Your perception of the Polish accent

And about half of Poland has no native speakers at all


To each his own. I'd rather appreciate some redundancy, which would make up for ambient noise and such. I wouldn't say that producing three difficult vowels instead of one simple is sloppy.

With the speed of Polish you exaggerated a bit. Maybe it sounds like that to you.


Looks plausible, but somehow doesn't prove in reality. USA is a huge country, and US English was constantly under pressure of all European languages, yet they say the Americans have preserved the archaic English pronunciation.

I have another theory about the accents. English is rather vowel-oriented, as compared to Polish, and vowels are easier to shift than consonants (or more difficult to keep in place). You can say 'better' or 'be'er' with glottal stop, of course, but it's still quite easy to extrapolate. Now compare 'like' and 'lake' in various accents, out of context, and you are in trouble. At least I am, not being as finely tuned to local nuances.

I didn't. Compare the Queen speaking to a Polish woman speaking and the difference in speed is highly noticable. It's probably an unfair comparison since it's different languages, but as someone who uses an efficient English dialect, I feel comfortable saying that "proper" English is simply painfully slow. I'm hyperboling a bit, yes. It's just mildly annoying that the most inefficient, ugly and hardest to mimic English accent is somehow the "proper" one.

The U.S has incredible homogeneity in accents for a land of that size and population. I'm not sure of all the reasons, but apparently the technology of radio and TV being so prominent in the U.S is a major reason. It might be down to its young age and inter-state travel being so easy. And the U.S does have accents influenced by immigrants, it's just hard to tell exactly which immigrants. The New York accent/s are understandably based off the huge Jewish population in New York, for example, plus some Italian. It can even be said that the pressure was on the immigrants to integrate into American society as quickly as possible through any means, since the U.S has never really been accomodating to immigrants. Canada, however, does have more variation.

By the way, the migration aspect of influencing future accents isn't 100% linear, it does depend a lot on two languages merging, which doesn't happen much in modern times (which could account for the lack of variation in the U.S). The Poles are in large enough numbers in the UK, but it's unlikely they will impact future accents at all. All of the migration and invasions in England's history were centuries back, a lot of it Scandinavian and French, which are languages that English is now derived from. The most modern impacts on English accents were Irish immigrants, who spoke English.

Now that's unfair, the Queen is quite rich in years, and this slows down everybody.

As for your 'better accent', I am of mixed feelings. On one hand I'd sustain the general theoretical notion of redundancy, even if it's slightly slowing the communication, on the other hand I actually prefer the sharpish, distinctive Glasvegian warble. The 'proper English' sounds gayish to me, but it's just a personal preference.

On the third hand... I love to listen to the sing-song, slow, relaxed accents of Eastern Poland... So it's not about speed for me.

The US case you explained sagely. So it's not the simple geography, rather.

Is that the queen of Spain, Belgium, Sweden...?

I definitely notice differences in class and gender when native speakers are speaking Polish. Interestingly enough, as with other excessively conservative and homogeneous groups of speakers, among others, Icelanders, Hungarians, Czechs and perhaps one or two more, Polish pronunciation across the board tends to be much more uniformly correct, than that of American English or even New World Spanish and Portuguese, for instance.

When I was last in Poland, I was challenged by a particular word and asked a woman on the street selling flowers how to say the word. Clearly, she spoke no English (I wouldn't have even attempted to use English!), but I mimicked her accent later when using the same word and was told by most Polish host that my pronunciation was absolutely correct! Delighted, I couldn't help but think to myself that here in the States, I would scarcely ask the average person off the street how to say an unfamiliar word. They'd probably say it wrong. In Poland, I'd be mistaken to think that I could rely only on an educated Pole for a reliable pronunciation, except for isolated dialect speakers, of course. It would have been an insult to the Polish language to therefore assume the baker or the butch or the flower girl were unable to pronounce their own mother tongue any less correctly than a language professor:-)!!

I absolutely love hearing Polish speak English. The accent is so soft and not at all hard. I think the English accent (Hugh Grant) type English "Public School Boy" english is also very attractive. I'm not so sure about English trying to speak Polish. When I try it, I sound very clumsy.

