|
|
Can British people pretend to speak like Americans?
Hey Native English Speakers!!
What about yourself? Are you good at immitating each other's accent? (For British, American and vice versa)
I'm American, but I've got a Melbourne accent and a Belfast accent that can fool locals. English is too tough - where do you start? I might be able to do it a little, but not for any length of time.
Liz, no, actually, I really meant "non-rhotic English English accents"; the matter is that English English speakers, outside of the rhotic English English dialects, have very few clues intuitively as to where postvocalic /r/ should be present in rhotic dialects without having to resort to looking at English orthography. Consequently, whether postvocalic /r/ is present in a given word has to be learned on a word-by-word basis, effectively. (In contrast, rhotic English dialect-speakers can emulate non-rhotic dialects far more easily due to not having to learn such sorts of things.)
TRAVIS:
We think of the same thing I reckon. I know that you meant "non-rhotic English English speakers". What sort of mislead me is that you wrote: <<as outside the most conservative non-rhotic English English there is generally very limited information available as to where postvocalic /r/ "should" be in most English English dialects>> because I overlooked that you put "should" amongst inverted commas.
Hugh Laurie on house gives probably the greatest American accent delivered by a Brit. I thinks it's partially because he really thinks about the specific voice of the character rather than simply doing "American."
The things that usually give away Brits trying American accents: *Maintenance of the distinction between [Q] and [O:] phonemes (in America, if the two are distinguished in any dialect, it would be between [A] and [O]). *Overly lax [{] phoneme before nasals (Americans almost always slightly raise this). *Centralized vowels (particularly actors from SE England) *Overly fronted resonanance (American speech is usually a bit further back). As far as Americans doing Brits, I generally find that it's not so much a matter of doing a bad accent as doing a WRONG accent. I attended drama school in America, and they basically teach you to either talk like Queen Victoria or a 19th-century cockney shopkeeper. Both of which are totally wrong if you're doing any play or movie that isn't antiquated.
Hi young Liz - actually it is on a par with Mr Dick Van Dyke!!In-fact thinking about it - it may be even worse. At least with Van Dyke you could tell he was doing an English accent, but with Mr Statham in the film The One I did not know what he was trying to do, he just sounded weird. It was only when I found out that his character was American that it all became clear.
Honestly Liz it is just soooo fuuunnnnyyy. How it made it onto screen i'll never know!!! He improved it just a tad for the film The Transporter (another pile of poop - I have too much time on my hands me thinks!!) but it is still really bad. I felt embarrassed for the man, the yanks must have been laughing their arses off!!! Awful awful aaaawwwwwwfffffuuuuulllllllllllll!!!! He is from lewisham which is not 'officially' a cockney area but it is as close to it as you will get (near the docklands in London). That was his real accent in Snatch, as well as his role in Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (good film Liz!!) and both roles suited him down to the ground. I have no idea what the bloke is playing at now though. Sort it out JASON!! Yes Trawicks, many Americans seem to really rate Hugh Lauries efforts. It is also true that those 19th Century shopkeeper accents are antiquated, they really don't exist anymore sadly (although there are 'similar' accents still around) and these days even the Queen does not talk like the Queen.
<<That was his real accent in Snatch, as well as his role in Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (good film Liz!!) and both roles suited him down to the ground. I have no idea what the bloke is playing at now though. Sort it out JASON!!>>
Yeah, I liked that one (Lock, Stock...I'm lazy to type), too. It was funny.
<<and these days even the Queen does not talk like the Queen.>>
Ve Queyne is tawkin' loik vat: moi 'usband an' oi. :-)
*Overly lax [{] phoneme before nasals (Americans almost always slightly raise this).
this is not true, Canada and West Coast US have the ''continuous tensing'', that is, [AE] tensing before nasals in optional. In Back East, there are accents with obligatory tensing before nasals.
*Overly fronted resonanance (American speech is usually a bit further back).
this is true, most British singers have /a/ in ''God, hot, everybody'' instead of /A/ when they sing in American English. Why do they want to sound like someone from Chicago? --- Too bad they use /a/ even in ''caught, coffee, lost'' it should be /A/ (in Western General American or Northern Cities vowel shift) or /Q/ (in Back East accents)
Hmm. I saw Elizabethtown and had no problem with Orlando Bloom's American accent. I've only seen a few minutes of House, so I can't comment on Hugh Laurie much, except to say that the small snatch I did see sounded okay. I read an interview with him once where he bemoaned the fact that he couldn't find a single word that was pronounced identically between the two accents, and with medical terminology not being something you hear tripping off the tongues of most ordinary people on the street, he sometimes had to work pretty hard to figure out how Americans would say words like "exudate". (Personally, I have had occasion to use that word, and I usually say it without the Y-sound before the U, but I suspect that in such an uncommon word, that's not written in stone.)
Perhaps it wasn't his accent, it was his acting. Maybe he was trying too hard to speak in an American accent.
Hmmmnn maybe I am wrong then Uriel, if you found, as an American, Orlando's accent to be convincing then who am I to argue!! Then again I am not exactly an authority on American accents/dialects so maybe he was speaking in a dialect I was unfamiliar with??
It may also have something to do with the fact that an ex-girlfriend dragged me UNWILLINGLY to see the film because she fancied the pants of the bloke. That's probably it. |