George Mason University Speech Accent Archive

JT Olds writes "Apparently George Mason University is running a project to document differences in speech and accents from different backgrounds and the like. They have a paragraph that 306 sample readers have read and recorded, and all of these sound files are categorized by background, gender, age, and other things. They say that this is primarily for teaching and learning, and is especially useful for any linguists out there, but I just thought it was cool. The sound bytes are released under the Creative Commons license. Of course, the Google cache of the main frame is here. As a side note, I did get the link to this from Penny Arcade's Jerry Holkins."

Comments

What???

[pytsun]

No cockney support? Insensitive clods...

Re:What???

[phaze3000]

Just wot I wos finkin geeza.. are they having a fucking giraffe or wot?

George Mason

[dotwaffle]

It's nice they named a University after him, after all, he did save Jack Bauer's life by swapping seats on the plane with the nuke...

IRC; afternet; #gamedev

[after]

We were just talking about how the British English language was the true "natural" English language, all other derived languages that were English with an accent. For example, If I (a person who lives in America and speaks US English; no born American (thank goodness)) were to go to England and converse with an Englishman; who would have the accent, me or him? The obvious answer, as a lot of Americans fail to realize, is me.

Re:IRC; afternet; #gamedev

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

Yes but why is British english considered the true english? because England is the most important country in the world, or because english originates from there?

If you think it's the former, then since Britain isn't the great empire she once was, and is only just a regular country these days, then you could consider US english as being the "root" english language.

If you think it's the latter, then one could also consider than english, which is a normand anglo-saxon tongue, originated either from Saxony (in Germany) or Normandy (in France) and therefore is itself an accented version of these languages.

What I'm saying is, every language is the derivate of something else, it all depends on your point of view. And what's more, within the UK and the US, there are great variations of accents, so I'm not sure it means anything to say "british english is true english".

Perhaps if someone could come up with a "reasonable average" of the lingo, then that would be the true english...

Re: IRC; afternet; #gamedev

[Black Parrot]

> We were just talking about how the British English language was the true "natural" English language, all other derived languages that were English with an accent. For example, If I (a person who lives in America and speaks US English; no born American (thank goodness)) were to go to England and converse with an Englishman; who would have the accent, me or him? The obvious answer, as a lot of Americans fail to realize, is me.

Maybe not. It's a curious but well-known phenomenon in dialectology that peripherial/frontier dialects tend to be conservative while innovations accumulate more rapidly in the core areas. IIRC, scholars study the isolated communities on the islands along the US Atlantic coast to see what Shakespeare's actors would have sounded like.

Re:IRC; afternet; #gamedev

[shepd]

>Err, last time I checked Glasgow was in Scotland, not England.

True, but you'd ever been to Cumbria, you'd understand why an American would easily get confused.

Re:IRC; afternet; #gamedev

[zsau]

Actually, that's not true. Obviously if you went to England, you'd have an accent. But there's a lot of different accents in England. Even in the city of London there's at least three native accents (Cockney, Estuary and Received). But that's not what I'm getting at.

British English isn't the 'true "natural" English language'. In some ways, American English is more conservative than British English; American retains the flat a in words like 'fast' and 'pass' (so 'pass' and 'mass' rhyme), whereas in southern British English they've become the broad a. Most American dialects have retained the rhotic in almost all positions (and where it's been lost---words like 'ass' (from arse) and 'bust' (from burst)---the r is no longer written, left no trace, and the resultant word is generally distinct), but in almost all English English dialects I've heard (I'm Aussie), it's gone. Of course, British English is more conservative in other ways---it retains a three-way distinction between father/bother and cot/caught, for instance. (In everything here, Australian follows British. Sometimes Australian follows American. Sometimes Australian is original or shares changes with the other Southern Hemispherean Englishes.)

British English is no truer an english then any english. Just because the name of the language is the same as the adjective for things that come from England (and the name of the people from there, too) doesn't mean the English have any particular claim to English any more. Especially because there's probably as much variation in English English as there is in World English.

Re: IRC; afternet; #gamedev

[Mindcry]

from last i heard (royal shakespeare company interview i believe), they would have sounded like irish pirates or some such... i heard a couple of the company doing a dialogue like that, and it was really strange...

Re:IRC; afternet; #gamedev

[PacoTaco]

english, which is a normand anglo-saxon tongue, originated either from Saxony (in Germany) or Normandy (in France) and therefore is itself an accented version of these languages.

