords, where my language immersion program took place last summer.
A bit of context: Icelandic has two "a" vowels, one is "a," which sounds like the "a" in "father," and the other is "á," which is pronounced like the "ow" in "cow." So in much of Iceland, certainly in the Reykjavik area, there are apparently some words, such as "ganga," meaning to walk, that are pronounced as "gown-ga" instead of "gahn-ga," even though they're written with "a" and not "á." In the Westfjords, they're pronounced as they're written - "gahn-ga."
I'm told that Akureyri Icelandic (Akureyri is the second largest city of the country, located on the northern coast) also has some distinctive pronunciations of its own, some of which are apparently easier for foreign students of Icelandic to reproduce than the ways in which they're pronounced in other parts of the country. But I'm currently not knowledgeable to talk about that in depth to any real extent.
Unfortunately I can't find any videos concretely explaining or demonstrating the differences in Icelandic accents either. But I will still show you guys what the language itself sounds like overall.
I hope that you guys enjoyed reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it! :) I intend to keep making posts like this as I grow and learn and continue learning languages, especially with my study abroad year in Russia and Finland coming up!
Take care for now,
Nico
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