For the record, "188,000 views on TikTok" is not that many for a single video to reach, let alone an entire search term's worth of videos.
As a zoomer reading this article I can tell you this very literally boils down to "funny voice = funny joke" and you could just as easily swap out the british accent for a Kermit impression. The popularity of british reality TV has exposed the young americans that watch it to funny sounding british slang (e.g. "fanny flutters") and now those sayings are making their way into jokes.
I promise you no one except for the Miami content creators and former reality TV cast members quoted in the article are slipping into British accents at Burger King.
If anything that data point proves that this isn't a trend. I searched "funny elbow" and saw more than 188k views. In other words "fake british accent" is less of a trend than "funny elbow," which is two random words I put together.
It's interesting how much reporting about TikTok depends completely on the audience having zero exposure to TikTok.
I’m so glad we’ve moved on from the journalism of “here’s what 3 or 4 people are talking about on Twitter” to “here are a few videos on TikTok with barely any views starting a massive trend”. Can’t wait for the journalists to fully automate this process with chatGPT.
This reminds me of those trashy articles like the ones Microsoft peddles on their Windows 11 widgets tab. They basically take a few tweets with just a handful of likes and create an entire article around them. The buzz that they are drumming up feels artificial and contrived. And if the author was really lacking in integrity, they could just set up anonymous Twitter accounts and conjure up the posts themselves.
But the data point is just wrong or poorly described. Did you really just test one side (the "funny elbow") and compare it to the possibly very different thing from the article. A search for "fake British accents" brings up multiple videos with >100000 likes each and significantly more such than for funny elbow.
True story. My daughter watched way too much Harry Potter growing up (2004-2012 ish). Some of her friends parents and teachers, etc. were surprised by my lack of a British accent. We still laugh about it.
British accents are heavily localized and class-based. I don't even know what a fake British accent means honestly. People in GB can spot an accent and a fake localized accent quite easily, and act accordingly.
I think Americans are just parroting pop culture from GB, and doing their best to sound, I dunno: posh or proper or whatever. It would be like someone in Kent trying to sound like a Wyoming cowboy. As the kids say: cringe.
This has had precedent. Years ago during the silver screen era there was a accent that most major movie stars had called the transatlantic accent, it has some elements of British and also American sounds.
Also for some reason I do not understand almost all US reality shows and other entertainment(contestant based shows mainly) have to have someone British judging Americans like we are incapable of having our own citizens be makers of taste or standards.
The History of English podcast just released a bonus episode about this. Highly recommended to anyone interested in hearing how it was historically used and how its use has changed over time.
> Also for some reason I do not understand almost all US reality shows and other entertainment(contestant based shows mainly) have to have someone British judging Americans like we are incapable of having our own citizens be makers of taste or standards.
Also, IIRC, infomercials, too.
I think America has some longstanding cultural assumptions that Europe is more culturally refined/upper class/fashionable. Probably dating from when America was mostly hick farmers and Europe had all that royalty setting trends. Throwing in a superfluous European accent is an easy way to hook into those assumptions.
My grandparents had this accent. It was contextual, they didn't use it with us but I did hear it come out when they would talk to certain friends or tell stories and voice characters.
And then my grandparents on my other side had thick Bronx and Queens accents respectively. I think there were a lot more variations in region and class specific accents 50+ years ago.
I've thought about trying to learn the transatlantic accent just for fun but wonder when/if I could use it. It doesn't have the same humor that the fake posh British ones do.
> I think Americans are just parroting pop culture from GB
Yes - a new "cool brittania" era, this time mostly via TV and TikTok/Youtube rather than music.
I consider this harmlessly funny, it's the reverse of the ubiquitousness of Americanisms everywhere and the extent to which non-English speakers usually have Americanish accents.
(Long ago, US East Coasters used to adopt high class English accents for much the same reason, and there is still what's called a "mid Atlantic" accent).
I thought Mid Atlantic was a completely fake accent taught to radio and movie actors because of better fidelity with the recording equipment of the day
> I think Americans are just parroting pop culture from GB, and doing their best to sound, I dunno: posh or proper or whatever
That contradicts the article. They’re imitating the Essex and regional accents they hear on love island and x-factor and TikTok. Unlike previous generations that probably heard ‘posh’ or cockney accents, Gen-Z are more likely to have heard Millie-B rapping than Alan Rickman in a movie.
For whatever reason that accent seems easier for US people. My wife can do a killer imitation of a Love Island-like girl but neither of us can do anything resembling the accents on the more posh side without it turning into caricature quickly. We used to watch a lot of British panel shows.
> I think Americans are just parroting pop culture from GB, and doing their best to sound, I dunno: posh or proper or whatever
Agreed with your take, but there is another reason as well - just the whole "rubbing off" effect.
I've seen quite a ton of comments in more serious/non-joke threads all across social media (including HN), talking about people from all across the western europe getting pseudo-american accents (usually something generic in-between or more general like californian, not anything like the boston one lol) from consuming so much american media. And that includes countries where english was already the de-facto primary language, such as the UK. So it seems like it goes in both directions.
Anecdotally, as someone for whom american english (and english in general) wasn't the first language (but has been the primarily used language 99% of the time for the past 15 years), I definitely get the occasional slips of pronunciation if I watch a lot of british english media. That is entirely unintentional on my part though, and I correct rather quickly and return back to the baseline in a couple of days.
With this in mind, I wonder if there is data available that plots these incidences of "fake british accents" against worldwide consumption rates of british-english-heavy media. I suspect there would be a statistically-significant correlation.
I moved to Finland, from the UK, and I can identify many of the local people as having grown up listening to American TV.
It's a little disconcerting to hear American words ("fall", not "autumn"), and New York accents from people who've spent their lives in Helsinki.
Still I come from the UK, and for me it's easy to place which part of the country people spent their formative years - sometimes even which half of a city somebody has grown up in, let alone the changes you hear across 20-25 miles.
> It's a little disconcerting to hear American words ("fall", not "autumn"), and New York accents from people who've spent their lives in Helsinki.
Why is it disconcerting? Should people adopt a British accent simply because it’s closer geographically even if most English media they consume is American?
I can recognize my bias, but I grew up in the UK and so to me English is British-English.
Words like "fall" are something I've only heard on TV until moving here. (Or when visiting America.)
I appreciate American media is global these days, so people will pick up on the dialect, but it's still a little alien to me. I could hear "fall" a hundred times in films, but if everybody I ever spoke to about autumn holidays said "autumn" that's the one that feels more natural to hear.
One child in a family of my acquaintance uses Americanisms, despite heavy correction from their siblings. I think it's a 'Netflix Effect', it's cheaper to buy USA programming than make British-English voiced programmes.
Aside, try "Scotland the What" if you're interested in some different Scottish accents (I think they're mainly Highland, Doric Scots).
Every culture that has ever existed is more nuanced than outsiders think.
I grew up in Texas and I’m a liberal who’s lived all over the country. I meet lots of people in California who’ve never left home and think people from X are like A and from Y are like B.
But put four people from any location into the same room and you’ll find plenty of differences between them.
On the one hand they do, as they certainly don't mean Cockney or Essex or Manchester.
But on the other hand they don't, because true RP is generally far too pretentious. Even in movies/TV, you see it mainly only in villains and historical dramas, or for comedic effect.
