Elon Musk is one of the brightest personalities of the XNUMXst century. Engineer, entrepreneur and millionaire with just unimaginable ideas. PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX are all his creations, and the businessman is not going to stop at just a few projects that have become world-wide successful. He inspires millions of people with his example and proves that even one person is quite capable of changing the world for the better.
Elon Musk speaks a lot at conferences and seminars, gives interviews and leads social networks. And many of his fans have noticed that his English is somewhat different from classic American.
In this article, we will analyze in detail the English language of Elon Musk, his accent and pronunciation of words. We will also analyze how the English speech of a businessman has changed over the past 20 years. So let's go.
Elon Musk's accent: South African or American?
Elon Musk spent his childhood in Pretoria, the capital of the Republic of South Africa. English is the official language in South Africa, so it is taught in school and widely used in everyday life.
The influence of the Afrikaans language on the development of English in South Africa is rather insignificant, but in terms of pronunciation and articulation of words, it is still felt.
At the start of his business career, Elon Musk had a classic praetorian accent. This is especially evident in the early videos with him.
Around 1999, Musk came to fame and fortune. The PayPal payment system, of which he is a co-founder, has gained worldwide distribution in just a year of development.
The video clearly shows how Elon Musk says. And his southern accent is clearly visible, which was only slightly smoothed out from living in Canada (in 1999, the entrepreneur was still living in Canada).
It is noteworthy that Musk's accent cannot be called completely southern. There is a lot of American in it.
For example, a very noticeable feature of the South African accent is the pronunciation of the diphthong "ai" in such words as life, light, fight. In the American version, they are all pronounced with [aɪ]: [laɪf], [laɪt], [faɪt].
You can listen to the sound of words with a classic American accent .
In Southern English, [aɪ] often becomes [ɔɪ], as in annoying or toy.
But in Elon Musk's speech, the words light and life sound familiar to the American ear. You can hear it in the video above.
Musk uses the typical American [r], in which the tip of the tongue is stationary and does not vibrate. In the South African accent, they often say a harder percussive [r], which sounds closer to Russian. It's all about the peculiarities of the pronunciation of this sound in Afrikaans - there it is harder than in English.
The American pronunciation of the sound [r] in Musk is explained very simply. The hard [r] is predominantly spoken by South Africans, who have Afrikaans as their native language and English as their second. Elon has the opposite: English is his native language, and Afrikaans is his second.
In addition, the influence of living in Canada and then in the United States changed Musk's language quite a lot.
Now we will analyze those features of the South African accent that have been preserved in Musk's speech to this day.
Absence of pauses in words and swallowing of sounds
One of the remarkable features of South African English is the high rate of speech and the almost complete absence of pauses between words.
If in British English pauses are clear, in American they may be absent in the pronunciation of articles or interjections, then in South African a whole sentence can be pronounced in one breath, without pauses at all.
Elon Musk has a very fast spoken language. He hardly pauses between words. And because of this, he simply does not pronounce many sounds. Let's just take an example.
In the word have, a businessman often lets out the sound [h], so instead of [hæv] it turns out ['æv]. At the same time, significant nouns that begin with the letter h always have a sound.
Musk also often swallows vowels in articles and pronouns. The, that, their and similar. In rapid speech, he drops the vowel and pronounces the word along with the next.
I worked in the paint shop ... - I worked in the paint shop.
00:00:39The phrase "I worked in the paint shop" Musk pronounces in one motion. It turns out the following: [aɪ wɜrkɪn' z'peɪnʃɑp].
You can clearly hear that in the phrase "worked in" Musk omitted the ending "-ed", which is why "worked in" is heard exactly as "working". At the same time, the article “the” is reduced almost completely - only the sound [z] remains from it, which sounds like a prefix of the next word. It is [z], not [ð] or [θ]. Also, in the merger of the words “paint shop”, the sound [t] fell out.
Similar abbreviations are typical for American English, but on a smaller scale.
It is noteworthy that this can only be heard in Musk's interviews, during which he speaks emotionally. In stage performances, there are practically no such sound mergers.
Frequent use of sound [z]
In the South African accent, [z] (as in zip or zebra) is often used instead of [s].
Elon Musk does this too. And not only in ordinary speech, but even in the name of his company - Tesla.
In American English, Tesla would be pronounced as [ˈtɛslə]. The British often pronounce the [s] sound in this word as a double - this is also acceptable.
Musk pronounces the company name as [ˈtɛzlə], through [z]. This fact still surprises both the British and Americans, so Lesley Stahl, a well-known journalist for the American television channel CBS, asked Musk a direct question about how exactly he pronounces the word Tesla. And he confirmed that after all through z.
This replacement of [s] with [z] is one of the features of the southern accent. And Elon Musk still hasn't gotten rid of it.
Compare English Elon Musk in 1999 and 2020
If we compare the available recordings of Elon Musk's speech in 1999 and 2020, it will be clear that his English has become more American. If in 1999, subjectively, his speech was 60% South African and 40% American, now it is 75% American and only 25% South African.
Changes in Ilon's English cannot be called too serious, but still they are.
In 1999, Elon spoke most of the vowels through his nose. This "nasal" pronunciation is very common in South Africa. In 2020, there is no trace of this. The intonation in modern interviews is entirely American. There is a suspicion that after worldwide success came to him, Musk was specially engaged in stage speech in order to competently speak at conferences and seminars.
In everyday life and in informal interviews, intonations from his southern accent slip through him, but in speeches in front of an audience they are not.
Also, Elon no longer “okays” in such words as “most”, “cost”, “got”. In 1999, he spoke all these words through [ɔ:]. This can be clearly heard on the recording from 1999 at the very beginning of the article. Mo-ost, co-ost, go-ot - these words sound something like this. Now they are quite American, through [ɒ]: [mɒst], [kɒst], [gɒt].
As for the vocabulary, there are practically no changes. Elon Musk did not use South African English slang in both 1999 and 2020. He uses neologisms and scientific slang a lot, but this is part of his profession.
In general, you can see how much Elon Musk's accent has changed in 20 years. And it is quite understandable, because for these 20 years he has mainly been living and working in the United States. Even if the entrepreneur did not consciously work to Americanize his speech (and we still think he did), his English today is much more American than South African.
We see from the example of many famous personalities that in order to create the desired accent, it is important to immerse yourself in the full ecosystem of the English language. That is what we have implemented in EnglishDom. This gives excellent results - after 3 months of classes, students from the "London Is the Capital of Great Britain" move on to the correct pronunciation with a classic British or American accent. All products of our ecosystem are just below.
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Source: habr.com