Plus Latin (old and Renaissance) and a bunch of other stuff. Here's a nice chart and some links for the curious.

Re:IRC; afternet; #gamedev

[CGP314]

If I (a person who lives in America and speaks US English; no born American (thank goodness)) were to go to England and converse with an Englishman; who would have the accent, me or him? The obvious answer, as a lot of Americans fail to realize, is me.

As someone who moved from the US to the UK, let me tell you that the British people here don't consider the language I speak to be English. It's American, and I better not forget it. : )

Re:IRC; afternet; #gamedev

[DietVanillaPepsi]

But then again, there are many different British accents. And British English is a evolved version of Old English. So none of us are speaking true and natural English. Such is the nature of language and progress.

Re:IRC; afternet; #gamedev

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not right: The three pieces of land around england that you're talking about might well not be able to survive on their own, but obviously enough, Northern Ireland could economically survive very well if reunified with Southern Ireland, independent of England (though a fair bit of the population would object to such a reunification with Ireland proper at the moment)

And remember that racially, the Scots and the Irish are pretty much the same people. What if they got over their bickering? A unified Irish-Scots nation like there was until about the 10th century would not only be perfectly capable of surviving independently, it would pretty seriously freak out the English, as there is very little love indeed between the Southern Irish and the English for pretty obvious reasons (millions dead in a famine caused by foreign invaders tends to piss the survivors off...)

The Welsh and Breton, while Celtic, are from a different branch of the celtic family tree, and might be a bit less enthusiastic about unifying with the Irish And Scots, but it's not at all inconceivable.

Imagine Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales ceding from the United Kingdom of Britannia and joining a reuinified Celtic nation ruled from Hibernia. That WOULD, most certainly, not only be self-sufficient, it would also be a force to be reckoned with - the famine killed off our weakest first, and evolution works. Remember that we Celts have very long memories.

Re: IRC; afternet; #gamedev

[orthogonal]

Maybe not. It's a curious but well-known phenomenon in dialectology that peripheral/frontier dialects tend to be conservative [i.e., less changing] while innovations accumulate more rapidly in the core areas

Also true in genetics, where's it's called Founder's Effect.

It's not that difficult to understand. Assume that in one year 1 person in X comes up with a language innovation -- a new word, a new way of pronouncing a word, an idiom, whatever. Or sate in another (but equivalent) way: assume that a language innovation happens on average every X person-years. Also assume that the innovation spreads with some frequency to persons who hear it.

Then then more people interacting in a place, the more innovation you'll have. More people will be present in core areas, fewer in peripheral or frontier areas.

And every time someone leaves an area for a previously unsettled area, that person will take with him his knowledge of the language as it currently exists in that area, like a snapshot -- but once settled in the new area, the smaller settling population will generate less innovation, causing language change to slow in the newly settled area.

In genetics, Founder's Effect of course refers to genes (and alleles): if a small group branches off from a larger group to settle a new area, all alleles/traits present in the larger group may not be represented in the settlers, or represented in the same frequency. What was a rare trait, (e.g., blue eyes) in the larger group might not be so rare in the smaller group.

Indeed, physical separation of groups of animals of the same species, as by geographical barriers, is though to be one of the main causes of speciation, where one species splits into two.

Interestingly, there are a number of parallels between genetic distribution over space and language transmission over space. Of course, we should remember that we get our genes exclusively from our parents, but our language from peers as well as parents.

Re:IRC; afternet; #gamedev

[tverbeek]

If I (a person who lives in America and speaks US English; no born American (thank goodness)) were to go to England and converse with an Englishman; who would have the accent, me or him? The obvious answer, as a lot of Americans fail to realize, is me.

I shared a flat with 5 UK citizens while at university in Scotland. We all had accents. There was a Glaswegian accent, a northern highlands accent, a Mancunian accent (i.e. Manchester), a Birmingham(?)-by-way-of-Australia accent, an East London accent, and a midwestern American accent (mine). (Plus a Welsh classmate whom I never could understand.) They occasionally made fun of me by talking funny like I did (especially the way I said my name), but I did the same with each of them.

Re:IRC; afternet; #gamedev

[UnknowingFool]

Interesting point. I always thought that American English was not per se "truer" but had fewer pronounced variations in a given area than British English.

