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PaperclipPerfector  19hr ago (text post)   614 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for May 31, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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What's the worst-sounding foreign accent in English? Right now I think it's Mandarin, but I am open to suggestions.

I find strong Scandinavian accents irritating in their dullness and weirdly Indian rhythm. Though I will say that many Scandinavian people speak really good english without much accent at all so I don't mind those speakers. Finnish, Swedish and Norwegian are pretty languages to my ear.

French and European Spanish speakers are also a bit monotonous to me, the German accent is fine but their speech patterns are usually too pedantic for my tastes

Certain overly nasal midwestern accents are irritating to me and east coast accents sound aggressive and unpleasant. AAVE can be charming but is grating in my internal monologue.

Indian and it’s not even close. Like nails on a chalkboard.

Does Boston accent ('Bahstahn') count as foreign? It's not in England. They did the whole tea-into-the-bay thing to solidify that position.

It has only one vowel (æ?)

French or Dominican-English.

Indian accents from a guy. The musicality is so annoying. It's fine for women.

I don't mind listening to Indian women speak English with heavy accents, but I must admit I can't say the same of Indian men. (Apologies to @self_made_human.)

That being said, if I may be permitted to stretch the definition of "foreign" a bit, Multicultural London English (that mish-mash of Pakistani, Afro-Carribean, Arabic and Indian accents and slang spoken by urban youths throughout the Yookay) is verbal sewage. "Wha' you lookin' at bruv? I wiw fucking kiw you bruv! Watch yourself, innit." Give me a thousand "don'd dell me whad do do"s over that. Unlike the former case, there's no gendered element to it: I honestly don't think I could bring myself to have sex with an otherwise attractive woman who spoke with this accent.

Are there any studies from linguists what makes the Indian accent so hard on the ears? Btw - I expect this to change in generation or two - everyone is immersed in english media now from birth, so more kids learn english simultaneously with their maternal one.

Honestly, I do think that's basically cultural prejudice. Coupled with perhaps an unusual amount of time spent with other ESL speakers.

I've known Russian professors etc. who were basically incomprehensible, the Indians have no monopoly on that. Rather that than chavvy London accents.

I knew a very nice Japanese girl with impeccable middle-class credentials. She spoke Japanese with a pleasant Tokyo accent (which the Japanese equivalent to RP these days) and she spoke English impeccably... except that she'd been to university in Plymouth and had picked up an incredibly gutter accent and speech patterns that she seemed to be completely unaware of. It was incredibly disorienting.

I don't have an Indian accent. Quite the opposite. I get asked, almost every day, where I'm from. By people talking to me in person too, mind you.

So far, people have told me I sound American, Canadian, Dutch, German and god knows what else. The standard consensus seems to be from exactly wherever they're not, so Americans wonder if I'm Canadian/European, and Europeans wonder if I'm from the other side of the pond.

In fact, this happens so frequently I have a whole canned speech ready. Surprisingly LLMs can usually still tell I'm probably Indian from pure audio logs, last time I tried was with Gemini 2.5 Pro. I sound very slightly Scottish when very inebriated, but I avoid picking up another accent since at that point nobody would understand me.

Funny and very recent story: I had a date with my Emotional Support Lesbian yesterday. I took her to the shady gay pub that's my usual haunt. The other Lesbian at the counter (much worse at the emotional support bit) could understand precisely what I was saying, and couldn't understand the white woman with the upperclass British accent. Well, she admits that she sounds like a "posh Tory cunt", and that is all the proof I need.

For what it's worth, I hate Indian accents too, they grate on my ears, and I mostly grew up there. I do agree Roadmen sound atrocious, and I'd walk into traffic if I see them on the streets.

I get asked, almost every day, where I'm from. By people talking to me in person too, mind you.

So far, people have told me I sound American, Canadian, Dutch, German and god knows what else. The standard consensus seems to be from exactly wherever they're not, so Americans wonder if I'm Canadian/European, and Europeans wonder if I'm from the other side of the pond.

... are you me? In my case, it's the result of years of speech therapy when I was young.

No, I don't think I'm you. Too handsome for that, and given the username, possibly less German or Dutch?

I didn't get any speech therapy. I give the speeches and the therapy. I just learned to speak English while in the States and it stuck and morphed into something so neutral it's remarkable.

Huh, that's interesting.

Apologies to @ self_made_human.

He has mentioned that he actually does not have an Indian accent.

Korean is the hardest for me to understand.

Have been to South Korea a handful of times, they learn American english there, everyone around 35 or so and younger speaks really good english in my experience. Older people may not know it at all though. I'm surprised you find Koreans hard to understand.

For spoken English accents in general, top three worst sounding to me would be (in order):

  1. AAVE
  2. Chinese
  3. Indian

Where, for example, I’m undecided between Mandarin and Cantonese being worse.

(1) Is a goshdarned furriner authorized to judge such nuances in the first place?

(2) My memory of exactly how annoying accented English is fades as my distance from my immigrant-filled workplace increases. But it is my impression that any language-based variation is drowned out by proficiency-based variation. I can say that 80-percent-intelligible Indian*-accented English < 90-percent-intelligible Cantonese-accented or Vietnamese-accented English < 100-percent-intelligible Sri Lankan*–accented English. But that doesn't give any information regarding the languages.

*Yes, I know these aren't languages, but I don't know the actual native language of the speaker.

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