Most people are generally referring to a kind of middle-class London accent. Like Jude Law for example. Neither "posh" nor "regional" nor "lower class" nor "multicultural" (quotes for irony where necessary, obviously London is a region). I'm not sure what the name for that is though?
Estuary English [1] -- the English spoken around the Thames estuary. It has, arguably, been the "standard" non-posh British dialect for a while.
As a North American, I find it one of the harder accents to understand. It has undergone a lot of interesting sound changes in recent decades, not shared by many other dialects. Likely a result of dialect flattening from 20th century population movements. "Football" -> [ˈfʊʔbɔo] (sounds like "fuh-baoh" to me) or "bottle" -> ['bɒʔo] {"bah-oh"?) or "Tuesday" -> [tʃuːz.deɪ] ("choose day").
The Surrey accent is close what most people most people consider middle class / standard English which is close to received pronunciation, but more natural sounding. In other areas other the country it's considered posh!?
I think the average American doesn't / can't distinguish Michael Caine's Cockney accent and David Attenborough's RP. Caine's working class accent is perceived to be just as posh and sophisticated as RP, so he gets cast in the role of butlers for bat-themed billionaires, etc.
> I think the average American doesn't / can't distinguish Michael Caine's Cockney accent and David Attenborough's RP.
You really think so? Maybe it's just me, but I can't imagine how anyone could mistake the two. (Possibly different people have different ears for accents.)
I can hear them and tell that they're different accents, but I don't really distinguish them, I would call them both "British" and I wouldn't know which one's more posh.
As an American, I find it most noticeable/funny in Helen Mirren's Fast & Furious franchise role. You can tell she's having a blast putting on the intentionally worst working class accent she can (in a way that it sometimes seems like she assumes Americans aren't in on the joke and it is mostly just for herself) to fit her role as Jason Statham's "mum", and there are definite fun moments of "Is she intentionally parodying Michael Caine here?" that do give me (as an American) silly, brief moments of "Americans still think that sounds posh", plus it does serve to more directly connect Statham's accent to Caine's. I don't think a lot of Americans notice how close they are and yet do notice that Statham and Caine have very different stereotypes in American cinema.
There are ample rea$on$ why non-American actor$ can do decent American accent$.
It opens up American roles for them. Nobody is going to cast Brad Pitt as a Brit, an Australian, or a Kiwi. He's a fantastic actor, but they're going to use the homegrown talent. So there's no incentive for American actors to really learn another accent. Instead, we get a mountain of non-American actors doing mostly-good-but-sometimes-awful accents because that's where the money is.
Since you mentioned Pitt, a funny anecdote: he wanted to be in Snitch because he was a fan of Lock Stock. But his London accent was so terrible that they went and made up the whole indecipherable gypsy thing just so he could have a role to play in the film.
Not only that, but a lot of British films will make british-only casting decisions, eg the Harry Potter series. I've never heard of a major American film making that choice, and it would probably be blasted as xenophobic if it did.
Er how many American movies have a single non-American? The only foreigners that consistently find employment in American cinema are Britishers, and that’s because the British English accent is perceived to have an at least equal prestige to the American one. You’re not going to find many main characters that are, say, Middle Eastern or South Asian or African.
This isn't what the article says, however: "Gen Z has embraced bad imitations of Cockney slang or a Yorkshire dialect" and then name-checks accents acquired from Love Island and The Only Way is Essex, neither of which are known for their RP!
If it's anything like the polish who have act like an american day where they shoot fireworks and wear flags, I'd welcome them with open arms. It cracks me up. I don't think it's cringe at all.
> People in GB can spot an accent and a fake localized accent quite easily, and act accordingly.
As a Brit the only convincing fake British accent I can remember in many years is James Marsters who played Spike in Buffy. I never once suspected he was American (in the pre-internet days).
Mid-Atlantic accents such as Loyd Grossman, are hard on the ears. "Soss", rather than "sauce" is particularly odd.
And then flip it - UK actors putting on US accents. Most of them sound to me like they're from the West Country such as Somerset, just rolling their Rs.
For US readers, the currently growing new London accent is awful and nothing like the 'Cockney' accent you might expect from watching older films. I've yet to see a US actor try that.
> For US readers, the currently growing new London accent is awful and nothing like the 'Cockney' accent you might expect from watching older films. I've yet to see a US actor try that.
Multicultural London English. It's not "awful", although you are entitled to your views. Personally, I think it's great for comedy, have you heard Big Shaq's Man's Not Hot ?
Wyoming cowboy is pretty easy -- not much of a strong accent there. More challenging would be a strong Boston accent, or somewhere from the deep south.
Disclosure: British person living close to Wyoming, in Montana, so I have a fake US accent.
English people are terrible at weak and standard American accents; they sound like they're head-injured, and put 'r's at the end of works that end with 'a's. The funniest examples are French & Saunders' bad American accents (but at least they're aware that they're terrible at it.)
English people vastly prefer trying to do a sterotypical New Yawk accent because they can hide their mistakes in the extremity.
Afaict, Scots are the best at doing an American accent, followed by the Irish, followed by the Australians and the Welsh, then you get to English people.
I know a number of people who moved from across the pond that actually do American phonemes fairly well. What gives them away are minor inflections and sentence cadences that sound a little off. Hard to describe, but it makes them sound like the are trying to speak to everything “as a matter of fact” and towards the very front of their mouth. For an example, listen to Freddie Highmore in season 1 of Bates Motel.
>But Gen Z has embraced bad imitations of Cockney slang or a Yorkshire dialect, using obviously fake, theatrical voices to make light of low-grade daily dramas.
I think this is everywhere where English is more common. I live in an Indian city with many Indians (and others, including ex-pats) from all over. So, the kids default to English as the common language. Their exposure to TV/Movies of both the US and the UK influences how they speak - not just the accent but the words they use, which are, at times, not how a “common English-speaking-Indian” speaks.
And yes, my daughter grew up on Peppa Pig and had a British-ish accent. She has since mellowed and now has a more neutral accent. Her best friend is an American, but she didn’t pick up on that one.
Our family is from a remote corner of India, and we always had an accent. I grew up in a school run by a British soldier and his wife (he stayed in India after the war). In the last 20 years, I have worked primarily with American and British clients, which influenced how I talk, and I also learned a lot along the way. However, I find it hard to converse with the Scots; I am OK if I pay attention to the Australians and am highly comfortable with Jap-lish.
I now believe that there is nothing called a “fake accent.” All the third-culture kids pick up talks from all over the world, and they know the Internet colloquial more than their immediate geographical and cultural norms.
I speak three languages fluently, and I modify how I talk to make the listener understand better. The way I talk Hindi to an Indian from the north or west is different from how I speak to a South Indian. With English, not necessarily the accent, my muscle memory kicks in, which picks up and uses different ways of saying specific words and expressions depending on the listener.
It is OK to have any accent - play with it - there is nothing fake about it. :-)
If you learn a language from someone with a particular speech pattern, you'll adopt it too. That's fine, and normal.
I don't think that's what the article is talking about, though. These kids are adopting an affectation different from the way they learned the language.
Your average American kid doesn't have much, if any, access to British media or people aside from a few popular shows they might pick up online. It's not a courtesy based on context.
> Your average American kid doesn't have much, if any, access to British media or people aside from a few popular shows they might pick up online.
You really think so? The internet is today's Great Melting Pot. "Popular shows" feels out of touch. TikTok? Instagram? Discord?
