for most people, probably a dozen or so, but some of them are quite similar to each other; Personally, I think I can distinguish (off the top of my head):
West Country (Devon & Cornwall together, for me)
Somerset (I can distinguish from Devon & Cornwall, although it is similar)
Hampshire
Dorset (is a sort of blend of broad Hampshire with a West Country twang - not surprising, since it is genographically between the two)
Surrey
London (not Cockney)
Essex
Oxford
Liverpool
Manchester
East Anglia
Yorkshire
Generic Geordie (my mother’s ancestry)
Several kinds of Scots - generally, the further north, the more clipped, burry and incomprehensible (to me).
Welsh (there is huge variety, but I can’t personally place any specific regions due to unfamiliarity)
Northern Ireland (different from Republic of Ireland)
Well maybe that’s a defence that the show could use, but I hope you’re not suggesting he purposefully modelled it on an 100 year old accent. How would he have known what to aim for?
Mmm, its like a fake mockerney accent, which folk in Britain immediately recognize as someone whos apparently learned everything they know about accents from Dick van Dyke.
As some of the other UK posters said, British accents vary within their region quite a lot, while people can still recognize them as being from a specific area. My own is West Yorkshire (Leeds), but people from as little as 3 miles away from where I come from speak slighlty differently. South Yorkshire (think Brian Glover in Kes) is different again.
Most folk will recognize Cockney, Estuary, Liverpudlian, Manc, Brummie, Cornish etc though.
Morley. Home of the brave. Born in Dewsbury, brought up there.
Zyada, a wide boys like a whealer dealer type dude, fingers in pies, dodgy dealings. Considers himself important, a hit with the ladies, Del Boy off Only Fools & Horses if you’ve ever seen that. Thats probably as clear as mud actually.
I’m always hopeless at accents. When I first heard Spike it was “Hey, cool accent. Where have I heard it before?” I finally figured out that it was supposed to be english, probably cockney, and I’d heard from other American actors trying to do a cockney accent. shrug But then I never noticed anything odd about DvD
So how about the Wesley accent (Alexis Denisof)? It seems pretty good to me but what would I know. I do know he spent many years working in England and even played Englishmen on TV there. His IMDB entry shows that he had a small role in several Sharpe episodes, but I don’t remember him. When I hear him speaking in his “normal” accent (Maryland) it sounds fake.
paulberserker that actually makes sense, and sounds like something Spike would try to emulate. But what is/are the home counties and what does it mean?
Wes’s accent certainly fits his role, and I have to admit he does sound pretty good to me, but again, it doesn’t really have any true basis in any English regional accents. Again, it’s just a generic stage-school accent, this time an upper-middle class one.
I find that with most actors who I’m more used to hearing with a different accent. Guy Pearce’s broad Aussie accent gets me every time.
I’ll have to listen to him again from my Buffy DVDs. He allways seemed to me like an Eton type trying not to sound posh. With false bits of London and Essex wide boy speak being used to try and hide his poshness. There were plenty like that to be found in Windsor pubs and the newer trendy pubs in Slough. I’d think it was just an Eton 6th former trying to not get beaten up for being a toffy-nosed git.
Doesn’t Marsters use a completely different accent for the “William the Bloody” flashbacks? IIRC, he sounded more middle-class and softer then. I always thought the Mockney accent was, like all things Spike, a big front.
In my strictly uninformed opinion (IMSUO) I think, perhaps, the one of the reasons most Americans cannot distinguish between the differences is that the US is large enough where we don’t really come into contact with enough people from different areas to be able to categorize them as easily. We’ll just lump West Virginian Rural with Georgia Urban as “Southern” even though there is a big difference. (I’m usually a lumper too, but my GF grew up in West VA hills and knows the differnence.)
Now with that theory, I would suspect that we can place people from our general area. For instance, Chicago accent (north and south side), Indiana/S. Illinois accent, Corn Country Illinois accent, Minnosota accent, UP accent, I think I could place someone from there.
The one that got me was Damian Lewis I didn’t remember seeing him in anything until Band of Brothers. It was really strange to hear him speak with an English accent. I would have put money on him being from Pennsylvania. In Dreamcatcher he uses both.
