Re: CHAT: Being taken for a furriner ...

Roger Mills wrote:

>Andreas Johansson wrote:
>
>
>
>>Had a strange experience on the train this morning; I went to the train
>>hostess
>>to buy new tickets, and, of course, addressed her in Swedish. Yet, she
>>replied
>>in English...,
>>
>>I've been taken for a foreigner before, but that's always involved me
>>speaking
>>in a foreign language. Possibly, my recent one-year stay in Germany has
>>left
>>some mark on my Swedish, but the whole incident nonetheless seems somewhat
>>extraordinary to me.
>>
>>Anyone else here experienced something similar?
>>
>>
>>
>Similar but different:  when I was in England, long long ago, I was having
>tea in the hotel lounge and fell into conversation with the lady at the next
>table.  After a while she asked where I was from, and was surprised to learn
>I was American.  "I thought you were from the North..." Maybe "the North" is
>Brit-speak for "you talk funny ~not like me"....?  But I was rather
>flattered.  In those days I was fresh out of fancy boarding school and
>Harvard, where I'd adjusted my midwestern twang to the upper-class Eastern
>speech of my classmates (dropping r's, frinstance), and suffering from
>severe Anglophilia.
>
>

I've found the MA accent to sound very, very similar to an English one.
Probably not a  northerner, but an Englishman nonetheless.

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