When I was about 12 years old I stumbled on an internet community of hackers and programmers that was largely based out of Europe, and I still talk to them today. We often spoke over Ventrilo/TeamSpeak (today it would be Discord) and at times I would start to pick up their accents.
Based on the sample of children I know (my nephews) yes. None of them are engaging in conversations on such a regular basis with Brits that they would change their speech pattern to do so, and the media they consume is overwhelmingly not affected either.
That's not to say that they haven't ever heard a British, Scottish, Geordie or Irish accent; they definitely have not heard or used it enough to naturally inflect their speech in such a way.
Pirating taskmaster and the occasional tiktok is about as close as it gets.
I used to have a British accent, when I was a kid, but have lost it. I now have a really weird accent (or so I'm told), that involves bits of British, Southern, and New York.
Lol. Peppa Pig has been extremely popular in the US for like a decade or more now. I know for sure my young niece and nephew will randomly throw out British phrases with accent because of this show. And now Bluey with Australian accents and phrases too.
You will acquire accent different then you learned language with after being apposed to it a lot. Not perfectly, but you will "naturally" and without effort mimic it.
I really enjoyed you sharing this story, thank you. I entirely appreciate the situation you are describing, and whole-heartedly agree when you say language should be played with. It's a perspective common in post-colonial contexts and amongst third culture kids, as you note, but folk from more monolingual spaces tend to struggle to accept it (and instead they're often preoccupied with a fretful prescriptivism, as though the bastions of language shall collapse in on themselves if undefended, and we shall all revert to communicating by grunts and yelps).
(There's a whole genre of newspaper story that more or less consists of "Look! This generation are doing a thing that all the other generations did, too! How surprising!" There's always an audience for moaning about the youth of today, and apparently has been for literally millennia; ancient Roman commentators liked doing it, say).
This is just a bit of a vent (as a Gen-Z-er myself), because "I feel like" reminded my of something I've noticed in my fellow young peers:
"I was just going to say, <insert statement>." And,
"I was just going to ask, <insert question>."
This makes me sound curmudgeony, but I work with a non-negligible number of people that cannot avoid these constructions in any serious or professional setting. I'll hear it 10+ times in a half-hour meeting. It's so indirect, and I must admit I take the speaker less seriously when I notice it.
I'm guilty I think of 'I just wanted to [verb ...]' - softens what follows as if to say 'not a big deal but'. It hasn't bothered me/caught my attention particularly before now, but I'm sure it will henceforth.
I noticed someone say it at least three times in a meeting not long after writing that. Thanks a lot!
While I'm here, a similar one that does bug me (but at least for now I only hear Americans saying it, on Youtube or whatever) is 'I'm going to go ahead and [...]' or 'so I just went ahead and [...]' - why do you have to 'go ahead' before you do things over there, is there a problem with the Earth's gravitational pull?
To your first comment: I also use the “I was just going to <verb>” construction to soften a statement, I just don’t use it ubiquitously - sounds like you’re in the clear.
I haven’t thought about the going ahead/went ahead construction much. I loosely associate it with managerial talk. It does sound to my ears very subtly disingenuous. Now it’s my turn to be on the lookout for this.
Uptalk evolved to fill a social niche and is related to dialects/sociolects that commonly use "right?" or "eh?" to inter-punctuate sentences without using such filler words. (Admittedly, Valleyspeak is partly best known for different filler words so there was, like, no space for inter-punctuating sentences.)
That seems like a more organic evolution of language. It's across several generations and is not an intenional choice. It's also a bit far away from adopting an entire foreign accent.
Because they only know English. Let me explain a bit. I’m a bilingual person, since I’m not living in a English speaking country and I’m 21. They’re saying that switching accents are their defend mechanism or coping mechanism with serious situations. Well, when I say this i think I’m talking for most of the bilingual people, our defend mechanism or us “being playful” is adding some English words into the sentence or switching to English. So it is not something to be shocked
We don't know that (and the article is quite low on the quality scale expected from Guardian).
I speak three languages, and I don't see a reason to mix. Of course, you might be right, but also that's a one trick point. You will be called for being pretentious or just obnoxious.
I don't think it's anything "reasonable". Like, OK, there might be objective reasons why you need to clarify which technical term you mean by a word that has multiple meanings in your native language, and use (typically) English to clear it up.
But I think most of the time it's just seen as hip, interesting, an extra flavor (flavour?). I do this occasionally -- sprinkle a foreign phrase here and there in my native Czech when I see that it fits and the other party might get it. More if I'm drunk. Some of my friends do it as well, in some social settings a number of jokes could be foreign language references. On the other hand, some people find it infuriating, as you note.
It's taken a tabloid turn (not just in terms of the page format). It's got noticeably worse, even in the last 6 months. It's packed with "listicle" articles ("10 reasons..."), and it's moving rapidly to the right, politically.
Sometimes there is a reason to mix, when the word in one language doesn't quite match the meaning you want, but in another it does. Like, for example, in Polish "security" and "safety" are the same word ("bezpieczeństwo"), so it would become weird when you're talking about the difference between them.
But I feel like this article is about something else. We don't think in terms of words, we think in terms of phrases, and when we remember those phrases it's not just their literal meaning, but also the context, and this can include the accent they were heard in.
In the ideal world we'd just play the sample that we have in the head, but we don't have that yet.
It's recognizable and easy enough to fake, at least to the degree that another American would recognize it as British English. Most people would not recognize a (say) New Zealand or South African accent, much less be able to replicate it.
It's also interesting that it's always a "posh" British accent: nobody ever fakes Cockney or Scouse or something.
> nobody ever fakes Cockney or Scouse or something
The article specifically refers to faking an "Essex" accent. The Essex accent they're referring to is basically a cockney accent, softened a bit. When East London was gentrified, from roughly the 70s, many East Londoners moved out into Essex.
The average American would likely fail to identify all but the most exaggerated Canadian accent (adding "eh?" to the end of every sentence). That's why we're constantly shocked when Hollywood blockbuster actors are Canadian.
My limited experience is that differences inside these two countries (e.g. New Foundland accent to Winnipeg accent, or Texas to Boston) are way bigger than averaged difference between countries (i.e. Manitoba to Minnesota). Most "Canadian" English is broadly similar to most "American" English, especially the standardized TV / Movie kind.
Yes. Central Canada is where 'eh' is said the most; I say and hear it a lot. Atlantic Canada certainly has the most distinctive dialect, and you can immediately hear it's gaelic roots. When a Canadian accent is being poked fun at, it's usually an extreme version of how the prairie provinces speak.
Then splash in some Quebecoise and that will really diversify things. Much of rural Quebec may not even speak English altogether. But you can tell the difference between Quebec French and France French pretty easily, with the latter sounding smoother. I've never been out west but I assume that BC and Alberta is the most 'normal' of the Canadian differing accents.
Even Ontario has regional accents, Toronto/Southern vs Eastern/Ottawa valley vs northern/western. I can't describe the differences but if you blindfolded me and had three different people speak, I'm pretty sure I could pick who is from where.
> I've never been out west but I assume that BC and Alberta is the most 'normal' of the Canadian differing accents
If Linus Tech Tips is anything to go by, this tracks. All of their hosts have very "generic American" sounding accents. They are very very close to Washington state which doesn't have a strong accent in my experience. Contrast this with Minnesota or northern Michigan and how "similar" they sound to the stereotypical Canadian accent.
