Fake English Accents...WHY???

[rostfrei]

At the busy office where I work, I often speak to a doctor on the phone. For months, I had assumed that she was from England, due to her slight British accent. Then, the other day, she called me up and asked me to connect her to a long distance number. I stayed on the line and listened to part of her conversation. She had called her mother in Arizona and her "English" accent mysteriously disappeared as soon as her mother said hello.

That got me to thinking. I've known of a couple of people over the years that have faked English accents.

Madonna also does it. Have you heard her speak lately? You'd think that she was born and raised in the UK, except for the fact that it's a bad fake accent.

There's also a local car dealership that has a lot of radio ads. The lady in the ads has a distint English accent. I guess I'm just wondering how the English accent came to be associated with being pretentious? And doesn't Madonna realize that everyone knows she's from Michigan?

[Kyla]

Maybe the doctor in question lived in England for a time and the accent isn't fake. My (American) aunt and uncle lived in London for many years and their three kids were all born there. My aunt, uncle, and the two older kids all had for years and years even after moving back to the US, accents that slid around the spectrum from American to British.

As for Madonna, who the hell knows what Madonna is ever doing?

[Spatial Rift 47]

Fake English Accents...WHY???


Because they're fun, of course. Besides, as David Letterman once said, even the squeegee guy would sound important with a British accent.

[MLS]

When I was in college, there was another student with an English accent. Since she was an American, born here, the obvious question was where did she get the accent. She claimed to have been raised by a British grandparent, and to have thus learned the accent as her primary speech pattern. Unfortunately for her, there turned out to be another student at the same school who had been in high school with her. She hadn't had the accent while in H.S.! Bottom line, she wanted to draw attention to herself and thought the accent made her cool, or sophisticated, or some such thing.

[Mr. Blue Sky]

Madonna also does it. Have you heard her speak lately? You'd think that she was born and raised in the UK, except for the fact that it's a bad fake accent.


Madonna is a special case (that is, an attention whore). If she thought shaving her head and painting a crying clown on it would keep her in the spotlight for a few more months, she'd do it.

[Misnomer]

In the summer of 1992 (while I was in college), I went door-to-door for an environmental group (Maryland PIRG, if that means anything to anyone). I spent 4-5 hours a day knocking on doors, delivering the same stupid speech over and over. So, one day, I decided to spice things up by using a British accent: I'd lived in Yorkshire for a couple of years in the mid-80s, but hadn't "used" that accent in a while, so I walked around the neighborhood for a few minutes, talking to myself to get the accent back. Once I had a handle on it, I went back to knocking on doors. It's amazing how many people listened to the entire spiel just because of the accent! :) I definitely got a better reception from people, and even got comments on it -- one well-meaning woman told me that I must have lived in England during my "language development phase." I didn't have the heart to tell her that I was 12 when we moved there. :D

I think that's the last time I was able to recall the accent correctly. But then, it's also the last time I walked around talking to myself in a fake British accent. ;)

[Queen Bruin]

When I was in college, there was another student with an English accent. Since she was an American, born here, the obvious question was where did she get the accent. She claimed to have been raised by a British grandparent, and to have thus learned the accent as her primary speech pattern. Unfortunately for her, there turned out to be another student at the same school who had been in high school with her. She hadn't had the accent while in H.S.! Bottom line, she wanted to draw attention to herself and thought the accent made her cool, or sophisticated, or some such thing.

Huh, that's my ex, only he used an Irish accent. And claimed that his family was from Ireland, and spoke Gaelic before English. Then I met his mom. Solid Bronx accent. :rolleyes: What was worse, he continued this charade far after I knew.

And worse than that, that I stayed with him for a year after I knew. :smack:

[uglybeech]

If you're interested, there's a this American Life episode (http://207.70.82.73/pages/descriptions/00/155.html) with an interesting segment about a teenager who fakes a british accent for two years.

[Cunctator]

Perhaps it's just the doctor's version of her "refined telephone voice". My mother has always used a more rounded and carefully enunciated tone when she's talking on the telephone.

[mittu]

Perhaps it's just the doctor's version of her "refined telephone voice". My mother has always used a more rounded and carefully enunciated tone when she's talking on the telephone.