Of course that's not to say that American English doesn't have variations (Southern drawl, New England, Bronx, etc), but I think there's less variation in all of Texas than there is in the city of London.

Part of this is that the US is younger and part of it is that the US grew up in a time of mass communication. Although variations have appeared, with recorded media, at least people know that they exist. Otherwise isolation from different regions would have made the phonetic variations more pronounced and widespread.

Chinese has many dialects due to it's several thousand years of existence, and they don't sound anything alike. Chinese people can't talk to other Chinese person if they don't speak the same dialect. Whereas Spanish and Italians can converse with a bit of work because most of the phonetics and grammar are still the same.

Re: IRC; afternet; #gamedev

[Black Parrot]

> As a child in the South in the Forties, I was taught that we were speaking essentially pure Elizabethan English and every other form was a corruption. My linguist uncle, OTOH, says that the true story is that children of colonial farmers, isolated from other white children by the sparsity of the population, were each given a slave child to play with...with the obvious linguistic outcome.

I don't know about your uncle's explanation of the mechanism, but the suggested outcome is certainly correct. When sociolinguistics classes cover Black English, Ebonics, AAVE, or whatever the current politically correct name of it is, and give a summary of (say) 10 features of that sociolect, the majority of White southern students will say "Heck, I use 7 of those features", or "My granny talks just like that", or something to that effect.

FWIW, a linguist friend says that most of the studies of BE/E/AAVE are done by northern linguists who have never bothered to find out how southerners speak.

Very curious methodology

[heironymouscoward]

Getting speakers of English as a foreign language to repeat a standard English phrase. It's highly unlikely that this produces accents in the sense of two speakers of the same language would recognise. I.e. would a Flemish Dutch speaker recognise the accent of a Dutch speaker from Amsterdam when mangled through an English phrase? Somehow, I don't think so.

It might be useful for tracing people's origins when they are in an Anglosaxon country. But you might as well just ask them.

What would be more useful, perhaps, is a study of the relative differences in accents between native speakers of the "same" language, and how these differences come about.

Re:Very curious methodology

[mocm]

I don't know about local Dutch accents, but I can recognize various German accents even when the people are speaking English. I can also recognize most other European language speakers when they are speaking English, although it gets a little harder when the languages are similar and I don't speak them myself. But I guess as soon as you speak a language yourself and can recognize diffenernt dialects in that language, you will also be able to recognize them when the people speak a foreign language.
If you ever listend to Gaelic or Welsh you can also see where the English accent of those people come from even if they don't speak the original language anymore.

Re:Very curious methodology

[fucksl4shd0t]

Getting speakers of English as a foreign language to repeat a standard English phrase. It's highly unlikely that this produces accents in the sense of two speakers of the same language would recognise. I.e. would a Flemish Dutch speaker recognise the accent of a Dutch speaker from Amsterdam when mangled through an English phrase? Somehow, I don't think so.

Probably not, for the same reason kids don't understand you when you baby-talk them. With kids, they hear the word the way the adults say it, presumably correctly. Then they speak it in their "I'm still learning to talk" accent. So I might say "later", but my daughter will say "waiter". I understand her because I've been hearing her trying to talk, and she understands me because it's my speech she's trying to emulate. But if I say "waiter" when I mean "later", she'll be confused.

Mind you, she knows that she's not perfectly emulating my speech, and she tries everyday to speak a little more clearly. This is the reason you don't baby-talk kids, and you don't imitate a foreign-speaker's accent when you talk to them. They won't learn the correct speech (assuming you're speaking it 'correctly', whatever that is), and most importantly for the foreign-speaker, they won't understand you. (It's less important that the kid understand you and more important that they hear the word correctly. Understanding will come with time, but breaking an accent you imposed on them will be very difficult, if not impossible) Also, mind you, it's perfectly ok to limit your vocabulary to theirs, if necessary, to get your message across. But in neither case will the person's vocabulary expand when you do that, so unless you're trying to say something of grave importance ("Your house is on fire! Call 9-1-1!"), you're better off going ahead and taking the time to teach the new vocabulary. :)

Re:Very curious methodology

[fucksl4shd0t]

I can't recognize southern France accents through english. It's very well known that the "singing" rolling accents found in the south of France just isn't compatible with pronouncing english properly, so either someone from there will speak english so badly you won't get a word of it, or he'll speak english properly and his native french accent will be filtered out by his very act of speaking english.