Linus has a bit of a Valley Girl sometimes and wholly acknowledges it.
I once stopped in a small town in New Brunswick a couple hours drive south of the Quebec border. To my surprise, not only did they all speak French there, but the people we were trying to order lunch from didn't speak a word of English. I never realized that there were French-speaking places that far into New Brunswick.
I had an easier time communicating even in smaller towns in Quebec, where it seemed that most people were capable of speaking a little English, even if they spoke French all the time.
Midwestern accents seem to have a lot of Canadian influence and vice-verse. Of course, we’re nearby friendly countries, it would be weird if we didn’t share some accents.
A lot of British television is popular on streaming here, and there is very little Australian television.
Canadian accents are largely indistinguishable from the generic American "TV accent" aside from a few specific sounds and vocabulary choices. If you go into the Boonies of Canada you hear more distinctive ones, but those are more like regionalisms, you don't hear them as much in the media.
Because Hollywood has been promoting* that accent.
* Review films made in the past 2 decades (that’s roughly when I began noticing the trend). Invariably, an English accent is used to imply authority or superiority (of some kind). Why this is happening in American movie industry is unknown to me but that it has been going on is clear for me.
Some British accents have implied a sort of eliteness in the US for much more than a couple decades. See the transatlantic accent. By the late 19’th century it a widespread enough sentiment that we made up an accent to copy it.
Americans used to have an inferiority complex vis-a-vis Europe (in general) and English. WWII put an end to that. People the world over started aping Americans, including the English. It is (strangely) after US decides to officially be ‘an empire’ that our propaganda organs started speaking posh language. (No one :) affects a cockney accent, ey?)
Personally, I have no idea what makes a Canadian accent, and the only Australian one I can think of is over-exaggerated Steve Irwin. British accents on the other hand are pretty common in TV/movies.
Because stereotypically British aren’t seen as very threatening people, they sound quite docile really. There’s also a lot of exposure to British accents in popular media compared to the others.
I've known a bunch of Canadians, and the ones who aren't French Canadians sound mostly identical to Americans. There's a few different words and pronunciations, but unless you stumble into those during a conversation, it's very hard to tell.
The pronunciation of "Gloucester" (gloster) and "Leicester" (lester) follow a similar scheme for the "-cester" bit which leads to "Worcester" being pronounced "wooster", but Worcestershire sauce is often pronounced "wooster sauce" which doesn't make much sense.
Apparently, Frome in Somerset is one of the hardest place names to pronounce in England, though it certainly doesn't compare to some Welsh towns. (I say it as "froom")
I think the sauce is either Worcestershire Sauce, or Worcester Sauce, either is acceptable.
Worcestershire and Worcester follow the same patter as Gloucestershire/Gloucester, Leicestershire/Leicester and (Towcestershire doesn't exist)/Towcester. Towcester, incidentally, being the same pronunciation as "toaster".
The one that annoys me is Cirencester, which is usually "sai-ren-ses-ta", and only occasionally "sai-ren-ster".
I like the Northamptonshire village of Cogenhoe, which is obviously pronounced cook-no.
It sits on the River Nene, which is pronounced Neen or Nen depending on which bit of Northamptonshire you live in (Northamptonshire is not very big...)
It amuses me when english words are pronounced differently to make them seem posher. We have a nearby town called Yate (rhymes with gate), but the posh version rhymes with latte.
"That's just incorrect. It's pronounced "wooster-shuh". The double-O is short, as in "book". Worcestershire Sauce is sometimes simply called "woosters", as in "a dash of woosters".
> Frome in Somerset is one of the hardest place names to pronounce
Hardly. It's pronounced "froom". That's not so hard.
>There’s a town in Massachusetts called Worcester, pronounced something like Wooster/Woostah/Woostuh.
And there's a Gloucester[0] (pronounced 'Gloster' or, more likely in MA 'Glostah') there as well. And there's one[1] in Virgnia too, (Wikipedia says it's pronounced 'Gloster', but I don't know the VA accent well enough to know if that's locally correct).
There are other similar place names around the US, mostly on the eastern seaboard, for obvious reasons, as well.
The pronunciation is what it is. The orthography is the problem.
(Many words place names long pre-date any kind of attempt to regularize English spelling, and in any case come from fusions of Brythonic, Norman, Roman, Norwegian etc languages. This is why it's difficult to predict the pronunciation of one word from the spelling of another.)
Maybe, but 'we can't provide logical rules for names acquired over a millennium ago' seems like a poor reason to say 'therefore we shouldn't apply consistent rules to recent conventions'.
Someone asked about physic ... well people used to use physick in [late medieval?] British English... but that's for what we might call medicine now.
Oh, defending the pronounciation is easy, because the problem is not with the pronounciation at all -- it's all about English language spelling not keeping pace with the changes with the pronounciation.
You start with a pinch of dyslexia and end with a bit of a lisp. Pretty straight forward when you imagine what it would sound like in a game of telephone between 10 5 year olds.
I mean this in the most genuinely curious and interested way possible.... but if you're doing geometry or trig... do you refer to it as "math" because you're just doing one type of mathematics? Is there every a point where it isn't plural. Is even 2+2=4 referred to as "maths".
I think its funny that terms like math v maths come about very organically and then after the fact everyone feels the need to back into a reasoning that was likely never there. Obviously neither are wrong because they are the "correct" way for a given dialect/region etc.
> Obviously neither are wrong because they are the "correct" way for a given dialect/region etc.
I would say "math" is an objectively better shortening of "mathematics" as it preserves the singular collective meaning than "maths" which preserves more of the incidental textual form.
Here in the UK, it's just called maths or mathematics and the term "math" is never used (or at least I can't think of an example).
I find it generally amusing to examine the differences between U.S. and British English and quite often get confused over whether I should be using "licence" or "license". It's the little quirks of language/spelling that make it interesting. (Though english, I'm a big fan of some of the U.S. contractions such as "y'all'd've")
>I think its funny that terms like math v maths come about very organically and then after the fact everyone feels the need to back into a reasoning that was likely never there. Obviously neither are wrong because they are the "correct" way for a given dialect/region etc.
We Americans use the phrase "do the math," which means to go figure something out, not necessarily arithmetically.
Is there a similar phrase for the Brits? As in "do the maths?" Which seems unlikely. As such, I'd expect those using British style English to have different phrase for the same thing. Is that the case? If so, what might it be?
> That's the only correct way of contracting "mathematics"
That's the correct way of doing it if you've naturally got a British accent (or really any accent where you clearly learned British English as a second language).
Americans saying 'maths' is like dragging fingernails down a chalkboard.
True, but it always comes off as sounding a bit pretentious to me since the social norm (as far back as I can remember) has been to simply refer to it as "math".
As an American who doesn't say "maths", my assumption is that algebra is one math, geometry is another, calculus is one, discrete math is one, etc. Together, they are "the maths."
Probably a "just so" definition to satisfy my American ears. I bet they'd say that any one of those is still "maths" by itself.
I have to object to trousers - that's because it's already plural - 'a pair of trousers'; we just don't use the singular much, but trouser leg, trouser press.
You've just dredged up a memory of an educational video we watched at school years ago for Corel-Draw, which was rendered in the most Canadian accent any of us had ever heard.