Ditto for my mother, I think lots of people have a "posh" phone voice. The odd thing about fake British accents is that nobody in Britain sounds like that, when people do British accents on American T.V. or in Hollywood films they tend to try and copy the Queens accent, which is an accent shared by the Queen and about 5 other people and always sounds ridiculous. 99.9% of people in Britain sound absolutely nothing like the British accent I hear portrayed in American T.V. and films.

[Sarah Woodruff]

On the flip side:
A girl in high school spent six weeks on exchange at a school in Hawaii. When she came back, she spoke in a broad American accent for precisely one week, long enough for all the other students to give her serious grief about it.

[WotNot]

Madonna is a special case (that is, an attention whore). If she thought shaving her head and painting a crying clown on it would keep her in the spotlight for a few more months, she'd do it.

While Madonna is, of course, an attention whore, I'd have said she was a special case because she does actually live in England with her English husband, and has done for long enough to have picked up a bit of the accent naturally. Certainly that's what it sounded like to me the last time I heard her speak.

[AngelicGemma]

Because you all secretly want to be British. :D

[GorillaMan]

The odd thing about fake British accents is that nobody in Britain sounds like that, when people do British accents on American T.V. or in Hollywood films they tend to try and copy the Queens accent, which is an accent shared by the Queen and about 5 other people and always sounds ridiculous
I agree - and I've always had a sneaking suspicion that Hugh Grant is really American ;)

[matt_mcl]

Speak for yourself -- when I fake a British accent, I come out sounding like Neil Tennant, which is quite frankly all to the good. ^_^

[calm kiwi]

Perhaps it's just the doctor's version of her "refined telephone voice". My mother has always used a more rounded and carefully enunciated tone when she's talking on the telephone.

Mrs Bucket. My Nana had a very 'British-posh' "lady of the house speaking" voice. It just sounded proper to her. Her and many of her generation.

[irishgirl]

BTW there is no single "British" accent- received pronunciation is probably the closest thing.

It IS possible to speak in a different accent to your usual without being aware of it, and to switch back and forth depending on context without any conscious decision to do so. Not everyone is actually TRYING to sound posh!

My mother is Zimbabwean, my father is Northern Irish, but spent a lage part of his life in Dublin and London. The accent I use to speak to my parents is the one I consider to be my "natural" voice. It's a Zimbabwean-tinged English accent.

When I went to primary school, I started talking like all my friends- a broad Northern Irish accent. However, I only spoke like that to my friends, never at home.

I never knew this until it was pointed out to me by one of my friends. We would give her a lift home from school, and while I would talk to her with a Northern Irish accent, any comments addressed to my mother were in my "home" voice. Quite weird to any third party listening in, I'm sure, but I'm completely unaware I'm doing it.

Now I've lived in Dublin, I speak with a soft Southen Irish accent to my patients, a Northern Irish accent at home with irishfella, and I still talk on the phone to my mum and dad with my Zim-ish accent.

NONE of these changes are conscious, although if asked to "put on" an accent I could.

My brain's default is to respond in the accent of the person I'm speaking with. After a month is Australia none of the patients believed I was from Ireland, and after 3 weeks in India I was saying "ha and nay" instead of "yes and no" and interspersing "tikke" and "acha" into my sentences.

When I met Kal and Washte a few years ago, they said I sounded like I was from Surrey...but that's only because I can't do Nottingham!

Don't assume everyone is putting things on, some of us just find that our accent is more free-floating than others.

[Mr. Blue Sky]

While Madonna is, of course, an attention whore, I'd have said she was a special case because she does actually live in England with her English husband, and has done for long enough to have picked up a bit of the accent naturally. Certainly that's what it sounded like to me the last time I heard her speak.

Possibly, but I'm betting she's playing it up a bit.

[Ponder Stibbons]

Madonna also does it. Have you heard her speak lately? You'd think that she was born and raised in the UK, except for the fact that it's a bad fake accent.
I'd love to see an interview that goes something like this ...

Interviewer: So, tell me Madonna, what is that accent I'm hearing?
Madonna: It's a British accent.
Interviewer: No, that's not it ...

[Spectre of Pithecanthropus]

Couple of observations...

I've noticed that when I've been reading a lot of British material I catch myself slipping into British constructions, if not the actual accent. I'll say things like "The team are..." and so on. If someone's exposed to an accent every day, like Madonna who lives there, they might well pick up a trace of it.

The other thing is that there are a lot of different American accents and even more British accents. Some of them are similar, and not always the ones you'd expect. Recently I heard a woman talking, and for a few seconds I thought she was English. Then I realized she was American, probably from someplace like Virginia. She had a semi-Southeastern accent, but with a mid- and even north-Atlantic influence.

