Why are Americans LOUDER

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

Is it particular to the accent, or the culture, or both?

I always feel like a dithering hermit dipshit whenever there's an American or Canadian around. Everything they say seems assertive, fully formed and really mother-fucking loud.

[hamfist]

it's confidence I suppose. they teach it in them high schools they have over there.

[Cuellar]

More space over there, everyone stands further away from each other just because they can.

[wooders1978]

Had this in the boozer earlier - an American guy who was obviously a colleague to the, I suspect, less senior Brits in the pub was having a perfectly reasonable chat about trying to get his head round school uniforms for his kids cost loads more over here - apart from the fact he appeared to be addressing the entire pub with his voice volume

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

it's confidence I suppose. they teach it in them high schools they have over there.

Even the introverted ones are VERY CLEARLY SPOKEN

[DrGreggles]

They're louder because they have to talk over other Americans in order to be heard.

[manticore]

Is it particular to the accent, or the culture, or both?

I always feel like a dithering hermit dipshit whenever there's an American or Canadian around. Everything they say seems assertive, fully formed and really mother-fucking loud.

I respectfully dispute this, though not from a position of great knowledge. In my limited experience one of the biggest gripes Canadians have with the US people is their loudness. I witnessed it once with my Canadian girlfriend in a restaurant when an American academic was regaling the colleagues at his table in a dominating voice that filled the whole bloody place. My friend isn't especially averse to her neighbours on the continent, but in this case she didn't disguise her utter distain for a certain variety of them.

I really like the way a lot of Canadian men speak, it makes them sound like very gentle spirits, even if they're actually axe-murderers. Find it harder to distinguish the manner of speech of US and Canadian women though.

[Pijlstaart]

It is a personal choice, you can be as loud as you please, and if I so deemed, I should be the loudest one in the room. "Boy-knee sanders, boy-knee sanders, you sunnavabitch, get offa muy syrup bush, fuuurrrrghh". I can pass as one of them now. They sound odd, and that oddness makes them seem louder because they stand out. If you feed them or kiss them then they'll stop talking, or you can just run upwind of them, and all three options work equally well. It is not a problem, and indeed people who talk quietly are a bigger problem. I  lost a game of quasar because the quasar man was too quiet to explain how the quasar guns worked. He just mumbled, and I lost the quasar. Quiet people are craven and untrustworthy, like me, whilst a loud man is open and honest.

[mrpupkin]

Look closely, they all have tiny little ears

[Spoon of Ploff]

Perhaps Americans have no interest in perfecting the art of standing in queues and muttering about how shocking it is they don't open another till in such a way that only the people within a couple of feet to them can hear?

[biggytitbo]

They have to shout because they're such a long way away, I'm surprised we can hear them at all.

[Chollis]

Better orthodontics from a young age. Straighter teeth and properly formed jaws means clearer, louder and more confident speech.

[up_the_hampipe]

Probably freedom. And liberty.

[Norton Canes]

I guess 70 years of bossing the rest of the world around gives you a certain entitlement

[yesitsme]

It's been my observation that the further people are from their home the louder they speak, as if they're trying to communicate with their townsfolk over the wind.

Like the woman who turns up on the second day of your holiday and proceeds to clear the pool area around here by letting everyone know she's from Adele, or Boycott or McGuigan.

Australians - see, those noisy bastards can't speak in a volume lower than that of a food blender, they also cram in more talking by bantzing up every word they say.  Cunts.

The Irish too.  When they're asking Connor where Connor, Connor and Connor are I'm surprised Conner himself doesn't just reply 'I'm here, 400 miles away.'

I'll tell you what American's can't do - use a knife and fork.  it's either hold them both like daggers and use them to pin'n'tear the food apart or they cut everything up in to bite size chunks, then put the knife down and from then on it's fork all the way.

Like you would cut up a sausage for a two year old.

[kittens]

nothing wrong with cutting up your food before you eat it. do all the work, enjoy the meal. absolutely no advantages to cutting it up as you go.

[Bhazor]

Land is so cheap they're used to big rooms. Like that Fry and Laurie dining table sketch.

[Cuellar]

I tell you what does mystify Americans in this country (UK), and I'm with them 100% actually, is why places DON'T slice your pizza.

I mean I know shitehouses like Dominos do, but restaurants etc.

[yesitsme]

I tell you what does mystify Americans in this country (UK), and I'm with them 100% actually, is why places DON'T slice your pizza.

I mean I know shitehouses like Dominos do, but restaurants etc.

How is the restaurant to know how hungry you are?  You might be starving and want 8 slices or not be too hungry and just want four?

TWBBIFICPA Jason McAteer.

[remedial_gash]

nothing wrong with cutting up your food before you eat it. do all the work, enjoy the meal. absolutely no advantages to cutting it up as you go.

Bollocks!

When you cut up food before you shovel it in your savage gob you're creating more surface area and thus it goes cold quicker.

If you like America so much, why don't you just marry it?!

[Endicott]

I tell you what does mystify Americans in this country (UK), and I'm with them 100% actually, is why places DON'T slice your pizza.

I mean I know shitehouses like Dominos do, but restaurants etc.

Because in a restaurant you're not supposed to pick it up, you use a knife and fork. Yanks don't know how to do that, as detailed a couple of posts ago by that yesitisme fella.

[Thomas]

I would like to formally reject all stereotypes, for they are lazy and divisive and provide the foundation for serious devastation, encouraged in ordinary people by powerful, wealthy vanguards of suffering and their propagandic allies in pervasive right-wing media.

Anecdotally, however, I lived with an American for a while last year, and she was VERY LOUD, which she apologetically acknowledged and described as a national characteristic. She said it.

[PlanktonSideburns]

Only know a californian one, pretty quiet

THAT'S FUCKED THAT EH LADS, PRETTY EMBARRASSING FOR YOU LOT EH

[shiftwork2]

On holiday and there's loads of them.  Can't dislike them though, and I have tried.

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

Re: Canadians being quieter, I wish I could say that was my experience but living with 4 of them and meeting their friends, they were all without fail hugely noisy and the simple act of conversing seemed to turn into a shouting competition to be heard over one another.

[Twed]

Not all Americans are loud. There are a few I, a middle-class softly-spoken Brit, have to help 'speak up' when ordering etc.

Many of them are indeed loud and of course you notice those. But again, they're the same species as you and it only requires minor adjustment to 'get'. They just seem out of place in a foreign environment, where they are being louder anyway.

I think a large number of Americans are loud because they have less hangups about comportment. They bluster loudly because they aren't constantly analysing their own conduct. These tend to be the worst Americans, the mini-Trumps, but some of them are alright despite this. Americans are generally better at addressing an audience, although their material is far more surface-level and less engaging (to me) because of it.

[maett]

They just seem loud because we understand English. They're no louder than the Chinese or Italians or the deafening South Korean men in bars once they've had a few. But because I haven't a fucking clue what any of them are on about I blank it out.
I'll also add that we don't notice the quiet ones because they're quiet and they are the ones we should be keeping our fucking eyes out for.

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

I don't need to understand another language to understand what is loud and what isn't. Those Korean cunts can shut it as well, wherever they are. Korea probably.

[Kishi the Bad Lampshade]

I think it's not just volume, there's something specific with the frequency or the nasality or something.

[manticore]

I think it's not just volume, there's something specific with the frequency or the nasality or something.

This may not be the same thing, but there was a period, about 20-30 years ago, when every other American man I saw on TV seemed to speak through his nose in a manner I found irritating to the ears, partly because I used to speak like that and I hated it. Then they just seemed to stop doing it.

One of the great unremarked mysteries of recent history, and biggy really should get on to it.