A friend jammed all the drawls into a single catchphrase which he used for laughs for weeks. "The daaataaa on the staaatus baaar is made of an aluuuuminum cahhhhmpaaaund and stahred on a cd-raaaaaaahm"
I’m from New Zealand. It’s staggering how many people in the US will repeat what I say back to me in a British accent. It’s hard to be annoyed because they’re “just having fun” but my god does it get old.
Fortunately I can do a bit of California surfer dude right back and that usually gets the message across
"imitation is the sincerest form of flattery" comes to mind, though I get it's hard to take it as a compliment when it's so commonplace for you.
That said, in that moment, they're not "having fun" (in the mocking sense) they're relishing the sound of your voice and wanting to imagine a version of ourselves being uniquely interesting, like you, in the mimicry.
I get that it gets old, though, as your accent isn't novel to you.
I would imagine that part of the reason it gets old is that it isn't "your accent." It is a NZ accent after having been filtered and ruined by US ears and speech patterns.
Old joke. What do you call someone who knows three languages? Trilingual. Two languages? Bilingual. One language? American (US). Speaking as one myself...
I cannot say that your experience includes this phenomenon, but whenever people gather they tend to talk like each other, and pretty rapidly. I've found that I've a tendency to unconsciously modulate my "accent" when I'm with my in-laws in Europe, or when visiting the UK.
When I'm staying for a few days in a different part of my country (Italy) I end up switching to the local phrase construction pattern if it's notably different from my native one. Accent not so much, I guess it takes quite a long time. Words are easy to swap (like truck/lorry in English) and pronunciation quite easy too (change of vowel sounds in my case.) BTW, none of this involves speaking dialects, it's all Italian with regional differences that everybody understand.
Not in Italy. Dialects here are languages. They basically belong to the same family of Italian but I won't be able to understand a dialect 50 km from where I live if speakers don't want to italianize it a little. What I was writing about is standard Italian with regional inflections in accent, phonetic, dictionary and syntax but still understandable by any Italian speaker.
True! Almost all of my extended family lives in South Louisiana and many have quite thick Cajun accents. When I spend too much time around them, I end up sounding a bit different when I get home.
Yeah it's "accommodation". But people also do the other thing where they repeat what you say and honestly I think they're just relishing this other similar sound they enjoy.
That's great actually, because it also works for South African (I often have a hard time with SA vs NZ) - 'fish and chips' with very short 'i', like it's reluctantly put in at all, I think.
I watch a YouTube channel that frequently features a guest from New Zealand, and in every video in which he appears, different people in the background will parrot the guest after he says certain words that really show off the NZ accent. I think he's become numb to it, because he shows no reaction. I'm sure it gets very old, but hopefully it's seen as endearment. imo, it's the best accent one can have :)
Do New Zealanders ever speak with a British accent? I mean, the ones I’ve known, it seems different from a neutral American (Midwest accent) but not by much, I would be hard pressed to call them out as British or even non-Americans (well, there is one guy, but he was also born in London).
The Kiwi accent is quite different. It's certainly closer to your typical southern English accent than a US Midwestern one, but the vowel qualities and rhythm of speech are completely different from both. As somebody from Ireland, I don't have issues picking out somebody from NZ. I could understand getting a New Zealander mixed up with an Aussie if you don't notice with differences in vowel pronunciation between the two countries, but that's about it.
That said, both AU and NZ have their own "TV accents", which in AU is referred to as "Cultivated Australian", which is relatively close to British RP (though not the same), and I expect NZ has their own equivalent, but most people would have something close to what you would generally think of people from that part of the world sounding like.
In tech you'll run into at least a few during your career. If you lived in Asia, you'll probably see more than that (more common than Australians for some reason).
Uh? I get saying its resembles more of a midwest Canadian slant than sounding like pure midwest American english, but Southern English? Having lived in Mississippi and worked with plenty of New Zealanders, I don't see that.
I think the parallels that people draw with the American south are typically the northern UK, like the Scots Irish.
In terms of US-UK parallels, there's also the effect that geographical isolation has in making a sort of language "time capsule" where colonies stick with dated pronunciations or vocabulary. I've heard an attempted reconstruction of London accents from the early 1700s that sound a lot like General American or Canadian English. The same source had an early 1800s reconstruction that sounded rather Australian to my ears. One imagines that English people colonize either place at a given time, leave some trace of their time and place in speech patterns, and their relatives in England
go on to evolve speech patterns in different ways.
Non rhotacism (lack of pronunciation of R) also left some traces in the American south (and northeast). That feature began in southern England after colonization, so I believe it was generally fashionable people keeping up with the latest English trends who brought it west.
No, their accent is quite clearly identifiable as Kiwi to us Brits.
They're easy to understand, they enunciate when they speak but the intonation and inflections and general sound is very different.
As for "a British accent". Would an American say there's "an American accent"?
There is no single British accent, we have, English, Scottish, Welsh, Irish and others with their own languages (and thus accents), then in England, we have widely varying accents, many clearly identifiable to a Brit; Newcastle (Jordie), Birmingham (Brummie), Liverpool (Scouse), London (Cockney), Essex, Yorkshire, etc.
I think when people say "British" like the article in OP, they really mean what we call "posh". We do it ourselves at times, but most people don't actually speak that way.
> As for "a British accent". Would an American say there's "an American accent"?
Of course, just the same as British. "American accent" for foreigners usually means "Southern Foghorn Leghorn" e.g. Daniel Craig in Knives Out, but can also mean New York, Boston, Chicago, Dakota (aka Fargo) or some other variation. To Americans it really means "unaccented" Midwestern English, aka broadcast (radio or TV) voice.
Americans know "American accent" from "British accent" by the same standard, the British "unaccented" voice is called RP and sounds posh or overly fancy to most Brits, but Americans don't distinguish RP from Cockney, Yorkie, Jordie or any of the other variants. RP is the broadcast voice.
To be clear: I used to be the same. "British" was one accent that Michael Caine, the Queen and Chris Ramsay all spoke. (For Americans: "Robert DeNiro, Harrison Ford and Dolly Parton have one accent" is equally wrong and hilarious.)
When I'm talking to British friends they'll often repeat back what I said and exaggerate the rhoticity of my western US accent. I'll poke back with a "It's chewsday innit bruv?"
Ha. My defense is that my west coast US accent is closer to what Brits sounded like at the time of the American revolutionary war than a typical London accent is today.
I thinks it's possible with the access we both have to the other country's media via Netflix, prime, Hulu, et c., that our accents re-merge. When I was a kid, British accents were a little harder and Scottish accents were impossible, but after 15 years of Netflix, I don't even notice British accents anymore and Scottish accents are noticeable, but understandable.
When I was a kid, no way could I understand a Geordie accent. I was raised with a RP accent, but I lived in Liverpool; I could understand ordinary scouse fine.
But my mates would sometimes launch into a very broad scouse accent to tease me; I could only just understand that.
Things have changed. Nobody nowadays speaks Geordie with the very broad accent that I couldn't understand as a kid.
Yes, you hear that a lot with teenagers in the UK, especially streamers, who dont even live in the US and havent been within a 3000 miles of it. Maybe we just like each others cultures so much?
I never understood that either but that's also common for Swiss or Austrian streamers who adapt a near to perfect German even thought most people would understand them, or at least would understand a light version of their dialect.