Also, if you watch old Hollywood films from the 1930s and 1940s, the women tend to enunciate in a way that resembles some aspects of British pronunciation. This is especially noticeable in the way Rs are dropped at the ends of words. I don't know why they did this, unless it was to indicate that, at that time, dropping Rs was a sign of posh speech.

[eleanorigby]

I am quite impressionable when it comes to speech.

I wasn't in UK for a day and I found myself "copying" the London accents around me. I was embarassed-not because I have any deep affection for my Midwest nasality--but because I thought people would think I was being "fake" etc.

And then we went to France! I swear I was channeling Pepe Le Peu.....I don't speak French, but I spoke zee Anglais with a French accent...... :rolleyes:

[Athena]

It's very difficult to be around a group of people speaking one way and keep your normal accent. I, for one, believe that Madonna's accent isn't put on or fake - it's just natural for someone to pick up the sounds they hear every day.

Heck, for me, living in Colorado for 10+ years, all it took was one long phone call from my mother to switch me back into "extra from 'Fargo'" speak. I shudder to think of what I must sound like now, after 3 years back in da UP. I try not to end every sentence with "eh" and pronounce 'th' as 'th', not 'd', but I know that I don't always succeed.

[F. U. Shakespeare]

My late mother (born in Pennsylvania) had a 'posh' accent for the phone. Friends of mine would ask me what country she came from.

An American woman I used to work with lived in Britain for three years when she was in grade school. She had an 'intermittant' British accent -- it kicked in on phone calls and in the presence of important superiors. When people would ask us if she was from Britain, we'd reply, "I think she flew over it once or twice".

Tina Turner also seems to either have picked up, or be faking a British accent (I saw her on '60 Minutes' a while ago -- she's apparently lived in Europe for quite a while).

[Anaamika]

She had called her mother in Arizona and her "English" accent mysteriously disappeared as soon as her mother said hello.



Not that I have a fake accent of any kind, but my accent changes when I talk to my mother. I speak more in an Indian accent, since I intersperse it with a lot of Hindi. It could just be something like that.

[Kevbo]

I absolutely know about impressionable speech. When we'd visit my Cousin's near Wichata it'd take me maybe 2 hours to catch thier twangless drawl. The upside is that when I learned German, I learned it with my teacher's Bavarian accent, not an american accent....Then I went to Austria and converted it to Wiener dialekt.

Speaking of wich, Most of the Europeans I've met learned english with a British accent, and Oxford vocabulary. (lift vs. elevator, "in hospital" etc.). I've traveled enough that whenever I meet a non-native english speaker, I tend automatically to switch from american to an "international" vocabulary.

As for Americans sounding like the queen and 5 others (which 5, BTW ?):

The Brits should hear what they sound like faking an American accent.

Clue 1: While it is the second largest state, It's fairly sparsly populated...we're not all from Texas.

Clue 2: Even Texans don't sound like that. If you'd stop saying "y'all" you'd sound Australian.

Clue 3: In Texas, "y'all" is second person singular. Second person plural would be "all y'all"
"you" is either junior's girlfriend or yankee for y'all, depending on how y'all spelled it.

[Shoeless]

Did she smack her head on something? Maybe she has foreign accent syndrome (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/2300395.stm) !

[Cynical Optimist]

You want fake accents, try TV Bostonian sometime. Yes, I have that accent, and no, Ted Kennedy was not my speech therapist. Ta pahk thah cah in Hahvahd Yahd wuh cahstyah thah bettah paht uv twuntee dahlahs. Maybe when I'm hammered, but not normally.

[AveDementia]

Madonna asking for a "fhaan". (http://www.madonnavillage.com/goodies/videos/MadonnaVillage.com%20Superbitch.mpeg) (Clip plays on windows media player.) Its not so much that shes faking it, IMO, but that her whole public persona is a kind of performance.

[Mr. Blue Sky]

Madonna asking for a "fhaan". (http://www.madonnavillage.com/goodies/videos/MadonnaVillage.com%20Superbitch.mpeg) (Clip plays on windows media player.) Its not so much that shes faking it, IMO, but that her whole public persona is a kind of performance.

So that's what an English Valley Girl would sound like.

[butler1850]

Very neutral accent here. I trained it out. I often get accused of not being a local when out in public, north of Boston.

