SunriseChampion
Senior Member
Yup....battery. I say ray-djoh and choon as well. Toronto accent and all.
What on earth is a batchry???
What is this thread really about? I don't know what Toronto you people live in but, where I live, the only similar accent I hear is a complete mashup of various attempts at a common language.
I was born in Belleville and grew up in Scarborough and have lived in Toronto, Ottawa, and Pickering since. Every time I travel to other parts of Canada I'm asked where I'm from. When I answer "Toronto" I get comments about how I have an accent....an overseas accent.
Makes me laugh.
I just speak in a way I think English is spoken....kind of like the other 2,699,000 other Torontonians do.
If there is a Toronto accent, it is most probably a mash up of various English accents that varies from person to person. That is to say, there is none.
I can't even begin to tell anymore if a person I meet is foreign-born or not.
... when I hear anglophones from Montreal speak English, I always feel like they're speaking English with a French accent, even though they're not.
I agree. Nobody says that in the local dialect. Sounds a little brit-wannabe put on.
It very well may be (I did say my friends and I talk to each other as if we were in Brixton), but that's my point.
When it IS the way one speaks ALL the time then it is, simply, the way one speaks. I don't consciously decide I'm going to pronounce it "batchry"; I just do. And I'm a local.
This is why I don't know how a common pan-Torontonian accent could exist at this time in history. Sure, there may be linguistic commonality within certain socioeconomic, ethnic, and subcultural (my peers and I, for example) groups; but a common Toronto accent of significance?
I'd be glad to be proven wrong.
We already know the Canadian accent is pretty consistent across Canada based on the map of North American English. For a recent example of this, you need only watch Big Brother Canada--they're from Vancouver, Toronto, the East Coast, and they all sound pretty much the same.
As I said, everywhere I travel in Canada, I am asked where I'm from and told I have a peculiar accent. The only places this hasn't happened are in south-central and southwestestern Ontario.
Though I'm frequently asked where I'm from in south-central and southwestern Ontario - and although English is my native language, as an immigrant, I don't have a local accent.In a region where 50% of the population was born elsewhere it's little wonder that nobody here bats an eye when hearing a 'peculiar' accent.
The majority of kids that I hear downtown sound like depicted in the link below. It's an accent that's very distinctly Torontonian.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAFGxKou-Dg