Yes: those incomprehensible Glaswegians all have a British accent.
However, Welshy’s accent was spot-on!
It’s better than Picard’s French accent.
No it wasn’t. By the 23rd Century, Britain had finally won the 2nd Hundred Years War, and France was totally subjugated. It’s language was suppressed, it’s culture abolished, and everybody French became “more British than the British” to fit in.
And the people rejoiced.
I don’t get what the big deal is about Picard’s accent. Apparently, he’s just a natural with languages, and was able to learn English as a second language well enough that he speaks it without an accent. Why is that so hard to believe? Of course, he learned English from a British teacher, so his “without an accent” is by British standards. I’ve met folks in real life with the exact same situation.
Meh. I said British because I meant any English, Irish, Welsh, or mother from the Isle of Man with a French father with a Lithuanian great-grandmother theatrically trained actor can sit and study the accent to get it perfect, of just mumble-mosh their way through it, and most of us wouldn’t mind – unless you actually lived in Scotland. The way I’d heard it James Dohan could do any accent – not just Irish or Scottish, that was a major selling point for him when he did guest spots on TV shows like Bonanza. We could have had a Swedish, French or any other sort of chief engineer – it was all up to Gene Roddenberry. James Dohan really didn’t care – it was just something he’d done to make his character a little bit more interesting (read: give this guy airtime so the show doesn’t get dull.)
It was fairly good generic Scots accent. The reason it gets mocked occasionally is the quaint phrasing he sometimes uses, like dinnae, which would be a little odd in someone with a generic Scots accent rather than a regional one - it’d be like someone with an RP accent suddenly saying ‘guvnor.’
Well, that’s part of the reason - the other is that many people automatically think ‘American doing a foreign accent, it must be bad!’ and proceed from that assumption.
Do they? Only if they’re being really prissy. His accent was very good, and the tiny number of occasions it dropped into American are justified by his character having lived in America for so long anyway.
- Scottish people are British.
- Irish people are not (necessarily) British.
Do carry on.
Depending on what definition you use, they’re either all British, none British, or some of them British but not others. They’re all from the British Islands, they’re none from Great Britain, and they’re some of them from the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
Can I ask a related question?
In the movie Gosford Park, there was a character who was, I think, an American actor, who was pretending to be a Scot. The Scottish housemaid knew immediately that he was a fake. But listening to her talk, and to him talk, I could tell they were different but I couldn’t say exactly what might have been wrong with his accent. Can someone enlighten me?
Also, in Doctor Who, Amy Pond’s accent seems to me to be Scottish, am I off on that too?
Roddy
I’m not sure about Amy Pond, but according to Wiki the actress who plays her was born and raised in Inverness, Scotland – right up until she went off to school in Edinburgh, Scotland.
James Doohan was Canadian.
I Agree with Chronos. Picard learned English from an English person. Many Indians speak English with an English accent.
One that surprised me was Alan Cumming. I had seen him in a few movies and I was surprised the first time I heard him speaking in his natural Scottish accent.
No definition that I know of includes people from the RoI as British. Plants, animals, etc, maybe, but not people.
Yup, she’s Scottish.
I know (see my screen name) - but the knee-jerk criticism is based on the ‘foreigner’ being American, even if the foreigner actually isn’t.
Why, politics? There was an Irish family in the library where I worked. I said something about their being English. She was obviously pissed off, but she was very polite and said, “We are British.” I apologized and all was well.
I can’t understand a damn word she says when she talks fast. 
Probably vastly annoys Canadians.
Are you sure they were from the Republic of Ireland rather than from Northern Ireland?
Then they were from Northern Ireland, not English or Irish.
Probably - though it’d be hard for them to decide between being derided for an accent that wasn’t actually that bad or being derided for it purely because they were ‘American.’
Amy Pond’s hard to understand? But she speaks sooo slooowly. Ach well, YMMV. Never watch Rab C. Nesbitt.
Thanks! Both of you have fought my ignorance.
Wait a minute, people from Northern Ireland aren’t Irish? I admit that folks from the Northern USA are still from the same country as I.
Well, first of all, folks from Northern Ireland are not, by most standards, from the same country as people from the country of Ireland. But it gets complicated, since “Irish” can refer to the island or to the country, and in some senses, Northern Ireland is lumped in with the rest of the island.
Carniviousplant, I assume you’re being disinegenuous in not knowing that Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland are distinct entities.
Some people from Northern Ireland do consider themselves Irish, and they have the right to Irish passports, but the people from Northern Ireland who were annoyed at being called English and said they were British were definitely not Irish.
It can sometimes be difficult to remember that loads of people in Northern Ireland do not actually identify with the Irish Republic very much and do not want to be called Irish. Some of them - or their families - will even have fought for the right not to be Irish. And a lot just identify as Northern Irish.
It was knowing a lot of people from NI i my late teens that changed me from my apathetic ‘ah, Ireland fought for independance so long, let the whole country be free!’ stance to one of ‘it’s a HELL of a lot more complicated than that.’