Get me wicked hammahd though, and I'm leaving Rs all around town.

[Mr. Blue Sky]

Very neutral accent here. I trained it out. I often get accused of not being a local when out in public, north of Boston.

Get me wicked hammahd though, and I'm leaving Rs all around town.

I have no discernible Southern accent. I get asked if I'm from around here, too.

[Little Bird]

So that's what an English Valley Girl would sound like.
OOOh, I sat next to an English Valley Girl in a class once. It was the weirdest thing ever.
Also--I worked in a call center for a while and tended to affect a southern accent. It was easier than speaking midwestern, and it seemed to make the people on the other line hate me less.
Bird Man has a lisp when talking to strangers. He talks just fine to me, friends, my parents, etc, but get him on stage or on the phone and he's got this adorable little lisp!

[DMark]

Once sat next to a woman from Alabama. You didn't have to listen long to know she was from the South, but when she would talk with her mother in Alabama, well - stand back 'cause her mouth was suddenly drippin' with grits...in other words, her normal conversation at work was her version of "high English" and to me it sounded like she just got off the Greyhound from Shinyfork, Alabama.

Perhaps the English accent girl has a new boyfriend with an English accent...foreign roommates/lovers often are the cause of people starting to pick up accents.

However, nothing is worse than to hear some honky trying to sound like a brother from the 'hood. Don't know whether to laugh, or hit 'em up side the head.

[elfbabe]

My boyfriend has a terrible case of Sympathetic Accent. Three weeks in Sweden and Norway left him sounding extremely Scandinavian for a while. Annoyed the heck out of me and his mom.

[GorillaMan]

I have a certain sympathetic accent. I suspect I'm typical of those brought up on the borders of Estuary English - I've got three parts upbringing, two parts local accent, and one part Eastenders.

I notice my telephone voice when I relax it - after the well-spoken 'external call' answer, realising it's a colleague I know, and going '"Yerr-right?"

[Misnomer]

I definitely have Sympathetic Accent Syndrome (SAS). I unconsciously match the pattern and basic accent of whomever I'm speaking to, which I really have to watch because -- as others have mentioned -- I can easily come across as being a smartass, or as mocking the person(s) I'm talking with. Funnily enough, I don't do it with UK accents as often/easily as I do with American accents ... maybe because it's harder to accurately pick up the UK accents (?). With those, I tend to change my vocabulary more than my accent.

Perhaps it's just the doctor's version of her "refined telephone voice". My mother has always used a more rounded and carefully enunciated tone when she's talking on the telephone.Ditto for my mother, I think lots of people have a "posh" phone voice.I definitely have a phone voice, but it's an unaccented, flat, "radio broadcaster" American accent (my North Yorkshire accent would never have been mistaken for posh ;)). I think it came about as the result of years of being on the radio (in college), in conjuction with years of being a lector (reader) at church, combined with a couple of years of voice lessons, followed by years of working as a secretary/receptionist after graduation. My "phone voice" is also my "presentation voice" at work.

I'd forgotten about my tendency to slip into a phone voice until a couple of months ago, when the guy I was seeing mentioned it. It's not like my regular speaking voice is completely uncultured, I think it's just that my speech pattern is more casual in person -- and, I think that my voice's pitch is somewhat lower on the phone.

And I'm perilously close to getting off-topic, so I'll stop now. :D

[Atheist Princess]

BTW there is no single "British" accent- received pronunciation is probably the closest thing.

It IS possible to speak in a different accent to your usual without being aware of it, and to switch back and forth depending on context without any conscious decision to do so. Not everyone is actually TRYING to sound posh!

My mother is Zimbabwean, my father is Northern Irish, but spent a lage part of his life in Dublin and London. The accent I use to speak to my parents is the one I consider to be my "natural" voice. It's a Zimbabwean-tinged English accent.

When I went to primary school, I started talking like all my friends- a broad Northern Irish accent. However, I only spoke like that to my friends, never at home.

I never knew this until it was pointed out to me by one of my friends. We would give her a lift home from school, and while I would talk to her with a Northern Irish accent, any comments addressed to my mother were in my "home" voice. Quite weird to any third party listening in, I'm sure, but I'm completely unaware I'm doing it.

Now I've lived in Dublin, I speak with a soft Southen Irish accent to my patients, a Northern Irish accent at home with irishfella, and I still talk on the phone to my mum and dad with my Zim-ish accent.

