Speech impediment

Chris has an unusual manner of speaking, thanks in part to his Southern US accent and dialect, and in part to a genuine speech impediment. It appears to have worsened over time — he spoke clearly and normally in his older videos, while he frequently stutters in more recent ones. This could possibly be attributed to the "stress" he's endured through dealing with the trolls, or the fact that he doesn't speak with other people as regularly he did when he was in college and high school.

Chris's problems in verbal communication potentially stem from either the extended period of "muteness" he went through during his childhood (purportedly lasting from the age of one and a half years old to seven) or his autism, a disorder which often results in speech difficulties. One should note that what he types on the internet generally tends to be significantly more coherent and grammatically correct than how he speaks. This may indicate that while writing, he has more time and freedom to determine what he says. Given the many and varied glaring errors in the Sonichu comics, one can guess just how coherent his speech is.

Classes

Non-Impediment Words

Many of Chris-chan's abbreviations are common in Southern accents and speech in general. "Y'all," "'em," "gee-tar," "givin'," and so on are uttered by many lucky people who aren't Chris. These may sound strange to listeners who aren't familiar with the dialect, but if Chris's only verbal problem were dropping the occasional g or l, there wouldn't be a "speech impediment" article.

He also grossly mispronounces names, e.g. "Fills-eye-mez" and "Mayamoto", but this is easily explained as Chris being sub-literate, not knowing how to pronounce non-English names and being a stupid American in general.

Likely Impediments

Chris's diction is very staggered. He fills up dead space with "Um"s and "uh"s, or, when attempting to be sweet/romantic, "hmmmm"s, and likes to pause and take deep breaths to break up sentences. Deep breaths and pauses are a training method for people with speech impediments, so it is obvious that he has some difficulty there, especially considering all the other crap that makes him so hard to understand. The worst of it is his occasional tendency to forget what he's talking about in the space of one of his pauses, and to continue rambling on a completely different subject, or occasionally the same subject with some key piece of information omitted. This is a pronounced problem in the Official Videobooks, where he'll lose his place and skip lines of dialogue, only to continue like nothing happened.

Chris can't seem to pronounce the letter "X" and related sounds very well, pronouncing it more like the German "Esszett," or double-S (ß, also known as "long s"). Thus we have Chris complaining about how homosetssuals are wearing Atsse body spray, or slurring "actually" into something like "azhally". Besides that, he tends to mash phrases into lumpy, assorted-candies-melted-together blobs that sound sort of like English while also sounding like his tongue is just flopping around in his mouth without actually communicating anything. Could one easily figure out that "buhBUHbyenose" is meant to be "but if anybody knows"? Another fan favorite is "Ensykapeia Dramakka paysh". Even worse are when he mispronounces words in ways that veer way out of the "Southern accent" excuse zone. Southerners cut off a lot of g's, but they're not precisely known for mixing up r's and w's as with "rell-wested" (well-rested) and "rishes" (wishes).

At some point, trying to find a pattern in how Chris mispronounces words, adding consonants to some words and taking them away from others, becomes futile. It's safe to say these are full-blown impediment issues. Combine all this with a constant stammer and you have the reason why there are so many videos without transcripts.

During the conversation with Kacey's dad, Chris claimed to pause before speaking in order to "spellcheck" what he is saying. This implies that Chris needs to consciously plan what he is going to say or else he is unable to say it; this suggests that Chris's difficulty with speech stems from poor contact between the speech centers of his brain and his cerebellum, a common characteristic of autism. It is also interesting in light of the fact that Chris clearly doesn't spellcheck his written work.

See Also

Chris and English