You're elongating vowels etc. when you sing. If you sing in English you're most likely going to sound like every other English singer.
The only way you don't is if you purposely slow down your singing make it sound like your talking accent. This works with some genres (e.g. rap) but not others.
a very long time. Jeff Lynne, who has a strong Birmingham accent, sang a lot of ELO’s songs in the 70s and 80s with a noticeable American accent. Sweet Is The Night being a prime example
Without actual evidence of a significant increase in adoption of the accents (its all anecdotal here) this seems like a bit of a fluff article that is designed to reassure Brits we are still relevant and cool and influencing other cultures in a harmless way that Guardian readers can get behind.
I thought this was going to be another article about kids watching Peppa Pig. My three year old has a sort of mixed vocabulary, but mostly from watching Matilda, the Musical on repeat.
I used to watch a lot of Danger Mouse back when it aired on Nickelodeon. To this day when I do a fake British accent, unless I'm imitating someone in particular I sound a bit like Sir David Jason.
My favorite Greenback line is from "The Four Tasks of Danger Mouse". He was holding Penfold hostage in exchange for DM retrieving the components of an ancient alchemical formula to create a monster with which he could conquer the world: "I have always wanted to try the recipe, but the ingreeeeedients are so hard to come by."
The writing on that show was top tier and holds up well today.
Yeah, just finished it. It's a funny thing. My kids haven't watched a ton of Peppa Pig, but they all have managed to pickup what I'd call 'different' pronunciations and vocabulary than a lot of their peers.
Like a lot of American 'o's, 'mommy' often sounds (I don't know the IPA for it) more like 'mahmmy' to me (my British ear) - but it's presumably regional. I mean mainly from TV/film, 'valley girl' sort of accent for example: 'oh my gahd he's so haht'.
I'm struggling to think of a single word in an American accent (from American people I have listened to) that has a letter "o" pronounced correctly, as IPA "ɒ". If that's true, and Americans never learn to make that sound until they try to mimic another accent, then shouldn't this be described more as a speech impediment, rather than an accent?
But yes, it's "mahmmy", which is only very subtly different from a British "mummy" - in the American version, there's almost a hint of an "r" at the end of the vowel, whereas the British version has a straight (and short) "u".
I've always thought the difference is more pronounced with the short forms, "mum" vs "mom" (and the red underlining of the latter reminds me of my biases!). I don't think I've heard an American pronounce "mommy" though, so I can't say for certain.
It's interesting that there are a variety of English accents, with differing connotations for Americans.
YouTube channels that make informative, content-driven videos tend to demand English accents from their voice talent. For videos about nature, history, technology, geography, any content where a viewer's enjoyment and engagement will be improved by trusting the video's sincerity and veracity, (certain) English accents rule.
But the article mentions young Americans adopting (presumably different) English accents when they are aware of being insincere or demanding.
To some extent this must be down to Americans receiving English class stereotypes and internalizing them as different roles they can play.
I adjust my speech patterns based on the audience. I've done it since I was a kid. Different groups of friends speak differently and convergence ensured I wouldn't stick out as weird. It wasn't an entirely conscious decision but I've always been fully aware of it. This seems similar although more pronounced and I didn't use accents.
I hate these articles with a passion, they make me think so much less of the "news" org putting them out. Another headline I saw recently on HN that drove me nuts:
"Paper map sales are booming" [0] - with a subtitle of "Fans say physical maps—though less efficient than digital options—enhance one’s journey. Among devotees: a surprising number of millennials and members of Generation Z" - Bullshit. Subtitle should have been "as art", almost no one, especially Gen-Z is using paper maps as actual maps.
Also all the articles about "people are going back to flip/dumb phones" no they aren't. You found a handful of people who did it, half of which I doubt are still doing it 1-2 months later and you want to pretend it's a trend. It's so tiring.
So this article claims "so many ..." and cites 6 examples (I'm not counting Madonna). And maybe statistically they represent more, but I feel like this article is just someone looking to write something about nothing. I'm not on TikTok and Twitter much (just instagram), so it could be a trend and I'm just not seeing it.
Speaking of the Madonna example, I'm not sure it's fair to lump her into this because this article seems to be focusing on people who have never lived anywhere in the UK, they are just mimicking what they've heard on TV/Film. A lot of people made fun of Madonna when she started speaking with a British accent but she at least _lived_ there for a long time, and doing so can definitely affect your accent. I've known it to happen the other way around. I've had British friends who lived in the US tell me that their friends back home would make fun of them for their new Americanized accent.
My dad has been doing this since the 1950s, and I'm willing to bet his dad was since the 1910s. We're from Ireland though, is putting on a funny accent really a new thing in the us?
I was on public transportation this morning, about to reach my stop, and I needed to ask a woman who was blocking my way to the doors to please excuse me. The train was quiet, I was right behind her, and I had the feeling that I'd startle her.
As the train rolled into the station, a thought popped into my head that I've had before - a friendly British accent would be disarming in a moment like this! It was a passing thought but an organic one, so it's funny to now read this.
you thought politely asking someone to move so you could exit the train would startle them? and then you thought you might do it in a fake british accent?
Yes and yes. It's uncommon where I live to talk to people on the train - and being a bulky 6'4 male, whether I like it or not, I have a lifetime of experience that it's startling for women when I appear behind them without them realizing. It was a passing thought I found funny in the moment. I think it might say something about the reason why some segment of the population is apparently doing this.
Most British people I know in this situation would literally just say, "Sorry!", just loud enough for the person blocking hear you so that they move and reply, "Sorry!".
In general I think we don't like to converse too much, especially on public transport.
When I first visited Britain what stood out the most to me was how much chitchat there is between strangers in public places, especially on the train. Something I hadn’t witnessed anywhere else in Europe. Also, something that made me feel very inadequate as I just couldn’t keep up with that manner of communication. A Canadian friend had noticed the same.
Granted, it’s mostly the colder parts of Europe that I have the most non-tourist experiences with. So that’s that.
I don't know if it's Gen Z specific but I think people now just have a very difficult time interacting with strangers in public. It's kind of a bizarre phenomenon of the digital age.
That is quite funny I have a British accent and live in the US and I often worry that my accent comes across abrupt and un-friendly, especially in situations like that.
Forced accents have been going on for a long time with kids. Just yesterday I was watching local news from the area where I grew up and a girl from my high school years was being interviewed. In her teens, she had a non-local accent that I always envisioned as california stoner. Well apparently she was working hard faking that thing because she has a full on upstate south carolina accent now.
I think NPR had something on this on "Wait, wait, don't tell me" a while ago. Some researchers were linking it to kids watching so much Peppa Pig that they developed at least a slight British accent
I'm British and this article still made a lot of sense. I probably have "exaggerated posh" and "exaggerated cockney" modes that I use for similar reasons.
My father was instructed in no uncertain terms that if he wanted to get anywhere in the legal profession in the 1960s, he'd have to drop his Welsh accent. This was in Wales.
Guess it's the right time to smugly lean back as a continental European and point to your absolutely disgusting freeform mix of AE and BE terms, pronunciation and spelling, the only saving grace usually having decided to be consistent with o vs ou, at least in a single document or conversation :D
Also yes, I think we mostly learned Received Pronunciation in school but at least half of the people diverged towards American (in words like "can't") pretty soon and I honestly couldn't tell you if I'm still being consistent, 20 years after school and using English for a huge part of my working life, as a software developer.
