Philippine Azkals: The Accents (2)
This is Part 2 of a series of posts about the Philippine Azkals' accents. Click here to go to my 1st post.
Hello there, Azkaleros!
Well, my previous post talked about the accents of some prominent members of the Philippine Azkals, the men's national football team. Last time we talked about Aly Borromeo's accent that's like a mix of Californian, Hispanic and Bisaya. We appreciated the ruff-and-tuff Southeastern American accent of Jason Sabio. We are tickled by the quirky Sussex accent of Simon Greatwich. And we do love the almost-Oxford-standard accent of Rob Gier.
Now let's get into another set of players. First up, the prime goalkeeper Neil Etheridge, the 21 year-old lad from London. Now, let's go back to that video starring him in 2008 (We'll observe, too, the other person interviewed here.)
As I've been observing his interviews every now and then, I am able to think that Neil's delivery of the language is close to what they call Estuary English. Estuary English refers to the dialect commonly encountered through South East England, particularly among the young and the working-class. It's called as such since it refers to those living in the estuary of the river Thames. Distinctions include /T/-glotallization (/T/ is heard as glottal rather as alveolar), broad /ɑː/, intrusive /R/, H-dropping and /l/-vocalisation. That's why you can really tell that he's from London and he's young that you can distinguish him from the elder Londoners.
Side note: The other person interviewed in the video is Phil Greatwich, brother of Simon Greatwich. Like I said in the previous post, he also has the Sussex accent like his brother.
Next stop: Anton del Rosario, the 29-year-old defender from San Francisco, California. The video below shows Anton promoting Alter-Space, a Facebook app made by Filipinos.
While preserving Californian distinctions of American English unlike his fellow Aly Borromeo, he somewhat tends to go near making /ɪ/ and /æ/ distinct, and do occasional glottal stops. Many would say Californians of Filipino descent tend to mix some features of Philippine English, that is /t/, /d/, and /g/ are glottal than alveolar.
Next, Phil and James Younghusband. They're born in Middlesex, South East England. So, you do expect Estuary English, right? Not quite.
In this above video from loqal.ph and Yahoo! Philippines, Phil and James teach football to young kids as part of their job as co-founders of the Younghusband Football Academy. Apart from that, their accents are quite interesting as well. Although somewhat very close to Estuary English as Neil, being West Londoners (as opposed to being North Londoner as Neil) makes their accent close to someone from the Midlands of England. Theirs /t/-s are alveolar, their /aʊ/ is prononunced, and they have yod-coalescence. However, it's interesting and not bad at all; it sounds pleasant anyways.
Next up, let's give the floor to some of the team's non-native English speakers. We'll get into Filipino-Dutch midfielder Jason de Jong, and Filipino-Iranian forward Misagh Bahadoran. Below videos are interviews they took before their match versus Kuwait.
Since Dutch and English belong to the same Germanic language family, many people in the Netherlands are able to converse in English properly. Jason de Jong's accent closely resembles the accents of many Dutch anglophones which tend to somewhat miss to velarize /l/, and his dipthongs are close to Amsterdam Dutch, but it's not badly delivered as opposed to those from cities close to Germany. Jason does it well, though.
Misagh's native tongue is Farsi (also called Persian). It belongs to the same family as Urdu and Dari. If you are able to study Farsi phonology, you would expect an Iranian to speak English in a style close to someone in Pakistan or Afghanistan. Their accent tends to flap or trill /l/ and /r/, /w/ tends to sound like /vh/, and they monophongitize some dipthonds like /au/ and /ou/. But in the case of Misagh, it's a little jilty but comprehensible.
That's it for now. Coming up, we'll be knowing about the accents of our full-blood Filipino players. We'll scrutinize the Hiligaynon accents of Chieffy Caligdong and Ian Araneta, the Sugbuanon glides of Paolo Pascual, the Manilenyo Tagalog of Christopher Camcam and many more. So, stick around, fans!
KENNETH
