I was visiting an aged relative over the long weekend, and we were watching some home buying and improvement show based in Mississippi, where some big burley dude and his petite wife speak in what I assume is a Mississippi accent. What was really funny in one of the episodes, they started talking about Georgia or South Carolina something-or-other, and then started mimicking/mocking that other accident.
Although I know there’s not a single, southern accent, it had never occurred to me that people with southern accents mimic other southern accents for fun.
I saw a show on Nickelodeon years and years ago- something like “Movie Magic” that basically described how things were done in movies. Most of it was how various practical and visual effects were done, as well as how stunts were performed.
One episode though, had a segment on voice and dialect coaching, and the example they used was teaching a British actor how to speak in a Southern accent. It turned out to be remarkably similar- with what sounded to me to be very minor tweaks to pronunciation, it shifted from a fairly neutral RP pronunciation to some sort of super-Deep South accent. Not a rednecky backwoods accent, but rather what I’d imagine a 1905 Mississippi state senator might have sounded like.
Anyway, it was surprisingly close to the standard British accent, even if it wasn’t exactly “accurate”. I imagine that what we end up with out of a lot of British actors is that sort of accent, and they don’t really go past that to learn the nuance of how real people sound, or that there are different accents- your average white middle class Southerner isn’t necessarily going to have a super-thick accent, although they probably do have an accent.
And if they’re not aiming for a specific Southern or NY accent, they get taught an “American” accent, which is kind of an everywhere and nowhere sort of accent. These are often quite good- good enough to where you don’t doubt they’re American, but you don’t know where they’re from either. Think Hugh Laurie in “House” or Damian Lewis in “Band of Brothers” for good examples of this.
I suspect the same thing happens in reverse; American actors are taught how to do a “British” accent, without much regard for whether they should sound like they’re from Kent, Somerset or Yorkshire.
An RP-speaking Brit has the advantage that the quote-unquote “Standard” Southern accent - the one most non-Southerners think we all have; Foghorn Leghorn or Jeff Foxworthy - is, like RP, non-rhotic. Which makes it a bit easier for an English actor than, say, a Scot or a New Englander.
Of course, there are several rhotic Southern accents as well. But most British actors I’ve ever heard stick to the stereotypical Cotton Belt accent.
Let me throw a theory. Americans, from childhood, do fake southern accents just for fun. As school kids we did Foghorn Leghorns, nobody cared how badly. As adult actors, we mimic ourselves, not our stage character, and if we use “y’all” in the singular, nobody is there to correct. But the non-American has no childhood history of solidifying the fake. Their first exposure to southerning is from the real McCoy, so they get authentic voice coaching from the get-go.
There have been some recent movies with decent Boston accents (there are more than one accent in this area) but for the most part they are awful. For the most part, the Boston accents in movies are way too broad.
Well, mebbe, sure. Just like the rest of us played with “Toidy-Toid an’ Toid” and “Hey, fuggeddaboutit!” as the stereotypical New York accent and “Pahk the cah in Hahvad Yahd” as the Boston accent.
On the other hand, given the prevalence of American popular media in Britain, I suspect British actors are exposed to the various American accents, including the Southern drawl, at a younger age than Americans are to British dialects. (And in my own memories of growing up in the Seventies and Eighties, the British media I encountered - mainly through PBS, and Star Wars - was predominately RP. Even a series like All Creatures Great And Small, which was set in Yorkshire, had RP-speaking protagonists. A Scottish or Northern Doctor Who? Unthinkable, old boy!) Here, for example, is the Welsh actress Cariad Lloyd doing a fairly decent Southern accent on Would I Lie To You? (from 2:10).
My SWAG is that most non-professionals who play with accents not their own identify and exaggerate what they perceive as the most “exotic” features of the target accent, and tend to apply those features in situations that natives wouldn’t. Which is how you get travesties like Dick Van Dyke’s “Cockney” in Mary Poppins. Lloyd does this in the clip I posted, when she makes the classic mistake of using “y’all” as a singular pronoun. That’s evidence, I think, for my supposition; non-Southerners see “y’all” as an exotic dialect term, a marker for “Southern” speech. They don’t characterize it as a functional word that obeys the rules of English syntax. Whereas Southerners parse it as it actually is, a contraction of “you all”, and thus plural. Since we don’t perceived it as foreign and exotic, we don’t slot it into a special category of “weird dialect words”. On the other hand, I’m sure we misuse the New York “youse guys” or the Estuary English “innit”, in the same way, not understanding the cultural and grammatical context of the word.
I’m sure Brits are exposed much more relentlessly to American accents than the converse, but “British accents” (at least RP) are really not all that uncommon in American television and especially movies. I would bet a vast majority of american kids have heard a British accent (at least from osmosis by hearing what their parents watch), long before they are capable of forming memories.
Not uncommon now, no, with increased ease of access to British media via YouTube, Netflix, etc., and British entertainers like James Corden, John Oliver, and Trevor Noah working in America. Doctor Who has a large American fan base now, as do English Premier League soccer teams.
However, that’s really only developed in the past twenty years or so. When I was growing up in the 70s and 80s, the only regular access to British media available was via PBS - Masterpiece Theater, occasional sitcoms like Good Neighbours and All Creatures Great And Small, the films of David Attenborough. Doctor Who was shown at 10 p.m. on Saturday nights, which gives you an idea of the size of its American fandom (and the assumptions PBS’ programmers made about those fans).
OK, OK. I fucking loathe soccer and I took the Low Road.
I humbly apologize (and I just realized I really do) to any I have offended by my rant against soccer. Although, ISiddiqui, I would seriously question the penetration of English Premier League teams into a population that can root for so many better teams. Really, Hispanic Arsenal fans? How many of those are there in the world? To both of you, I apologize.
Well aside from La Liga (Spain), the EPL probably has the best teams.
And Hispanic fans and EPL fans don’t necessarily overlap, the Hispanic fans generally watch LigaMX (Mexico’s league) and do so in the millions.
And to tie it into the Southeastern United States, I’m very excited for Atlanta United’s first game for the MLS is Back tournament this Saturday (and am sad Nashville SC has so many Covid cases right now).
NBC, I believe, shows EPL games on Saturday mornings. And promotes them pretty heavily. They wouldn’t do so unless they knew the games would draw enough eyeballs to make it worth their while.
The point of this, anyway, was that NBC’s EPL broadcasts are yet another medium of exposure to British accents, for Americans.
FWIW, I can’t get into soccer, either. 'Bout as exciting golf and professional cornhole, to me. But the game has a big fanbase, even down here in SEC Land. What can I say; we live in degenerate times. ( for ISiddiqui)
I’m curious as to what the posters who describe someone as overdoing it mean by this. In particular, how does it apply to the “standard” American accent? Let’s take the example of Hugh Laurie playing the role of House. If he were to have done a bad job by “overdoing it”, what might that have sounded like? Are there examples of someone, British or otherwise, overdoing a “standard” American accent? I’m having a hard time imagining what that might sound like.
for ISiddiqui)