Cary Grant may have been a little harsh on himself there. He was born in Bristol (where they don’t talk anything like Eliza Doolittle) and in any case his accent had lost all traces of its origins by the time My Fair Lady was made. Perhaps he had to work hard at losing his West Country burr and didn’t think he’d finished the job? He always seemed to me to have one of those mid-Atlantic ones that sounds English to an American but more American to an English person.
Ironically Rex Harrison was from my home town of Liverpool, and if he’d had the usual accent of that city Eliza would’ve ended up sounding like Lister!
By the way, is there any truth in the rumour that the title of the film came from an American attempt at pronouncing “Mayfair Lady” like a Cockney?
Thanks for that Kinsey. I did see an interview with John Mahoney where he said he was originally from Manchester.
I’m sure that Jane Leeves wouldn’t fool anyone from Manchester that she was from that city. If you want to hear a Manchester accent you should listen to the Gallagher brothers from Oasis (not that I’m recommending you to listen to them talk of course ;)). She’s clearly a southerner attempting to talk like someone from more or less the Lancashire area.
It’s true that people’s accents can be influenced by travel, but you’d have to be separated at birth to finish up with the range of voices in Daphne’s family. It seems more likely that the producers wanted to make her brothers sound rough and picked some accents that fitted the bill. Although it sounds ridiculous to us Brits, how many Frasier viewers would be expected to tell the difference anyway?
About the only thing I thought was funny on Benny Hill was
when he’d slap the little bald guy on the head. About the
lowest of BH’s low humor, but what can I say? I like the
Stooges, too, as well as most of the other much better Britcoms that have been mentioned here. I guess I take my
humor high and very low, but not just low or middling.
As an American, I always perceived Monty Python and Fawlty Towers as presenting a wide range of accents, and going a long way to explode the “British==Aristocratic” myth. With
some exceptions, most of the hotel-guest actors on Fawlty
Towers come across as typically middle class people, without
“toffee-nosed” accents. Actually, Mr. Hutchinson, that notorious spoon salesman in hotel inspector’s clothing, had
an interesting accent that almost sounded American at times.
Can any of our resident Brits tell us what kind of regional
accent Mr. H. had?
If memory serves, Mr Hutchinson the spoon salesman was played by Bernard Cribbins (who is a Londoner) attempting to speak with a Yorkshire accent. Your own comments describe his level of success pretty succinctly.
Having been to college in Sheffield I can confirm that the accents do change over that distance.
I bet most people from the UK would be able to spot the local variations within, say 100 miles radius from their home hown, and pin down a neighbour’s origins to the nearest town or city. I’d put money on being able to tell a Bolton accent from a Burnley one or a Blackburn accent from a Salford one. Or am I just another 'enry 'higgins?
People from my home town (Maghull v. near Liverpool) sound nothing like, say Ormskirk or Preston which are only a few miles away. In fact you can hear the accent change more from Scouse to Lancastrian every mile up the road. Of course it gets harder the further from home you go. I bet very few English people could tell a Glasgow accent from an Edinburgh one for instance, which a Scot might be able to tell apart quite easily.
People’s accents do vary for more than just geographical reasons, but it isn’t always a matter of social class or education. My brother has a stronger Merseyside accent than I do, but we were brought up together, went to the same schools and were both educated to degree level. Our dad was from Bootle, a very blue collar part of town, but he didn’t have a strong accent either. In fact none of my uncles sounded like Brookside cast members.
Speaking of Northerners, I recall from hearing Beatle interviews that even within the group there was a variation.
When they were kids John’s aunt thought George’s accent was
low (pres. meaning more Scouse), maybe Paul tried to talk
a little “higher”, and the scousiest sounding of the lot
was the fired drummer Pete Best, regardless of the fact that
he enjoyed a significantly more comfortable upbringing than the others.
Fawlty Towers is great but they only show very few episodes (maybe all that were ever made) but my all time favorite is Keeping Up Appearances. That really shows the difference between how different social classes speak (even if they are sisters)
I used to like Rumpole of the Bailey but they have not shown it in a long time.
I think it depends very much on the individual, how deeply ingrained the accent is in the first place and to some extent on deliberate choice. I am sure that some people either lose or retain a distinctive accent because they want to. I know somebody with a distinctive Scots accent who has lived all her life since the age of about four in the South of England.
