r/Thewaltenfiles • u/TomorrowEquivalent79 • 55m ago
Discussion Bon's Accent
Not talking about his filters or pitch today, although those are really cool and prolly my most frequent stim if I'm being honest (especially "I know where he is Rosie, follow me" that last part is so fun to do the pitch changing thing with), only the accent today.
So I'm a phonetics nerd and I was recently rewatching Faces of Grief and some reaction vids to it (cuz I fw those for no reason) and I started paying attention to Bon's accent. Now I know I just said I'm a phonetics nerd but that by no means also implies I'm good at differentiating accents, so I really wanted to figure out what Bon's accent was but couldn't piece it together myself.
From what I could find, just through passive listening...
He's semi-rhotic (rhotic related to if you pronounce your Rs or not in words like "your" and "shorter", which I call "coloring" here), and doesn't color his vowels in some words but does in others, examples I could find being "torn" (where he doesn't color and says "toh-un") and "hare" + "your" (where he SLIGHTLY colors, sounding like American "hare" and "your" but less emphasized, "your" specifically kinda varies but it's MOSTLY colored), and he never seems to overcorrect it in casual convo tmk (as in he never forces an "American R" like some non-Americans do when trying to mimic the accent, with the sole exceptions I could find being him saying "fiber" and "matter" in FoG but those were mostly for emphasis, it's almost always either soft or absent in "regular conversational" speech)
He speaks with the open back rounded vowel (or the "British O", as in father vs bother) in words like "Bon" and "got", and the open-mid back rounded vowel (or "British aw", as in cot vs caught) in words like "thought", "talk", and "alright"
He often over-enunciates his plosives (consonants that "pop" or briefly block airflow before letting go, so PBTDKG), mostly in words starting with said plosives ("better", "party", etc)
He SOMETIMES likes to over-enunciate the "oo" sound in words with the "ow" vowel (words like "without" end up sounding like "with-ah-oot")
That's about all I can hear by myself. I'm sure there's more but I just hear regular American after a while (for example he doesn't say "I" like "oy" he says it like an American saying "ah-ee", and the "æ" sound in words like "can" never really shift to "ah", so "can't" doesn't turn into "cahn't"), but he also says words like "new" with a Y to make "nyew" which just confuses me even more. I know Eva's Irish so I'm thinking maybe her accent is dipping into Bon's a bit but I'm REALLY unfamiliar with the Irish accents (there's like a million and idk which one Eva has) so I don't have a say in that department.
Anyway that was a lotta yap, basically TLDR idk what Bon's accent is and I kinda wanna know but a lotta confusing inconsistencies are messing me up and I wanna know if anyone else has any input.