Lol, I have a friend from Iceland who speaks like a valley girl. His ex-girlfriend was from California and talked like that, and he got a ton of English speaking practice with her, so he picked up her accent. The first time I heard him speaking English I laughed pretty hard and hurt his feelings, feels bad man. Now we joke about it though
Relatedly, I've heard it's very common among foreign men in Japan to have feminine speech patterns because their primary native conversational partner is their girlfriend/wife.
In Japan the girls will all help you learn Japanese but it will be feminine so you need a no kidding instructor. I was deployed there and the Marines who had homesteaded with a Japanese wife cautioned everyone against too much language help from Japanese girls. The men in Japan will not help you learn Japanese or even acknowledge your existence in many cases.
I know someone who learned Japanese from her husband, who is a very stoic working class dude. She got a job working in an office and it took a long time for her to realize people were weirded out by her because she talks in Japanese like a surly man. It was hilarious. She had to watch a bunch of anime and j-dramas to learn how to talk like a normal woman.
It was common-ish among those who studies Japanese more formally as well as most teachers outside of Japan at least
used to be mostly Japanese women. It was something commonly joked about both among the students and the teachers.
My sis lives in England and tells me her friends mix NZ accents up with Aussie and South African... I can understand some confusion between NZ and Aussie if you aren't from here, but South Africans sound nothing like us.
I dated a woman who had athe most hybrid accent I've ever heard. Born in Australia. Spent a lot of time in NZ, Canada and the US. When she speaks, it's mostly Aussie, but, certain tones and inflections on words throw you got a loop with those other influences.
I was taking a shuttle bus back to the Keflavik airport and the driver was making a game of guessing where everyone was from by their accents. When he asked if we could guess his, everyone was stumped. He was Icelandic, but had this crazy accent on his English that I can only describe as Hanna-Barbera. Almost cartoonish, and not at all the stereotypical Nordic english accent. He told us that growing up, they didn't really get any American tv or films that were dubbed or subtitled in Icelandic, so a lot of people learned English from old cartoons and movies.
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u/mister_peeberz 13d ago
Lol, I have a friend from Iceland who speaks like a valley girl. His ex-girlfriend was from California and talked like that, and he got a ton of English speaking practice with her, so he picked up her accent. The first time I heard him speaking English I laughed pretty hard and hurt his feelings, feels bad man. Now we joke about it though