"He had a minkey."

(obligatory Clouseau quote)

Re:Very curious methodology

[The Phantom Blot]

Would a Flemish Dutch speaker recognise the accent of a Dutch speaker from Amsterdam when mangled through an English phrase?

Sure. Why not? I'm an American who's been living in Paris for several months, and I've noticed the following things:

• As an anglophone, it is easier for me to understand other anglophones speaking French than a francophone speaking French.
• As an American, I can tell the difference between an American, a Briton and a German speaking French.
• As a Southerner, I can tell the difference between a Californian, a New Yorker, and a Floridian speaking French

If the accent is strong enough, it will always shine through.

Re:Very curious methodology

[The Cydonian]

would a Flemish Dutch speaker recognise the accent of a Dutch speaker from Amsterdam when mangled through an English phrase?

I can answer the question in terms of Indian English. As an Indian who speaks English but not as a "mother" tongue, I've always been able to recognise the respective mother tongues of other Indians through English; that is, not that difficult to differentiate between English as spoken by a native Tamil speaker, and that spoken by, say, a native Hindi speaker (even if I don't necessarily speak either language).

I guess this where the whole question of how native we're in English comes into play.

Problems with study

[0x0d0a]

This is a really wonderful idea. However, I worry that it has a copule significant problems for researchers. First, for computer analysis work, a paragraph is likely too short to be useful. It can take a *lot* of audio data to make up for one-time variations. Second, cleanliness of the recording. Since anyone can submit a recording, not only will the recording environments and devices differ, but it is unlikely that any recordings will be made in the kind of studio-quality or lab-quality environment that would make these most useful for analysis work.

I'm not a speech synth/recognition researcher, but I do know that generally, for speech research, much stricter constraints are placed on audio being acquired. The extreme variety of the site is nice, but I'm not sure that it outweighs the drawbacks.

Re:Problems with study

[bziman]

As a linguistics student at George Mason University and having used this system, I know that the people who developed this project took great care to make sure that the "paragraph" represents all of the phonemes in the English language. It is therefore a good representation (maybe not perfect, but good). Furthermore, each speaker is made to repeat the phrase three times. And the audio is of sufficient quality for analysis -- at least for research in my graduate English phonetics class last year.

Hmmmmm

[ziggy_zero]

When I found this site a few days ago (linked on Penny Arcade), one of the first things that came to mind was how useful it could be to an actor who has to learn how to do a certain accent. In some of the more common accents they even have a list of rules on how most speakers of that other language speak (e.g. many Japanese speakers reverse their R's and L's).

Re:Hmmmmm

[mocm]

They don't reverse them, they only have one sound for l and r which lies between the two sounds. Naturally it is difficult for them to even distinguish the sounds and even more difficult to speak them.
It is like the French U which English speakers never get right because they don't even realize the difference (rue is not pronounced like roo, it is like the German u (that should be \"u, but no Umlaut in /.).

They could learn from actors...

[Monkelectric]

Actors/voice actors have "dialect tapes" which they study to learn accents. I have a few and generally they start by giving vowel substitutions, common phrases and syntax, and then move on to insanely boring phrases you must repeat while trying to copy their accents and inflections.

Which British English?

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you even been to the UK? There are a LOT of different accents there :)

Actually...

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe the correct answer is both. Everyone has an accent. An accent is the part of speech which is neither specific to an individual or to the language. It varies by region, background, or time period. If you were to go back to the Old English days (there is no "single" English language as it has evolved over time) it is unlikely that anyone would understand you. The same for the Brits.

Maybe the question you meant was which is closer to "correct". If you consider correct to be closer to the root of the evolutionary language tree then the Brittish are probably closer since the Americans' language changed more quickly since the split.

Re:Actually...

[tverbeek]

I thought it was the language in the satellite countries that changed the least. And the language in the original country that changed and evolved the most.

One thing that has pushed the evolution of American English (more so than British) is the ongoing influx of non-native speakers adopting it. Britain has had immigrants of its own since the American colonies were created, to be sure, but particularly since that nasty split with the British, American English has been spoken more by former Africans, Germans, French, Chinese, Norwegians, Poles, Mexicans, Dutch, Koreans, Arabs, etc. than by former Britons. That had to affect its pronunciation (and might explain some of the regional variations, depending on which immigrants settled where).

