A question to specialists

[leebow]

Hi, I have a question to the pros. There is a new video that popped up recently. I find that the male narrator has a peculiar way of speaking. Is it possible to narrow down the regional pronunciation specifics? Is the male narrator a native North American English speaker, or is English his second language? The link follows. It is not clear who produced this video. I wonder if your analysis could give any clues. Thank you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQJkNc88ijA

[Daniel]

The information posted on the page is in Russian, and the narrator has a detectable non-native accent in his speech that sounds like a Russian accent to me (mostly in the vowels). I would assume this is the case. As for dialect, it sounds more like a North American accent than British accent, setting aside the Russian influence.

[leebow]

Thank you for your response. That's what I thought. He says "Chicago" like a Chicago-area native, at the same time he had some British notes and strange i in "it is". I'm not a linguist, that's why looking for a confirmation.

I don't mean to be a pain, but when you say that you assume that it's Russian accent, are saying this because it's posted from a Russian-named account and most of the comments are in Russian? If there were no comments and the account name was not indicative of Russian origin, would you still say it is Russian accent?

[Daniel]

Probably. The Russian text just makes me more confident/specific in that guess.

The vowels, and specifically palatalized consonants before vowels, sound distinctly Slavic, if not Russian specifically.

However, it is not a VERY strong accent compared to some. It's obviously non-native to me, but it's not hard to understand or particularly "foreign" sounding.

Notes:
1. I'm a native speaker of American English.
2. I've studied Russian and know some Russians. (I don't know that this would be obviously "Russian sounding" to someone who doesn't know the language a bit. Probably to most linguists, but to some/many non-specialists it might just sound vaguely non-native.)