FWIW I find my Polish girlfriend's manner of speech adorable! She is improving her English in a formal class now, so I am enjoying this while it lasts.

I had her listen to one of my recorded speaking exercises from my Polish lessons. She listened patiently, then turned to me as if quite serious and said:

"You have akcent!"

I nearly fell out of my chair. The concept, her delivery, and her own akcent were a perfect combination. [hilarity ensued]

So... yes, I love the way she speaks...

I don't know how much of the US and Canada you have traveled but you got it all reversed. Canadian English is less diversified than American English. One sharp exception are the rural populations in Eastern Provinces. The rest of the country is pretty uniform and the difference between BC and Ontario are less noticeable than the difference between Lower Manhattan and Washington Heights (Upper Manhattan).

While Canadian English is certainly not 100% uniform, the changes go along a East-West continuum. In the US those changes are all over the place. Just traveling from RI, via MA, NY, NJ you will hear more variation than in all of Canada, and in the US it does not even sound like there is continuum of the changes.


You may want to know that NYC "accent" is possibly more diversified than that of all of Canada. Most of it is actually influenced by Italian and a less by Hebrew/Yiddish. Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens sound very much different than the less orthodox Jewish people of the above boroughs. These Jews and the Jews living in the the outskirts of NYC ( NJ, PA and LI) but who spend most of their time in the city sound more along the lines of General American. And that's just the Jewish neighborhoods in NYC.

Is is possible to speak Polish in a Polish accent? See article, link below.

Whose accent would you copy? Are there different Polish accents?

poland-claritaslux/blog/foreign-language-accent-reduction/

I can speak Polish with a Polish accent and English with a American (Philadelphia) accent it all depends on how well you speak the language.

Audacity is a great piece of software but its application in learning a language is as useful as picking on one's nose.

I did some experiments years ago with spectrograms of various sounds. A short study marring linguistics and computer science. I managed to find plenty of sounds made by inanimate objects with spectrograms nearly identical to some words pronounced by a person. I had persons speak the same words a number of times. There were always differences in the resulting spectrograms. I also asked the persons to imitate themselves in an attempt to create similar spectrograms by the same speakers. No dice. This technology is a waste of time when it comes to learning a language.

This (screen shot #1) is a quick sample of the numerals 1 to 4 spoken by the same person in 3 tests (two tracks per test). None is identical than any other within the sample.

The second screen shot shows two more tests. The first is human speech (letters A,B,C,D). The second is knocking of the knuckles on a table top. Who wudda thunk, huh?

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Deciding what part of a waveform can be considered redundant and therefore safely removed, without perceptible degradation of voice quality, was once part of our very frustrating research in voice compression techniques. Various models had ben tried - some mathematically sophisticated, some simplistic.

Of the latter category was this brute force approach: record few dozens of seconds of a person's speech, break it into thousands of vectors of the same size, then choose some number of them, 1000 say, that would best represent the entire speech sequence. This was a so-called training session where some pattern matching techniques were used to make the pattern table, or the dictionary - if you wish.

The dictionary was then to be used in the next step - in the real time voice compression session, where the same person would speak, vectors of his/her voice extracted, matched to pre-stored dictionary vectors, and the resulting keys (actually numbers) sent over to a receiver.

On the receiver side, the same dictionary was used to decode the original speech by converting keys to values (vectors) and piecing all those vectors together. Again, this was done in real time.

Quality of the resulting synthesized voice depended on many factors - dictionary size and vector size being the major ones. Obviously, the bigger the dictionary and the smaller the vectors the better the approximation of the original - but, on the other hand, the lower voice compression ratio.

We tried using a dictionary of a person A during speech compression session of a person B. To our surprise this often worked reasonably well, even if A was a soprano woman and B a baritone man.

Since I quit that research long time ago, I am still clueless to this day what voice features are essential and which part of voice can be considered redundant. Some people obviously do know that, since voice compression techniques are everywhere nowadays: telephony, satellite communication, voice over internet, etc.

