Charming english accents

Rally drivers. Brilliant racing talents, not so brilliant english pronounciation:



As a Norwegian, I find the accent of the Solberg brothers completely hilarious. Or maybe I should just generalize and say "We Norwegians all find this accent completely hilarious". Maybe it's more fun to us since it's so completely over the top in stereotypical Norwegian-English, and I don't know if those of you who've never heard Norwegian find this funny. Basically, Henning Solberg is just speaking Norwegian and swapping his words with English translations as he goes along. For instance, in the sentence at 0:36, his linguistic tone is plain and simple Norwegian.

Best phrase in the video above: Shouting "HÆ?!" at the interviewer, in the purest norwegian you can imagine. Just like a farmer in some desolate place who meets a foreigner for the first time, not being able to comprehend anything, just shouting "HUH?" back

Oh, and "It's not the fart that kills you, it's the smell" (correct: it's not the speed that kills you, it's the crash)

Well, for someone with a boring ass California accent, it is kind of musical; and I find it a little charming. Makes him sound like an upbeat kind of guy too. And he's doing a hell of a lot better than I would if the shoe were on the other foot. Actually I probably would never have made it to the interview, after impaling myself on some tree.

I had a friend from Telemark, he spoke English with a similar accent. I quite like that. The melody you have in Norwegian, Swedish or even Icelandic just sounds so lovely in English.
On the other side I mostly get cold shivers when I hear a Frenchman speaking English... apart from the sometimes incomprehensible pronounciation, it's very very flat in tone.
But who am I talking about accents ...

Tomte wrote:I had a friend from Telemark

Funnily enough, a true Norwegian Telemark dialect is almost incomprehensible to most Norwegians if you're not used to hearing it. It's about as rare as Kölsch is in German, and it's about as different from other Norwegian dalects as the Berlin dialect is from the Swiss German dialect.

Most non-fluent English-speaking Norwegians tend to try to avoid the "Solberg Brothers accent" and instead play it safe by alternating almost every other syllable with high and low pitch and high and low emphasis (while in English, it should really be just once or twice during your average sentence, and with smooth transitions). Also, for some strange reason (probably anticipatory assimilation), many of us pronounce V in front of an English word as W. I flinch whenever I hear that happen with someone. I've received comments from an American before that I sound Canadian, but I think that was him trying to determine the origin of my linguistic tone, and not judging by any accidental canadian pronounciations of vowels.

Tomte wrote:The melody you have in Norwegian, Swedish or even Icelandic just sounds so lovely in English.

Norwegian and Icelandic accents sound quite similar, while Danish, Swedish and Finnish accents are very different from everyone else and different from each other as well. While Norwegians and the Icelandic sound like birds of different sizes (icelandic are mostly "larger birds" compared to the norwegian accents), Finns sound like large trolls, Swedes sound like poetic cellos, and Danes sound like drunken Germans.

Tomte wrote: On the other side I mostly get cold shivers when I hear a Frenchman speaking English... apart from the sometimes incomprehensible pronounciation, it's very very flat in tone.
But who am I talking about accents ...

Hehe, those accents remind me of watching 'Allo, 'Allo! in my childhood:

"Good Moaning!" -Officer Crabtree
and of course:
"Zeh Pikcha off zeh fallen Madonna vis zeh big boobies" -Herr Flick of the Gestapo

C14ru5 wrote:Danes sound like drunken Germans.

There's my take-away statement for this topic.

Example of a Dane speaking English:



That was the real thing, but the clip below from a comedy show on Norwegian TV takes the Danish-English accent to the next level: