American Tongues Summary

The video “American Tongues” is about variety of English dialect in America, and people still carry prejudice and stereotypes in people’s accents and dialects. These accent and dialects are not limited in pronunciation. There are different words, phrases and grammars in their dialects, therefore, some people are noticed where they are from. As a premise, everyone has an accent. However, some people believe they don’t have an accent because people around them have the exact same accent and dialect in their community. Therefore, they haven’t noticed differences. In the video, there was a scene of a woman was correcting her accent for work to speak “standard dialect”. It was required for her to speak “standard dialect” for work because when she was out of her original community where

Due to the certain accent’s stereotyping images, other “original English speaker” think they are uneducated, rude, and ignorance. TV comedy shows increased this negative image to audiences as making fun of their accent and laughed. The video introduced some words which are unfamiliar to us: cabinet is milkshake, gum band is rubber band, schlep is to carry, and pau hana means work is done. Those words and phrases are noticeable if they are native English speakers. On the other hand, I hardly notice those accents and dialects as a foreigner because I don’t have enough knowledge to judge what “standard English” is. In fact, we normally learn “standard English” in school as a foreigner, but we have a great chance to hear mixed dialects and accents everywhere because of mixed race society. Nevertheless, standard English accent is easier for me to understand. I easily distinguish and guess people’s hometown if they are foreigners by their accent. Still, it’s hard to recognize accents and dialect within states. Moreover, this video was difficult to understand because of the