Swedish-English Accent

There was one day in class that I got really bored because the lecturer was reading directly from the text I had read the previous night, but instead of falling asleep I decided to take linguistic (phonetic) notes on her pronunciation of the text she was reading. It was actually ended up being very fun to go through that text and start to recognize and predict patterns. She had a very strong and typical Swedish-English accent and I am glad I brought the text with me to class that day.

I have been very interested in different accents of English for a little while now and I even have a book entitled Accents and Dialects for Stage and Screen (:: oj, why can't I underline in this interface ::) by Paul Meier. I found this book online and it is sooo awesome! It comes with CDs and uses the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) to help teach accents to actors/actresses. Not that I'll be doing any acting anytime soon... but it's super fun nonetheless. It is helping me to keep up with my IPA reading abilities and it's not just broad transcription either. There are some very narrowly transcribed things that use diacritics and suprasegmentals that man kan säga är a little advanced, like the marking for extra short (in Italian), or lowering maybe (in French).

Anyways, I have started on a project for myself to basically write the chapter for the Swedish dialect. It has been a lot of fun and is helping me to understand phonetic mistakes that Swedes make when speaking English. But, we all know that lexical mistakes are the most fun... you know, like the ones that happen because of direct translations.

Oh and there are words that Swedish and English share that are what I think is called false friends. A couple fun ones are: fart and mambo. I can't help but giggle a little (at least inside) when people say that there's a lot of mambo in Stockholm or reading something like "fick lite för hög fart," which sounds like it means you had a fart that was a little to loud (and that you might be holding in) or "full fart framåt," which I would really rather not try to explain.

So, I hope this post has pleased those of you that were waiting to read a real "linguisticky" post. That is, of course if you do faktiskt exist... in my nearly invisible audience. Yes, käraste församling... Gud vi tackar dig.