Linguistic Profiling Quiz

I thought that the quiz was really interesting. After the first one, I thought that it was going to be really easy because I knew right away that the first speaker was African American. When I got to the third speaker, however, I was shocked at how hard it was. The third speaker and the first speaker were both black, but their accents were so different! The first had the accent that I am used to, with the more pronounced near open/near front vowel sounds in words like went and Mary. The third speaker was much more difficult for me to categorize because he had much more of a Caribbean accent, which is not something I'm used to. The second speaker was a caucasian male, and he was actually kind of difficult for me to; I had to listen to it a few times. I think it's because he had a bit of an accent that I'm not really used to, so I wasn't sure whether it was a white man with an accent from somewhere else in the country or someone of a different ethnicity. The fourth and fifth speakers were also hard for me to guess, I couldn't really hear their accents, but I was immediately able to guess that the sixth speaker was latino. When he said the "o" sound in snow and go, it had more of a "u" sound in it as well which really stood out to me. The seventh and tenth speakers were very easy for me to pinpoint because I recognized the middle eastern and indian accents. The eighth speaker was also pretty obviously a black man. He did some of what I said earlier about having the near open/near front vowel more prominent in words like went and Mary, but he also seemed to cut off the ends of some of his words which, for me at least, tipped me off. In some ways I thought that the accents would be much easier to figure out than they were. I was very surprised at how much trouble I had with some of them, but to me that just goes to show how used to many accents I've become, that they don't even really sound that different to me anymore.