World’s favorite American accent

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    From this morning’s New Orleans Times-Picayune comes the stunning news that the New Orleans accent has been found to be the “World’s favorite” US accent. This is based on Twitter comments, so should be taken with a grain of salt.


    “According to a survey by the WordTips website, more people approve of the New Orleans manner of speech than any other accent. Yeah, you right!

    According to a news release, WordTips — a word-search site which, to be honest, we'd never heard of — surveyed 528,612 tweets in February 2023 to determine how Twitter users across the globe view various accents.


    The website statisticians used a Hugging Face artificial intelligence algorithm to analyze how positively Twitter users talk about 165 accents throughout the United States, and 46.4 percent of those surveyed approve of our particular mangling of English, which the website describes like so: “The local accent known as Yat is influenced by Irish, Italian, French and multiple African languages.”


    We regret to report that only 25.2 percent of those surveyed approved of the Cajun [SW Louisiana via British Columbia from France] accent.


    “The Brooklyn New York accent was even less appreciated, at 22.2 percent. Which is odd since most people think the Brooklyn and New Orleans port accents are similar. The late Crescent City cartoonist Bunny Matthews famously said that people in New Orleans sound like people in Brooklyn on sleeping pills.”



    What are your favorite Argentine, UK, Italian and other accents?

    I'm pretty good at identifying where accents come from around the UK but ashamed to say that I suffer from complete accent-blindness in Spanish and most other languages. It all comes down to whether or not I can understand what the speaker is saying and whilst I accept that's more likely to be in places like Mexico, Equador or Peru than Argentina I can't pin down the differences that make one person's speech comprehensible and another person's a blur.


    I'm not trying to curry favour with forum members but I think my favourite British accents come from Wales and Scotland. My own accent is more-or-less RP which is pretty boring to listen to.