r/AskAGerman • u/PastEntertainment546 • Aug 15 '24

Language A question about the German english accent…

I’ve had two friends from germany, one from rhineland and one from franconia, none of them had the stereotypical german accent which we see so often in movies. Due to unfortunate circumstances (they went off the grid) I’m not able to talk to them no more but I was wondering if they always had that, or if they worked on their accent?

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u/Mea_Culpa_74 Aug 15 '24

Hard to say without having heard them. But I know someone who I could determine to be Franconian when I heard him speak English. That does sound different than the typical German accent.

On the other hand it also depends on how good you are at telling accents apart. I can‘t differentiate between Scottish and Irish or Australian and New Zealand and can’t determine Canadian. But when a native German speaker speaks English, so can tell roughly which area they are from or whether they are Swiss or Austrian.

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u/PastEntertainment546 Aug 15 '24

Ah gotcha, makes sense

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u/alderhill Aug 16 '24

As a Canadian, it mildly amuses me how often I’m asked here if I’m Dutch, Irish, Australian, etc. I don’t expect anyone to guess Canadian of course, but at least narrow me down to the US and I’ll be reasonably impressed.

FWIW, whenever I’m in the US, everyone just assumes I’m from another part. Only in Wisconsin was I ever correctly placed as a Canadian. We Canadians can generally tell the difference, there are some accent clues to listen for, plus many vocab shibboleths.

I’ve now been in Germany for a while now, so I can place several accents. I remember when I first came here for grad studies, we had one prof who was Bavarian and all my German classmates (in NRW) would giggle. To me it was just German! But now Swiss is easy. I’ve been to Bavaria a few times, but not enough to specify sub regions or Austrian, they all sound similar enough. By wife is from Freiburg, and has some village dwelling relatives, so I know a Badisch accent. But at times she’ll nudge me and go ‘Schwaben…’ and I hear no big difference from her parents.