NONE of these changes are conscious, although if asked to "put on" an accent I could.

My brain's default is to respond in the accent of the person I'm speaking with. After a month is Australia none of the patients believed I was from Ireland, and after 3 weeks in India I was saying "ha and nay" instead of "yes and no" and interspersing "tikke" and "acha" into my sentences.

When I met Kal and Washte a few years ago, they said I sounded like I was from Surrey...but that's only because I can't do Nottingham!

Don't assume everyone is putting things on, some of us just find that our accent is more free-floating than others.


Well I've lived in Australia for about 10 of my 17 years. Other than that I've lived in South Africa, USA, Canada, England, Ireland, France and Italy.

Now I've only found this out about a year ago when my Australian boyfriend was in the room when I made two overseas phonecalls in a row, one to South Africa and the other to France. When I got off the phone, he asked 'Why do your accents change?' I had no idea what he was talking about so next time I made overseas calls, he taped them. And indeed, my accent changed. Huh? :eek:

Normally I have a pretty normal, average, Aussie accent with a bit of a South African/Irish (funny how they blend) kind of drawl thrown in there. And apparently my accent changes all the time dependign on what I'm saying and to who I'm saying it.



Huh?

[rocking chair]

i can't talk to someone from the uk without picking it up inside of a few minutes. with 3 coworker with british accents it can get a bit wild. i start using brit. vocab. as well, not just accent. it takes a few minutes to de-brit.

books and pbs will set me off as well.

i pick up canadian cadence as well.

i've managed to stand strong against southern us accent. i just pick up the vocab. and just a few words get tweaked.

southerners get major kudos for solving the second person problem in english. y'all is just a fantastic pronoun! i use it no matter how i'm talking.

[F. U. Shakespeare]

I was born and raised in West Virginia and have lived in the Baltimore/Washington area for almost twenty years.

People who meet me are generally surprised to learn my origins -- they say I have no discernable accent. Which is probably true, because I tend to adapt to people's speech conventions.

Around 10 years ago, my then girlfriend Laura (Russian-Jewish, Connecticut-born, city-bred) and I planned a trip back to West By God. I called a motel and asked if they had a vacancy on our scheduled date. We talked for a minute, and came to terms.

When I hung up, Laura was grinning at me.

Apparently, I had taken on a weird, hillbilly accent as soon as I picked up the phone.

"Hillbilly Hebrew!", I sneered.

[Johanna]

Back in the mid 1960s, the British Invasion, remember? My younger sisters, who were no more than 7 and 4 years old, respectively, affected "British" accents because of the Beatles, Herman's Hermits, Dave Clark, etc. Not that my little sisters' accents were within miles of how British accents actually sound, but the point was we all knew they intended to talk British. Even though I'm a linguist, I'm still not sure how the brain pieces together such inept, wrong clues in speech and comes up with the intended conclusion.

No fake British accent has ever been more reviled than Dick Van Dyke's ersatz "Cockney" in Mary Poppins (which was undoubtedly another major influence on my little sisters' accents in the '60s). Everyone complains that Van Dyke wasn't even close to getting it right. And yet, even though he got the sound all wrong, we can still hear it as an attempt at Cockney. A failed attempt, but a recognizable one just the same. Whence this elusive recognition?

People use accents to fit in. On a job I had once, I had to ride in the cab of a truck with an urban Italian-American guy raised in Cleveland, which is all the way North (next stop, Canada). About as un-Southern as you can get. And yet when he got on his citizen's band (CB) radio to talk to other truckers, he affected a fake Southern redneck accent. His explanation: Nobody would understand you if you didn't do that.

[Sarah Woodruff]

I've yet to come across an example of an American actor who can successfully talk "Australian." (Or "Straaay-an"). Even the venerable Ms Streep sounded....like a Kiwi in Evil Angels (Or whatever its US title was - the film about Lindy Chamberlain).

When I first starting speaking in complete sentences I had a pukka Indian accent (Mum took time off and looked after me). Then I spoke like a Pom until I went to school (Dad took time off and looked after me). Within a month or so of starting school, I talked Straay-an. I basically now have a mild Aussie accent (mild because none of my family has an Aussie accent, so its tempered somewhat).

Accents are interesting.