Well my Polish girlfriend has the most adoreable accent when speaking English...and of course having lived in Ireland (in the west around Galway, Ennis and Limerick) since she moved here 8 years ago she has picked up a number of colloquialisms and manners of speech from the region of the West of Ireland. The west of Ireland is basically the source of the world renowned Irish "brogue" accent....the very sing songy "arrah begorrah" made famous by Hollywood since John Waynes "The Quiet Man" and such. I come from Wexford in the South East and have a very flat neutral accent (which she loves because its very easy to understand). But I have to say...when she speaks it is amazingly cute...English with a soft Polish accent and then a few words enunciated in almost a Galway accent...slays me every time. Could listen to my sweetherat talk forever and never get tired of it. :o)

My Polish man has an accent and I think he is so adorable and cute when he speaks...I'm always smiling with some of the words and how he pronounces them...just want to cuddle him he's a cutie !!! :-D

Now that I am starting to learn Polish he will laugh too hehe :-)

Women love mens accents !!! It's sexy and cute at the same time !!!

I have to agree with you; especially when it pertains to a sexy Polish accent.

Australian simple???? It's the most difficult accent ever, they speak extremely fast and use a lot a lot a lot of slang.
Irish- OMG, I talked only once with Irish guy and I felt like a donkey , I could understand maybe a half.
Scottish- I love scottish accent, it sounds so friendly :)

Sexy as f***

"BORAT" :D

My story is a bit different and I'm not trying to hijack the thread. I was born to Polish parents outside of Poland and essentially grew up in the USA. So I have an American accent when I speak English and, I'm told by Poles from Poland, that I have almost know "foreign" accent when I speak Polish. My primary concern has always been to have as little "foreign accent" when I speak Polish.

I've been told that I sound like I could be from the far, formerly Polish, but that it's minute. No "L" "£" issues or anything like that.

As for what I think of Polish accents when heard in the United States? Wow, I've heard so many that I don't even notice it really.

I find it funny that when Poles, who've lived in the states for a long time and are in the IT field, talk to me about Computers we both have to switch to English because the vocabulary in "technospeak" is very different between Poland and USA.

There is a quote option on the forum, putting the quotation marks won't indicate who are you quoting.

If they speak american english, it is kind beautiful.

If they speak british english, is a bit weird. Actually i find british english already ugly anyway, speaking like spit on someone.

Well, American English makes more sense for us Polish and it sounds better when it's spoken by the natives too.


There are loads of English accents but I know what you mean. When I came to England people were often guessing that I'm from Germany or Austria, someone told me that when I speak English I sound like his friend who is Canadian French from Quebec.

I was taught British or rather BBC English at school. I thought I was quite good at mimicking the accent. I was shocked when I first arrived in London that people in the streets mostly speak some strange dialect I could hardly understand instead of the BBC English. Then I managed to learn how to differenatiate some accents. I still believed I don't speak with an accent (i.e a Polish accent) - then I worked with a guy who was born in Ireland but immigrated to London when he was six - I could hear that he had noticeable Irish accent or at least traces of it - so I told him that he spoke with an accent - then much to my surpirse I was met with an answer that I too speak with a strange accent

now after some time I actually shifted my accent to more American (perhaps MidAtlantic) I no longer swallow the final r's and also pronounce words like better, daughter the American way. - I am pretty sure I still have a 'strange' accent though

both irritating

When Polish women are speaking together, once more, it often sounds to my jaded Germanic ears much like birds chirping. Men on the other hand, often sound sort of almost world weary or bored:-)

horrible... polish and indian accent in English sounds awful .and am polish.so hard to lose it

and funny as well.watch :dailymotion.com/video/x1tgok

Without making any value judgements, the Polish accent is as distinctive as other accents. Frankly, I find it relatively easy to identify:-)

Its not the accent its the language.I THINK*lot of eastern Europeans and south Asians have same rhythm.

Polish is more easily recognizable, immediately in fact, as compared with certain other Slavic languages. Poles and Czechs speaking English, I will admit, DO often sound almost alike. However Russian for instance sounds nothing like Polish, Croatian, Slovak or Slovene, very hard to imitate:-)