Agreed. You wouldn’t believe how hard people try to lose their accents, especially northern ones, when they come here to Oxford. Several times I’ve asked students here where they come from, to be answered in a half-northern, half-southern accent, “Newcastle…Leeds…Bradford (etc.)” This would definately fall under class differences, I believe.
It’s interesting that only those from Northern England do it. Scots, Welsh, West Countrymen and Northern Irishmen usually make little attempt to modify their accent here.
How exactly would Queen Victoria (or any other monarch) have mandated a particular accent? The idea that RP derives from her accent would only have made sense if the claim was that those around her copied it out of snobbery. It however seems most unlikely that the members of her court, all of whom had a strong sense of their own social standing irrespective of their royal offices, would have bother to do anything so obviously unaristocratic. Most English peers in the nineteenth century no doubt believed that their existing accents were entirely acceptable. Most of the rest of her subjects would have had no idea how she spoke.
The origins of RP are usually attributed to the influence of the major public schools and to Oxford and Cambridge Universities.
I don’t know which college you’re at, but my experience at Oxford was the reverse of that. People who had been to expensive private schools affected to speak with “working class” regional accents. The most popular was a kind of non-specific South London / Estuary accent, usually favoured by those from the more affluent parts of the home counties, so you had people from Surrey who went to Eton speaking like petty criminals out of The Bill (“Leave it aaht, John; cor blimey, you’re 'aving a larf, en’cha” etc.). IIRC, people from Wadham and Balliol were particular offenders in this regard.
Everybody from anywhere vaguely in the North-West of England affected a heavy Manchester or Liverpool accent. One guy I knew had been at Epsom (though his parental home was in Manchester) and he spoke like Liam Gallacher (though this was just before Oasis became famous).
Then again, I was at a College which took a large proportion of people from state schools in the North of England; and at a time (late-1980s) when Manchester was seen as the bright centre of the cultural universe by everybody under the age of 25.
I used to work with a guy in California who’d moved there from England at the age of nine, and never lost his accent. When I mentioned to him how unusual this seemed to me (most people, in my experience, tend to lose their accent if they move to a new area before they hit puberty), his reply was: “The chicks dig it.”*
Ironic, because his is Home Counties, which has got to be one of the least attractive English accents.*
When speaking of BritComs from the '90s, let’s not forget “Absolutely Fabulous”, sweetie darlings!
Returning to the thread topic: I read somewhere (recently) that the dialect spoken in the remote areas of the Eastern Shore of Maryland is considered to be the closest thing to Elizabethan English which exists in the present day. Not clear whether this was strictly in North American terms, or world-wide.
(For those of you who don’t know, the Eastern Shore is that piece of Maryland across the Chesapeake Bay from Baltimore and Washington, D.C.)
You’re probably thinking of Tangier Island, in the Virginia waters of the Chesapeake Bay. The local accent is frequently mythologized/romanticized as being close to Elizabethan English - mainly by the local tourist industry. Linguists who’ve studied the area acknowledge that the accent bears a similarity to that of Devon and Cornwall, but none would never refer to it as “Elizabethan”.
Yep,yep, I spent a little time on the Outer Banks (flat, windy, good fish and interesting as ye ole Barbary Coast, har, harrrrrrrr) and the locals there definately speak modern East Coast American. Didn’t hear a single Shakespearian-esque accent in Burger King.
The talk about British actors trying to change their accents reminds me of a story I wrote not too long ago about a Canadian acting coach who was doing very well teaching Canadian actors to speak like Americans so they could get more parts on the US TV shows being filmed up here. He told me about the various ways Canadians sound different than Americans, and I must confess that I’d never noticed the differences before.
I think for most people it’s to do with preserving what they perceive to be their “cultural identity.” Shane MacGowan is a good example – he was born and brought up in London, he went to Westminster School (one of the top public schools* in the country) but he still has a distinctive Irish accent. Just like your man in the USA.
My own accent changes according to the time of day, the person I’m talking to and whether there’s an R in the month (mild, Alan Bennet, Yorkshire to BBC English), so I’m always a bit suspicious of people who cleave fiercely to the accent of a region they haven’t lived in since early childhood.
(*Public school = expensive private school, for the avoidance of any doubt among US readers.)
