Perfect Accent

wasee   Mon Sep 03, 2007 11:19 am GMT
Hi,most of us here are non native speakers of English .I wonder if it is ever possible for a native English speaker to learn a perfect American (or any other) accent . Are there any people who have learnt another accent of English successfully?
dave   Mon Sep 03, 2007 1:47 pm GMT
There are some successful natural English speakers being able to adopt American accents. Hugh Laurie in “House M.D” is a perfect example.
The most beguiling to me is the master of the English language. Kenneth Williams a boy from working class King's Cross can in the space of one sentence can go from a London cockney to a "high camp" shrill right through to a very posh "plum" English. His contortions of English are probably not the best to learn by, but good fun to listen to.
Skippy   Mon Sep 03, 2007 3:29 pm GMT
While watching House I told my friend that I couldn't hear a trace of his English accent, and she was pretty convinced that he was American.... So we had a little argument that ended with her getting on imdb.com and me saying "take that, hippie!"

On the other hand, another of my friends said she could tell because he kinda talks funny.
Damian in London E14   Mon Sep 03, 2007 3:51 pm GMT
Kenneth Williams was one of the most high profile actors in all those old Carry On films we now see on the various TV channels (previously the films did the rounds of the cinema circuit when they were first released between the late 1950s and the early 1980s. He played a whole range of loopy characters in those films, many of which were based on storylines from British history (eg Carry on Up the Khyber, a spoof on the British Raj in India in the 18th century) and most of his style was very high camp.

Previous to making all those films he also featured in various BBC radio comedy shows, notably with Kenneth Horne in something called Round the Horne, and in those KW teamed up with Hugh Paddick to form a very high camp comedy duo Julian and Sandy, very obviously gay characters who largely spoke in something called Polari, a form of secret language used by gay men many years ago as a means of communication in the days when homosexuality (in the UK anyway) was very much kept under cover so to speak. You can hear those shows on line which is how I found out about them, and in the Julian and Sandy sketches KW would always start off with "Hello, I'm Julian and this is my friend Sandy", which always seemed to make the audience roar with laughter.

Kenneth Williams was an extremely erudite guy with a great love for the English Language and the use of words, and he was a leading star in a program called "Just a Minute", which is still running on BBC Radio 4 today. In the program, the compere Nicholas Parsons presents the four team members with a topic, and each one has to try and speak for one minute on that topic without any hesitation or repetition or deviation from the topic, or using any word (apart from conjunctions, definite article, or standard link words etc ) more than once. If they failed on any of these, another team member would press a buzzer, and if NP decides that the challenge is valid s/he then continues with the topic until the minute was up. KW vey often managed to go the whole minute without being challenged, and so gained bonus points.

He was born in February 1926 in the Kings Cross area of London. He was a very precise diary keeper and his diaries, starting from when he was in the British Army (in the Army Entertainment unit called ENSA - apparently jokingly referred to as Every Night Something Awful) in 1945, right up until his death in April 1988 (as a result of a drug overdose which was never really established as either deliberate or accidental) were produced in an abridged book form by Russell Davies, on a day by day, yeasr by year basis, and they give a fantastic insight into his private and professional life. He was most assuredly homosexual, but the great sadness of his life was that he never truly admitted it to himself or to others, yet all the while it was plain as a pike-staff to everyone that he was gay, and in his diraies he used this strange polari language to express his sexual feelings and attraction to a whole arry of guys over the years. During his life he met just about everybody in the entertainment world, and he regularly appeared on stage in the West End, mostly in serious plays, playing alongside many famous actors and actresses, many of whom were very close friends of his, among the very closest being Maggie Smith, Gordon Jackson and Barbara Windsor.

One thing KW hated more than anything in life was the misuse of the English Language, or sloppy speech. He'd have a high old time of it in the Kings Cross of today ranting and raving at everyone within ear shot. :-)

He suffered badly from ill health in his later years and this may have been a factor in the controversial nature of his death but the evidence was never conclusive.
Babs   Thu Sep 06, 2007 4:33 pm GMT
We all loved Kenny. Gawd bless im.
Syd   Thu Sep 06, 2007 4:36 pm GMT
I didn't. HAHAHA
wasee   Sun Sep 09, 2007 8:28 am GMT
why does it always boil down to your personal things?
John English   Sat Sep 15, 2007 9:48 pm GMT
another of my friends said she could tell because he kinda talks funny.

Don't all you yanks







...have different accents
(one regions normal, is another regions funny)