The answer then is STILL NO, i am not an Anglophone.
Yes you are. An anglophone is a person whose native or primary language is English. We talk about
anglophone Canada and
francophone Canada, the region where French is the primary language.
French is fairly rigidly controlled and doesn't really allow for dialects.
Within France, perhaps. But if Swiss German is any clue, I would imagine that Swiss French is also distinctly different from Parisian French. And how about the Walloon French of Belgium? I don't really know about that one so the answer could be "no," but I have been to Quebec and their dialect is considerably different from the speech of France. And there's always Louisiana: Cajun French is almost impenetrable to someone who learned the language in school, and it's not even easy for the French. And don't forget Haiti: it's the country's official language and I'm sure it's diverged greatly over the centuries.
Even in France, you can still hear echoes of the Germanic Franks who lived in the north and the Celtic Gauls who lived in the South. In Paris you almost always hear the gargled German/Swedish R, whereas in Nice you might hear the flapped/trilled R of Irish and the majority of the world's languages.
Dywyddyr, do they have names for those accents?
Few people know the names of the accents of languages other than those of their native language, or even of their native country. So it would be unusual if anyone on SciForums could name the accents of French or Russian.
Accents don't have "names".
Sure they do. Right here in the USA we have the Midwestern accent, the Boston accent, the New York accent, the New Jersey accent and (several variations of) the Southern accent. There is a Standard American accent, a synthesis of the pronunciation of New York and Los Angeles, where all of our broadcasting studios were for many years, and children all over the country unconsciously began to assimilate it. Today our regional accents are much more difficult to detect because of this. Add to that the fact that in the economy of the past twenty years people have been migrating from region to region every few years, instead of dying in the place where they were born, and we have a powerful force for the leveling of not only accents but entire dialects. As I mentioned in an earlier post, the speech of most Southerners today is hardly more than an accent, when during my lifetime it was a dialect with its own peculiarities in grammar and vocabulary.
. . . . accents can vary from town to town [at least in England].
People don't migrate quite as much in England as they do in the U.S., so there is still a much richer assortment of regional accents, and even regional dialects, than we have here. Brummy, the accent (dialect?) of Birmingham, is almost incomprehensible to Americans. And of course Scots and Cockney are true dialects, with significant idiosyncrasies in their vocabulary. Cockney is almost a
cant, crafted deliberately (rather than evolving naturally) for the purpose of thwarting understanding by outsiders: e.g., Cockney rhyming slang.
Cockney isn't the name of the accent, it's the name of a geographical group of people, with a particular culture/ set of traditions (traditionally only those born within the sound of Bow Bells).
Actually linguists consider Cockney not merely an accent but a dialect, because it's not just differences in pronunciation but in vocabulary that make it somewhat difficult for outsiders to understand. As I said above, those differences may be deliberate, which would qualify it as a cant rather than a dialect, like Shelta although no other cant on earth is so elaborate and totally incomprehensible.
And as far as I know Spanish has accents . . . .
Obviously Castilian with its Z pronounced TH and LL pronounced LY, versus Latin American with the sounds leveled to S and Y. But there are regional accents within the gigantic Western Hemisphere. Mexico, being a corporate subsidiary of the USA, was the leader in communication and entertainment technology, so Mexican Spanish has become the standard accent on TV shows that are broadcast internationally. Viewers used to find it more than a little jarring to see a huge family sitting around the dinner table in a
telenovela (soap opera) with Mama speaking
argentino, Papa
venezolano, Tía María
guatemalteca, Abuelo
peruano, and Chico
chileño. So the studios now coach everyone to speak
mexicano so they sound like they might possibly be related.
. . . . as does German, and Austrian.
I assume that was a composition error on your part since Germans and Austrians both speak German.
When I was in Europe in 1973 with my Chinese girlfriend and we crossed the border from Germany into Austria on our motorcycle, we walked into the first cafe we spotted and I ordered lunch. She was really impressed: "Wow Fraggle, I didn't know you could speak Austrian too!"
There are many accents in Germany, but there are also true dialects. In fact, as I have posted elsewhere, German and Dutch form a
dialect continuum. Adjacent to the border between Germany and Holland there are villages where the people speak dialects that are rather easily comprehensible to each other, but quite a bit more difficult for a person from Berlin or Amsterdam, respectively.
But do you have a source to support your contention that there's only 3 or 4 American accents?
There's no real standard for saying that the speech variant of two villages or regions are
separate accents versus slight variations on the same one. Since by definition all accents are intercomprehensible no matter how distant they are geographically, there are no criteria for sorting them out except tradition. A linguist who specializes in such things could tell you which part of New York City or Chicago you're from after hearing just a few sentences, but that doesn't mean we should say that America has hundreds or thousands of accents.
Since you say you've lived in two different states and had two different accents wouldn't that indicate (superficially at least) that there's AT LEAST one accent per state . . . .
Not really. That is true in the Northeast, where English has been spoken for three or four hundred years, and even in the Southeast. But not so much in the Midwest (the region that ironically starts in Ohio because it was named 200 years ago when Ohio was the Frontier), and most certainly not in the West. There's a generic Southwestern accent in the region roughly bounded by Arizona, New Mexico and Wyoming, although it's being leveled by the millions of Easterners who flocked to the Sun Belt. But on the Pacific Coast and adjacent areas, in Seattle, Portland, Boise, Las Vegas and San Francisco we all speak TV newscaster English, like the people in Illinois, New York, and the other states whence we (or our parents) came. Although in the California cities with their huge Chinese populations we all know how to pronounce Beijing correctly, with a J rather than a ZH--something the newscasters still don't get right.
I also think that one or two are very neutral which i would say would be Chicago.
"Neutral" is subjective. There are four standard dialects of English: British R.P. (we call it Oxford/BBC English), American, Aussie and Indian. Each one sounds anything but neutral to a speaker of the others. The hybrid L.A./NYC "TV newscaster" accent is slowly overtaking the country due to the influence of TV and migration, but I think we have not quite reached the point at which the majority of the American population regards the speech of Chicago (or any region) as "neutral."