Another continental European here (also software developer). I know most non-native speakers will never learn "proper" English pronunciation (whether AE or BE or Australian English I don't care) and international English is here to stay but, man, the many ways in people butcher English pronunciation (not because they pronounce everything as in their mother tongue – that's fine – but because they actually try to put on a native AE or BE accent) still makes my ears bleed on a daily basis.
Pronouncing English literally as if it were Spanish, French, etc. would make it impossible to understand.
Every non-native English learner tries to imitate natives, to the best of their ability. I don't think there's any other way to learn. Some people relax and stop trying to improve once they notice that they get to a level where they are understood, though. And then, one can be aware of one's limits (I don't think I'll ever get to distinguish "ice" and "eyes", so I don't even try anymore).
What you describe seems to be some kind of linguistic "uncanny valley" effect.
> Pronouncing English literally as if it were Spanish, French, etc. would make it impossible to understand.
I was chatting to a French-born colleague and he mentioned visiting the camping store "Millets". He pronounced it as a French word (something like "mi-ey") and I had no idea what he was talking about. It was unusual as otherwise his english was flawless.
Brits can occasionally run into this problem with US or Canadian place names that look like they ought to be of French origin, but really aren't pronounced that way. (someone else can provide examples)
This was an affectation that Bart Simpson used to use way back in golden-era Simpsons - in almost exactly this kind of ‘defense mechanism’ kind of way.
For the same reason that children adopt virtually anything.
Within the context of their general development, children are undergoing a long process of constructing their social architecture.
Which often entails a long stint of unsophisticated and ruthless social climbing. Therefore, anything that is presented to them as being socially advantageous stands a chance of being adopted.
It isn't much different in nature from blue-blood adults consciously adopting the Mid Atlantic Accent.
I'd love to hear this. It's not something I've noticed in my plentiful YouTube watching, etc, but I think it'd be an interesting development. The English-inspired "posh" American accents of yesteryear are beautiful, I think.
The similar thing that stands out to me like a sore thumb (and I appreciate this is all on me and anyone can talk however they like!) is when British people keep their accent but drop their "t"s to "d"s when speaking in public/on YouTube/podcasts/etc. ("Bedder" instead of "better", for example.) It doesn't seem to be a youth only thing, a lot of British speakers at tech conferences seem to do it, but it's not how we'd talk amongst ourselves in the UK. I wonder if it's something to do with subconsciously reducing plosives which often come out bad on mic?
Born and raised in Brooklyn, and old enough to remember when the Brooklyn accent was a detriment on job interviews, yet I've bumped into a bunch of people who sound almost like they're from Brooklyn, but they have only lived there for a few years from the midwest or other areas. Southerners tend to maintain their charming lilts. There are enough transplants, that it is not because they are being inundated with the accent, so I wonder what gives?
We used to mimic Monty Python episodes and movies when I grew up in 60s and 70s in Brooklyn. Hilarious stuff. Eerily relevant skit from The Life of Brian: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFBOQzSk14c
(American here)
I knew a girl in college who was very sheltered: she was homeschooled in a rural setting by wealthy ultra-religious parents up until college. Her only outlet was british television. She's spoken with a badly formed british accent as long as I've known her.
I learned katakana as a middle schooler because I would wake up at 4am to watch anime on youtube on the family computer, so none of this surprises me.
Indoor kids can get weird :)
I didn't see any data in the article on this but I'm under the impression that we're making more indoor kids.
I heard a young woman chatting to her colleague yesterday and switching between American and British, maintaining an hyped ultra affected tik tok influencer tone all the time.
I try to have no judgement on that but I can’t help but feel twinges of concern at people embodying what’s good for the platform algorithm . Taught and moulded by the platform.
This is obviously reflected in people paying for their irl faces to look much more the digital filter. This seemed to be case for the person I described tbh
I haven't seen it mentioned here, but Drill Rap from the UK has had an explosion in popularity in recent years. Hip-hop has always been a huge trend setter in American culture, and for once, one of the strongest influences to the current sound is coming from Brittain. I've heard the "drill rapper" accent filtering in over the last year especially as a lot of local artists and fans jump on the trend.
Could be kids coming of age who had parents who were themselves raised on (in particular) British comedy. In my own case it would be the inestimable influence of Monty Python. Younger adult Americans's parents maybe quoted the Parrot Sketch, or offered to give their kid lupins when they were ill, or perhaps demanded a shrubbery if they don't want to do their chores.
I'm re-watching The Wire. He's supposed to be a cop from Baltimore; I suspect his accent wouldn't be recognisable as a Baltimore accent to anyone familiar with it. I think he actually struggles to sound authentic as any kind of US accent.
Almost no one in the cast, including the Americans, save for the 3 actors from the area (Robert Chew as Prop Joe, Felicia Pearson as Snoop, Anwan Glover as Slim Charles) even tried putting on a Baltimore accent. Wood Harris and Idris Elba were supposed to be dealers from the Baltimore projects, but Harris just spoke in his Chicago AAVE accent and Elba sounded like a guy from New York City (his accent even breaks pronouncing the word 'responsibilities'). Lance Reddick sounded like Lance Reddick. Robert Chew tried coaching the kids in season 4 in a Baltimore accent and dialect but the accent didn't seem to land.
I do wish David Simon had enforced accents as strongly as he did with Treme.
I can't understand Snoop at all. I've watched this stuff more than once. I still can't make sense of what she says. I know the actress is the real thing.
I thought she was a bloke with a high-pitched voice the first couple of times I watched it. I guess her making like a bloke is part of the character's backstory.
> “If you like to think of yourself as somebody who’s easygoing, you might adopt a certain voice to express frustration, because you don’t feel totally comfortable with that part of yourself that complains,” he said.
Fred Rogers was reported by his children to express frustration or annoyance in Lady Elaine Fairchilde's voice rather than his own.
Are there that many? Off the top of my head, I can think of Hugh Laurie, but no-one else springs to mind (I'm british though so it might well be less visible to me).
Christian Bale, Damian Lewis, Millie Bobbie Brown, Idris Elba, Henry Cavill, Tom Holland, Dominic West are all actors people are surprised to learn are British.
Also Damson Idris, Daniel Kaluuya (though somewhat known), Robert Pattinson, Andrew Garfield, Daniel Day Lewis, Chiwetel Ejiofor… Actually the list is very long if you keep going
Thanks. I'm surprised about Christian Bale, Millie Bobbie Brown and Henry Cavill. Can't say that I'm familiar with Dominic West (haven't watched The Wire).
The Wire even has a scene where Dominic West's character puts on a British accent. So a British man pretending to be an American pretending to be a Brit.
The Wire is very good.
It also features Idris Elba, so it has two British people playing Americans on either side of the law .
Reminds me of Hugh Laurie in Avenue 5 when his character puts on a U.S. accent to appear more reassuring to the passengers, but falls back into an english accent when he's panicking.
I believe this native-accent is a common gag; Laurie also in one episode of House MD did the American-faking-a-British accent when he telephoned an overpond doctor in GB to learn more about the medical history of a patient.
I also recall an episode of The Mentalist, where agent Rigsby (played by Welsh Owain Yeoman) says he can imitate a british accent and proceeds to do so, only to receive a “nah, not good enough” by the protagonist.
