Accent Tag on YouTube

[OC Richard]

Sorry if this has been covered before, but I just stumbled upon a great thing on YouTube, the large number of Accent Tag videos.

Here's a young woman from Scotland

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfO8F6Uz_qM

and here's the way everyone around here talks

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NsJqya8XLl4

There's a list of words the contributor is supposed to read (many of the videos have the first few words omitted, too bad because they're good diagnostic words) and then a list of questions.

Seems like the questions are aimed at picking out the differences between various US dialects (many overseas people are puzzled) but interesting and fun anyhow.

Too bad one of the questions is poorly worded, which strikes close to home because I've asked dozens of people from all over the world the same thing, and started a thread here about it: what are various people's plural for "you". The way I word it is "if you approach a group of people and ask the entire group to come with you, how do you say it?" The purpose being to find out the plural for "you" as opposed to the singular.

But on this Accent Tag thing they ask "how do you address a group of people?" and most of the responses are things like "hi!" which doesn't tell us much.

Here is the XMarks poll I did a while back on this. I've found "you guys" (or "youz guys") to be more common than I thought, reported by a number of Australians, Brits, Canadians, and Americans. And of course Picksburg has their distinctive "yinz" and the South "y'all"

http://www.xmarksthescot.com/forum/f...ral-you-69973/

Anyhow it's very interesting and intertaining to hear all the various accents.