I feel like I’m being asked to write a legal contract. How about this: Over a period of time during which she primarily resided within the political entity known as the United States of America, the manner of speech which is commonly known as an accent which was most frequently displayed by the person generally known as Gillian Leigh Anderson shifted from that which a significant number of English speakers would recognize as indicative of residency in the United Kingdom to one which a significant number of English speakers would recognize as indicative of residency in the region of the United States of America that is commonly identified as the Mid-West.
Does that meet the accuracy standards of this board or do I need to throw in some citations and footnotes?
Here is a video of Anderson appearing on a BBC talkshow.
Wait a second, rural NC? Like rural VA? A Blue Ridge accent? You know, mush mouth? I may need to rethink this. But I could get past Jodie Foster’s mush mouth accent in “Silence of the Lambs” and she’s no Ava Gardner.
Late to the party, but Ciaran Hinds’ accent in the clip is a middle class North Belfast accent. North Belfast being a mostly Catholic part of the city.
He sounds exactly like my boss.
Forget about the aitch/haitch nonsense.
Ask a NewYorker or Londoner how they can tell by speech alone which part of the city someone comes from, after a while you just learn to tell.
I don’t know about that, I’d say that Brooklyn, Queens, and Long Island each have a recognizable accent. Most Americans that are paying attention could probably distinguish these from normal New Yorker accents, but I’m going to bet that New Yorkers themselves probably do a much better job at it than I would.
Ava Gardner was born, if Wikipedia is to be trusted, in Johnston County, North Carolina, which is eastern flatland tobacco farming country. I would guess that her natural accent was pretty similar to … well, my mother’s actually, but that doesn’t help you any.
The most famous person I can find from anywhere close to there is Vanna White, who is from coastal South Carolina originally. Different, but not as different as Blue Ridge would be. Of course, Vanna probably doesn’t use her native tongue on TV, either.
Most Americans will have no idea how to distinguish them from each other or from “Jersey” accents, and maybe even Philadelphia accents.
And given the way city is currently populated, I would question the use of the term “normal New Yorker accent.” Once you’ve removed Brookly, Queens, and Long Island accents, there aren’t a whole lot of “normal New Yorker” accents left.
When not acting, Tony Curtis had the most god-awful Bronx accent, enough to befit his real name (Bernard Schwartz). But in films, he sounded regular mainstream standard American.
As befits a resurrected thread, how about a departed actor; Cary Grant.
I doubt any recordings exist, but he would have had a Bristolian accent at least in his early years, and ended up with some kind of mid-Atlantic accent far removed from that.
