4.21

        I agreed with and liked the way Green talked about what accent means. As we have discussed many times in this class and previous classes, accents is a difficult concept to understand because so many people have different views on what it means and whether people really do have different accents. Green gave the meaning loosely of accent, which was “a specific way of speaking” (Green, 42). I truly believe that although that is a very vague definition, it sums up partly what accents are. There are so many people that disagree or do not understand what the concept actually means, but I personally think that is a good way to describe it. There is so much research that goes into it and there will always be people that have different views on what accents are and many other terms as well. In my personal opinion though, this is a good, vague definition of the word.

            The article then continues to talk about two elements to identify one variety of a language from another. Once it explained what prosodic features and segmental features are, they came up with a working definition of accents. “Accents are loose bundles of prosodic and segmental features distributed over geographic and/or social space” (Green, 42). Throughout the article, it talks about how there are so many different ways to distinguish accents and there are so many accents. I liked how they talked about first language accents and second language accents because some may think that we only have a first language accent or vis versa, but that is not the case. Our first language accent is a structured variation in language. Depending on where we are from, we are going to have a regional accent because people from different parts of the country have their own accents and ways of saying words. There are many different accents between races, genders, ethnicities, regions, religions, etc.; they are not just based on where you are from in the country. Being from Chicago alone and then with my religion, I hear from people (even in Chicago) that I have an accent. I sometimes hear it when I say certain words, but it is so cool that everyone has their own unique accents and ways of saying certain words. It just shows how diverse and different everyone is, but we all come together with the languages we speak. The accents are a small part of our whole language.