The issue I (as a non-native English speaker) sometimes have with British actors is: how to pronounce their names?! Examples: the aforementioned Owain Yeoman, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Siobhan (pronounced Shivohn IIUC) Finneran…
> The issue I (as a non-native English speaker) sometimes have with British actors is: how to pronounce their names?! Examples: the aforementioned Owain Yeoman, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Siobhan (pronounced Shivohn IIUC) Finneran…
I don't think it's purely a non-native problem with those names, though they're not exactly English names.
I enjoy names such as Sean Bean ("Seen Been" or "Shorn Born"?) or even Mary Berry ("Merry Berry" or "Mary Bary").
Cara Delevingne, to name another. Each of the HP core cast have had unrelated roles where they do - Emma Watson (The Perks Of Being A Wallflower), Rupert Grint (Servant) and Daniel Radcliffe (Horns).
British actors are generally good at American accents[0], but not the other way round. That new Zelda game what came out yesterday has surprisingly poorly directed voice acting in general, but especially Zelda herself, who in a sea of American accents is a Canadian-American actress doing an ultra-fake British accent where half the time it still has American vowels.
> That new Zelda game what came out yesterday has surprisingly poorly directed voice acting in general
OK, so it's not just my wife; she sometimes directs voice actors, and within the first five minutes of the game as part of the big intro sequence everyone who plays the game has to see it got an "oof, that needed another take" out of her, LOL.
I can't speak for anyone else, but as a British male living in the USA I can testify that having my accent gets me a large amount of friendly attention from American women. I tell people all the time they should fake an accent for that reason alone.
Oddly, every American actually assumes I am Australian. Strewth!
You definitely don't. It's called acting. I was married to an actor who had no problem with speaking in "RP". And when I was in jail here in the USA my American cellmate managed to impersonate me so well that he could talk for me through the walls to the other prisoners.
My sister married a guy from the UK. She lives there now and has mishmash of midwestern US / southern UK accent. It's the most ridiculous sounding thing ever. UK people can't figure out where she's from and US people can't either.
This is not a new phenomenon; some thirty years ago I had moved from Europe to America only to be amused by my 12 year old punk friends ("Punk"...aka Green Day) putting on fake British accents.
When I'm surrounded or talking to someone with an accent, I tend to take on that accent. I don't always realize it at the time and it's totally subconscious.
I was once at a restaurant beside a girl and her parents and a friend of the parents. All were American, but the girl, who had just returned from spending one semester at a university in England, spoke with a strong RP accent. Similarly I met someone (who was starting graduate school) from Texas who had just spent a summer in Germany, and spoke with an exaggerated German accent. I don't understand how they didn't realise that it made them seem foolish, rather than, as they seemed to hope, interesting and sophisticated.
What are they saying instead of th, when did this start, and is it particular parts of Britain or particular social groups?
(Using f/v instead of th has long been a feature of some London dialects, and using t/d instead of th has long been a feature of some Irish dialects, and young children often use f/v instead of th, I think. Jocular references to "the youf" have been around in print for a while.)
EDIT: Of course there's also Jamaican pronunciation with t/d instead of th!
As an aside, the dialect I used in my youth used "f" a lot - fit, fa, fan and far for what, who, when and where. Leading to "Fit fit fits fit fit" making sense...
There's nothing sudden about it. Many regional (mostly city) accents have common mis-pronounciation. "th" being mis-pronounced as either "f" or "v" was extremely common in the area I grew up 20+ years ago, and I'm sure it predates me.
Why have Americans always been unable to pronounce the intervocalic T?
Bread and budder? WTF?
I'm an author; I love horseback writing?
I'm tired of wading for the flood?
I want to ride my modercycle?
It's so pervasive that we really ought to update our dictionaries to replace these, now phantom, "t"s with proper "d"s. Think of it as antipsychotics for a batshit crazy language.
I'm American. But this has always been annoying, along with most of the eN language.
To cast a cynical eye on the bright side; it seems both the "t" and "d" will soon be obsolete as the entire eN language is refined to tonal variations of our most common word/punctuation/expression/noise, "like".
I may be mistaken, but I believe there's evidence that new humans are forming a "like-gland". The sound will become as natural and necessary as that of frogs bleating* after rain.
> Why have Americans always been unable to pronounce the intervocalic T?
> Bread and budder? WTF?
In this and most cases there isn't really another word that would fit in context. Also plenty of other dialects (i.e. Australian English) do exactly the same thing.
> I'm an author; I love horseback writing?
I'm this case, "riding" and "writing" have a marked difference in the length of the initial diphthong sound "ai".
I general American English is nowhere near the most ambiguous in this way. Many languages rely more heavily on context because they use ambiguous phonological and grammatical marking in common speech (i.e. spoken Japanese).
Reminds me of going into a shop while visiting the U.S. and trying to buy some batteries. The employee struggled with my english accent, so I had to try to explain what batteries where. He eventually understood and exclaimed "oh, badderies!".
I've got a friend with a story from his high school job at a retail store, about his having to translate for the other workers so they could figure out WTF this British guy was asking for.
"Batcheries"
[EDIT] That's not me trying to, like, contradict or counter your story—occurred to me it might come off that way. I just think it's funny that that specific word has so many cross-accent issues.
The t can also disappear. I've heard people say "twenny" instead of "twenty". Perhaps because "twendy" sounds more like Elmer Fudd giving Bugs Bunny decoration advice.
I believe this is a sign of a hearing problem. Some children are unable to hear a strong difference between certain sounds so, to them, they are speaking the same as everyone else. It used to be that those children would be identified and given special help to allow them to hear better. I remember having eye and ear tests at school. Maybe this has stopped now?
The tragedy is that this is a huge dividing factor in the UK. In all the places I've worked the vast majority of people use the distinct "th" sounds. Use of "f" and "v" sounds is, to use the current terminology, a "red flag".
Doesn't seem likely to me - it's common with specific strong dialects and often associated with working class people. As it's regional, I don't see it being a hearing related issue (not that I think it's an issue anyhow).
This is such a goofy take. I am a millennial and I remember doing a british accent all the time as a kid as a joke. And so did my boomer parents.
It's not that complicated
I love the British accents so much, I would put months of practice if I could. Their wit and dry humour parallel closely to mine in daily lives.
The other day we were mocking Brits on received pronunciation or what people call the 'royal posh talk'. Oh god, their novels are too fun when adapted into play, drama or theatre. My nephew had so much fun, it consumed the whole afternoon and evening in a jiffy.
Anybody who grew up in different mother tongue will appreciate Brits and their culture, language being just the start.
Not bad, I read your comment in an English accent. Too much positivity though. We can only give that level of enthusiastic complement as an insult.
Your "so much fun" and "too fun" makes me think of "such fun" which is a complicated phrase now I think about it. It's rarely used to express something positive about having fun... Even just the word "fun" is rarely used positively. If an English person ever reacts to something with "well isn't that fun", be worried.
Oh, and jiffies are passed rather than consumed. Don't ask me why.
As a zoomer reading this article I can tell you this very literally boils down to "funny voice = funny joke" and you could just as easily swap out the british accent for a Kermit impression. The popularity of british reality TV has exposed the young americans that watch it to funny sounding british slang (e.g. "fanny flutters") and now those sayings are making their way into jokes.
I promise you no one except for the Miami content creators and former reality TV cast members quoted in the article are slipping into British accents at Burger King.