Re:Actually...

[tverbeek]

the dominant Canadian accent corresponds very closely to the dominant American accent.

That's because they all live on our border and watch our TV shows. :) Seriously, the accent we're talking about here evolved mostly in the Great Lakes region, where there's always been plenty of interaction between the two countries. When you get away from that area (e.g. Newfoundland, Georgia) the similarities fade.

Its not that different from noting the similarities between Tyneside and Lothian accents. Sure, one's English and the other Scottish, but they're neighbors.

Re:Actually...

[doktor-hladnjak]

I thought it was the language in the satellite countries that changed the least.

I've heard this before too. One key example that comes to mind is Icelandic. Both modern Norwegian and Icelandic are largely decended from Old Norse, which of course was spoken in what is now Norway. A long time ago, some people from there went off to settle in Iceland. Interestingly, the language as spoken in modern Iceland is much more similar to Old Norse than Norwegian is to it. I think the usual explanation given is that Iceland was very isolated over those 1000 or so years.

Now, to know how people spoke English in North America at the time of the American Revolution seems difficult. At that time (and certainly say 100 years before) English as spoken in England (of course this is complicated too, since the variation of accents in Great Britain is more dramatic than the variations in North America) would have been largely the same as English spoken in the New World. Since then, both have probably diverged a lot from that ancestor, because neither country was particularly isolated linguistically (unlike Iceland).

However, I know I stumbled across something a few years ago that claimed modern North American English is closer to what was spoken back in the 17th and 18th centuries than modern BBC or The Queen's English is to it. I wish I could remember the reference for it, but I can't.

Finally, the whole situation is complicated by continued linguistic contact between the UK, the USA, and Canada. One interesting (although maybe dubious) claim is that the way, for example, southern US English, Boston English, and London English all have a tendency to drop r's at the ends of words came about from the upper class in the states sending their children to boarding schools in England in the 19th century. The story goes that in Philadelphia and rural areas further away from the coast (in particular) this was not a common practice and so that sound never really took hold there. Interesting stuff...

Japanese people can't pronounce L!!

[JollyRogerX]

Japanese people don't REVERSE L and R, they just can't pronounce L at all. A lot of people (stupid people) imitating japanese accents reverse the l an r because they think it sounds japanese. It doesn't. It's justs stupid. BTW, they call it "Engrish" because they just can't say "English." Its just like how I cannot roll my R's no matter how hard I try. Thus, when I speak Spanish, I sound funny when saying words containing rr. If you want proof of this, just look on any Japanese Katakana or Hirigana chart. These contain all the phonetic sounds in the Japanese language. notice there is no L.

Re:Japanese people can't pronounce L!!

[Senjutsu]

Japanese people don't REVERSE L and R, they just can't pronounce L at all.

This is not particularly correct. Japanese has neither an R nor an L; it has a sound that stands somewhere roughly between the two (whether or not it sounds more like an R or an L depends on the exact speaker, their particular regional accent, and to a certain extent, their gender). And while Japanese speakers of English do not always or even consistently reverse the two consonants, as a consequence of growing up in an environment where the two sounds were conflated, they often have trouble distinguishing the two and have trouble remembering which tongue positioning they should be using for a particular word. Hence it is not uncommon to hear a native Japanese speaker produce an R instead of an L, or vice-versa, in English.

If you want proof of this, just look on any Japanese Katakana or Hirigana chart. These contain all the phonetic sounds in the Japanese language. notice there is no L.

That proves nothing, as Katakana and Hiragana charts contain neither Rs nor Ls; they contain, by definition, Katakana and Hiragana. On an English translation (and the key word here is "translation", as in close approximation of the sounds in english) of the (ra ri ru re ro) portion of the charts they are often presented as R sounds (as this is what they tend to sound like, especially when produced by male speakers in the standard accent), but it is not truly an R (or L sound), as the tounge is at a different position with respect to the upper teeth, and it shares elements in common with the R, L (and to a certain extent D) sounds.

Accents

[ozbird]

They say that the first accent was a grave mistake...

Re:Accents

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

They say that the first accent was a grave mistake...

Not at all, it was an acute mistake...

Re:Quicktime!?

