The Gheorghe List: Accents of the English-Speaking World

I've been down a rabbit hole for several weeks thanks to Jacinda Ardern.

The former Prime Minister of New Zealand announced her resignation on January 19 after five and a half years in office. In normal eras, the affairs of the Kiwi government wouldn't register much in these parts, but Ardern was noteworthy because of her age (when she took office at 37, she was the youngest head of state in the world) and her acclaimed handling of a number of major crises, including the Christchurch shooting and the COVID-19 pandemic.

While Ardern is certainly worthy of acclaim, I didn't get sucked in by the political moment. Rather, the occasion meant that I heard a lot of Kiwi accents on various newscasts. And so the rabbit hole in question had a soundtrack of liltingly transformed vowels.

[This bit with Stephen Colbert and Ardern has a lot of Colbert's American non-accent, too, but it's quite amusing.]

As I was digging in on New Zealand's accents, I stumbled across a really interesting series of videos curated by Erik Singer, an American dialect coach. In them, he and several other experts travel across the country virtually, slipping effortlessly in and out of regional accents while explaining the linguistic and historical intricacies of our American (and a bit of Canadian) tapestry of speech. It's fascinating, and if you dig diphthongs, glottal stops, and vowel shifts, these videos are for you. (Singer also bears more than a passing resemblance to Carbon Leaf lead singer and noteworthy FOGTB Barry Privett.)

The most fascinating bit of the first video is historian, linguist, artist, and teacher (polymath, really) Sunn m'Cheaux's exposition on the Geechie language of the Gullah people, which remains largely intact in parts of the lowcountry South. I think it strikes me so much because it's such a distinctly different version of English than the ones I encounter on a regular basis. As a Virginian descended from New Englanders who grew up in Alabama for a spell and who's spent a lot of time in Minnesota over the past decade, I've heard a lot of American English. I have not, however, heard many native Gullah speak. Or in the case of m'Cheaux's video below, sing.

I made a list of the accents I find the most appealing, and then stumbled across this article from the New Zealand Herald celebrating the fact that the nation's accent had been deemed the sexiest in the world in a poll conducted by Big 7 Travel in April 2019. The poll's top three (Kiwi, South African, and Irish) were all among my top five, so I'm either totally conformist, or clearly able to tap into the zeitgeist. The latter, I think.

Without further ado, then, here's the definitive Gheorghe List of the top five English accents in the known world:

1. New Zealand/Kiwi

2. Irish

3. South African

4. Jamaican

5. Nigerian

Honorable Mention (and a nod to Mr. KQ's wise counsel) - here's Len Pennie reciting a poem she wrote to support Scottish sports.