I’ve yet to come across an example of an American actor who can successfully talk “Australian.” (Or “Straaay-an”). Even the venerable Ms Streep sounded…like a Kiwi in Evil Angels (Or whatever its US title was - the film about Lindy Chamberlain).
When I first starting speaking in complete sentences I had a pukka Indian accent (Mum took time off and looked after me). Then I spoke like a Pom until I went to school (Dad took time off and looked after me). Within a month or so of starting school, I talked Straay-an. I basically now have a mild Aussie accent (mild because none of my family has an Aussie accent, so its tempered somewhat).
We grew up around my grandmother who had been brought up in upper-middle class English boarding schools to “speak properly”, and in the era my mother and father went to school, and in the particular schools my parents went to*, aping an English accent was seen as more refined than speaking with an Australian accent, so my parents had a very soft Australian accent at most. My brother spoke in rounded “proper English” tones at home and broad Australian at school, which apparently amused everyone in the family as he switched off at will, with no apparent effort, whereas I was stuck being told I couldn’t possibly be Australian throughout my entire childhood. (“No, where do you really come from?” How obnoxious is that! As if I don’t know where I was born and raised!)
My mother now affects a moderately broad Australian accent because she resents being brought up to speak as if she were from “the Mother country”. Oh, the joys of post-colonialism.
And my accent is getting so hybrid that unless I’m doing polite-company voice, people no longer ask where I’m from or assume I’m not from Boston, where I’ve been living for five years, but polite-company voice still stumps most people. It’s not that I have an American accent exactly in my normal speech, it’s just hovering somewhere in between three continents. Thanks, granny!
*Both were aspirational in different ways - Dad went to a working class school with a few teachers who wanted the boys to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and mum went to the ‘best’ private girls’ school in her town where the teachers were selling the line that the girls were going to be the leaders of society and needed to set an example. But I don’t want to get too far into the whole class/accent issue!
I’m good with languages. This includes being able to pick up other people’s intonations, realizing where our pronunciation differs, and if I see that my pronunciation makes it difficult for them to understand me, trying to match theirs. My first run into Cockney would have been quite scary without this ability - I’d been taught “British English” and somehow ended up speaking “American English”, but nobody ever told me about Cockney. Strill trying to recover from a dose of “Bing’ham” I got months back, too :rolleyes:
Problem: sometimes I do it unconsciously in Spanish, specially if I’m with someone who has a very strong accent. There’s people who have started looking at me funny and when I asked “uh, what?” they said “chou’re speakin’ Ahgentiiinian, dearie”. Oops. There’s been others who thought I was trying to make fun of them and got real angry.
My own mother sounds pretty much “Official Spanish” most of the time, but after she’s been on the phone with her mother, you can tell she’s from Barcelona with just one word, it’s amazing.
Spot on that man. I was raised in Hertfordshire but have lived in London for most of my adult life. As a result i can go from Hugh Grant in Four Weddings to Jason Statham in Snatch within the space of a conversation.
A situation that will probably get even worse when i move to New York in a couple of weeks :smack:
One of the things I’m good at is picking up accents. I used to mimic things a lot when I was a kid. It took me only a week or so in Kansas visiting my aunt to pick up the flat drawl. Drop me in the right part of Scotland and I’d be doing a burr with the best (worst?) of them without thinking about it. Just a couple of days in Wisconsin was enough for me to imitate the Yah-hey’s up there. Or should I say, “Da Yah-Hey’s up dere”? If I’d stayed around long enough it would probably stick. <shudder> My natural accent is a pretty neutral upper-midwest accent, which is basically broadcaster North American. Some people say my speech has a slight upper class feel, but I think that’s just because I tend to enunciate and use big words.
I took Spanish when I was relatively young, so most of it stuck. I hadn’t used Spanish in several years when I started taking Japanese at university. My teacher asked me if English was my native language; I sounded like a native Spanish speaker in Japanese. Now, I get consistent complements on my accent, or lack of, in Japanese. Most Americans “sound American,” but I guess I don’t.
Back when I could speak Spanish instead of having everything come out as a hybrid of Spanish and Japanese (language interference sucks!) I was told I had a kind of “educated” accent. Maybe I don’t use enough slang. One of my first teachers was from Spain and spoke a Barcelona flavored Castilian Spanish. Mix that with the various flavors Spanish I was exposed to, and later on a buddy from Uruguay who’d traveled a lot, and I got a hard-to-place vaguely upper-class accent. I still lisp a bit when I say something like “?verdad?”
I also suffer from Sympathetic Accent Syndrome. SAS is a good term by the way. At least when I speak English (Swedish is my native language). When I speak to Brits my English improves, both accent and vocabulary. But when I speak English to for example a German or an Italian I suddenly lose it all.
I attended a course this spring with a very international bunch of people and I could hear my accent go from good to bad over a couple of seconds when talking to people from different countries.