[Idlewild]

We grew up around my grandmother who had been brought up in upper-middle class English boarding schools to "speak properly", and in the era my mother and father went to school, and in the particular schools my parents went to*, aping an English accent was seen as more refined than speaking with an Australian accent, so my parents had a very soft Australian accent at most. My brother spoke in rounded "proper English" tones at home and broad Australian at school, which apparently amused everyone in the family as he switched off at will, with no apparent effort, whereas I was stuck being told I couldn't possibly be Australian throughout my entire childhood. ("No, where do you really come from?" How obnoxious is that! As if I don't know where I was born and raised!)

My mother now affects a moderately broad Australian accent because she resents being brought up to speak as if she were from "the Mother country". Oh, the joys of post-colonialism.

And my accent is getting so hybrid that unless I'm doing polite-company voice, people no longer ask where I'm from or assume I'm not from Boston, where I've been living for five years, but polite-company voice still stumps most people. It's not that I have an American accent exactly in my normal speech, it's just hovering somewhere in between three continents. Thanks, granny!

*Both were aspirational in different ways - Dad went to a working class school with a few teachers who wanted the boys to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and mum went to the 'best' private girls' school in her town where the teachers were selling the line that the girls were going to be the leaders of society and needed to set an example. But I don't want to get too far into the whole class/accent issue!

[Nava]

I'm good with languages. This includes being able to pick up other people's intonations, realizing where our pronunciation differs, and if I see that my pronunciation makes it difficult for them to understand me, trying to match theirs. My first run into Cockney would have been quite scary without this ability - I'd been taught "British English" and somehow ended up speaking "American English", but nobody ever told me about Cockney. Strill trying to recover from a dose of "Bing'ham" I got months back, too :rolleyes:

Problem: sometimes I do it unconsciously in Spanish, specially if I'm with someone who has a very strong accent. There's people who have started looking at me funny and when I asked "uh, what?" they said "chou're speakin' Ahgentiiinian, dearie". Oops. There's been others who thought I was trying to make fun of them and got real angry.

My own mother sounds pretty much "Official Spanish" most of the time, but after she's been on the phone with her mother, you can tell she's from Barcelona with just one word, it's amazing.

[garius]

I have a certain sympathetic accent. I suspect I'm typical of those brought up on the borders of Estuary English - I've got three parts upbringing, two parts local accent, and one part Eastenders.

Spot on that man. I was raised in Hertfordshire but have lived in London for most of my adult life. As a result i can go from Hugh Grant in Four Weddings to Jason Statham in Snatch within the space of a conversation.

A situation that will probably get even worse when i move to New York in a couple of weeks :smack:

[Sleel]

One of the things I'm good at is picking up accents. I used to mimic things a lot when I was a kid. It took me only a week or so in Kansas visiting my aunt to pick up the flat drawl. Drop me in the right part of Scotland and I'd be doing a burr with the best (worst?) of them without thinking about it. Just a couple of days in Wisconsin was enough for me to imitate the Yah-hey's up there. Or should I say, "Da Yah-Hey's up dere"? If I'd stayed around long enough it would probably stick. <shudder> My natural accent is a pretty neutral upper-midwest accent, which is basically broadcaster North American. Some people say my speech has a slight upper class feel, but I think that's just because I tend to enunciate and use big words.

I took Spanish when I was relatively young, so most of it stuck. I hadn't used Spanish in several years when I started taking Japanese at university. My teacher asked me if English was my native language; I sounded like a native Spanish speaker in Japanese. Now, I get consistent complements on my accent, or lack of, in Japanese. Most Americans "sound American," but I guess I don't.

Back when I could speak Spanish instead of having everything come out as a hybrid of Spanish and Japanese (language interference sucks!) I was told I had a kind of "educated" accent. Maybe I don't use enough slang. One of my first teachers was from Spain and spoke a Barcelona flavored Castilian Spanish. Mix that with the various flavors Spanish I was exposed to, and later on a buddy from Uruguay who'd traveled a lot, and I got a hard-to-place vaguely upper-class accent. I still lisp a bit when I say something like "?verdad?"

[Coil]

I also suffer from Sympathetic Accent Syndrome. SAS is a good term by the way. At least when I speak English (Swedish is my native language). When I speak to Brits my English improves, both accent and vocabulary. But when I speak English to for example a German or an Italian I suddenly lose it all.

I attended a course this spring with a very international bunch of people and I could hear my accent go from good to bad over a couple of seconds when talking to people from different countries.