[barcodez]

Just to answer my own question # emerge mplayerplug-in Looks like I saved myself the 1000 and half my deskspace :p

I just got back to Oz from NZ

[NemesisStar]

And while there I saw a chalkboard outside a cornerstore with a joke on it:

A foreigner was at a sheep farm watching them shear the wool off the sheep. Knowing a better way he said "Here, let me show you how to shear your sheep"

The Kiwi replied "I'm not shearing with anybody!"

Never let it be said that Kiwi's don't know how to laugh at themselves! (and for this instance we'll forgive them their rediculous accents ;))

Re:Quicktime!?

[Anonymous Coward]

No they are not ... :P

They use standart quicktime files with imapcm audio ... mplayer could play them forever and anything gstreamer based should too . You don't even need any binary codecs for them..

get mozplugger or that mplayer plugin for your browser

Bork bork bork...

[hefa]

This stuff is cool, IMHO. In case anyone's interested, here's the Swedish version of the concept: http://swedia.ling.umu.se/

In SweDia you can listen to 100 Swedish dialects recorded 1998-2000. Hurty flurty schnipp schnipp!

Meanwhile on YRO.slashdot ....

[DrYak]

Nintendo sues "George Mason University" for their "Speech Accent Archive", saying that the university is guilty of trademark infringment on nintendo's patented "Hellooo it's meeee Marrrrrioooo " and that they're trying to take advantage of the copyrighted italian accent in their work...

Don't forget these resources

[TTL0]

The Collection won't be complete w/ out Father Guido Sarducci Or the Jive Guys from Airplane

Serious oversights...

[neuroklinik]

They missed quite a few accents.

Bill Shatner
Christopher Walken
Dana Carvey's Ross Perot
James Stewart

I have at least 4 accents combined

[filekutter]

due to moving around the states... So, am I unique, or just a mutt?

Massachusetts

[nycsubway]

For doctors practicing in Boston:

Doc "Ok, open your mouth and say 'R'"

patient "Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh"

Doc "Good!"

International Dialects of English Archive

[johnwbyrd]

The IDEA archive has a far more complete collection of accents and voice samples. Excellent source material for geeks who work in film, TV or theater.

Is it offensive to "adopt" an accent?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just out of curiosity:

When Dick van Dyke adopted a "cockney" accent in Mary Poppins, he was beloved by Americans but panned by the English. Yet most people didn't realize that Monty Python's Terry Gilliam wasn't English and that his accent wasn't natural, or if they did, they didn't hold it against him. For years, I thought Peter Jennings, who was based in London for ABC news for many years, was British because he spoke with an accent at that time.

If you adopted an English accent,

a) Would the British people recognize it as being "fake"?
b) Would they treat you more favorably? Would they view it as offensive (such as a person trying to fake their way into a higher social status)?

Re:Is it offensive to "adopt" an accent?

[mabinogi]

I don't think its offensive to adopt or imitate an accent...as long as you do it WELL.
If you adopt my accent well enough, then I won't see it as faking my accent, I'll see it as losing your accent, and the extent to which I see it as losing your accent depends on how well you adopt mine.
However, if your attempt at adopting my accent is based on cliches and generalisations of what my accent sounds like, then it will sound wrong to me, and probably be offensive, as it will seem like you're making fun of it.
I would guess that Dick van Dyke did the latter, wheras Terry Gilliam was surrounded by people that would tell him he sounded like a idiot if he got it wrong.

Re:Actually...it depends on the language

[real gumby]

In English there isn't an official accent (BBC "Received English" notwithstanding). Other languages have different conventions.

For example, German. There is an official "High German" (Hochdeutch) that is learned in school and is considered "correct." Other dialects, of which there are many of course, are considered "nonstandard." This is more than just a Texan being proud of speaking Texan, they are really considered different. Someone who speaks Hochdeutch natively (there are a small number) are considered by others to have "no accent."

Remember: this is a language that standardises its spelling, hyphenation, capitalisation and comma usage by international treaty. Making one accent official is comparatively speaking, trivial.

As a native english speaker myself, I find this all all a bit berserk. But other people, other ways.

weird...

[tuxette]

...I'm an anglophone in Norway, it's easier for me to understand Norwegians speaking Norwegian than anglophones speaking Norwegian.

I concur on your second point. I've never tried the third one, as I don't hang out with any of the American expats here, and even if I did they would want to speak English, not Norwegian.

Pirates ?

[ultranova]

Does the study show if software pirates say "arr" more often than other people ?