>>301831i always had trouble with pronunciation when i was younger and thought i was just retarded. i couldn't even pronounce my own name correctly, i didn't realise how to correctly pronounce it till i was like 22, there is an A that i thought was pronounced as in "air" when in reality my parents pronounced it as the the A in "hat." the confusion was because it's a common name and the standard way of pronouncing it is whit the A in "hat" so thats how most people called me.
there were a lot of other examples of certain words i had trouble saying, another big one is the O in words like "hole" and "pole," i literally cannot pronounce it like a normal american. now why is this? well i didn't talk to my father for a period of many years after my parents' divorce, then one day i talked to him on the phone and realised he had an accent. like the time away from him and the vocal isolation of the phone caused me to finally realise this. at that time i thought it was a boston accent that had kind of become more subtle because he grew up in that area, and maybe that was part of it, but then years after that realisation, i dug through my ancestry and found out that our family immigrated to america from yorkshire england and a few generations ago, that my grandfather was the first of our line born in america. so my father woudl have grown up around a grandfather who was born in yorkshire, and his father would have still had that accent and so he too had the accent, though i still think it has been watered down.
so yeah basically i grew up getting mixed signals from my dad's accent and from my mom's and school teachers', to the point where i didn't even know how to pronounce my own name. since i've learned this, i now say certain words with a british accent, such as potato/tomato, banana, many others. it's just how some words come out naturally now, the problem is that i also am conscious that if i spoke like how my brain wants to speak, people would think i'm some kind of larper autist, so i have now added another layer of complexity between the words in my head and the words i have to say out loud, i essentially have to put on an american accent artificially, which i guess i've kinda been doing forever but now it's harder.
moreover, it's not farfetched to think that many other americans have a similar experience and that the "neutral" american
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