I work in a company with many foreigners. I’d say 50% of our head office is non-Dutch. 10% American, roughly. Lots of Brits, Aussies, Kiwis, Canucks, you name it. It’s pretty much an institutionalised sport to take the mickey out of the fellow Anglos.
For some reason, they appreciate it less when the Dutch join in. Even though our English is just as good, if not better.
Examples? My former English boss always addressing an American colleague with “buddy”. “You got it, buddy!”, in a perfect NY accent. Drove him nuts.
And, when the whole Clinton/Lewinsky thing was going down (I can’t believe I just typed that!), he smugly mentioned that “At least the English need to go down on just one knee when we praise our head of state”. Cracked me up.
I keep hearing about this Valley Girl accent, what the heck is it? Can anyone point out a TV character that would be said to have a valley girl accent or even a link to somewhere I can listen to it.
It’s, like, tooootally all over the teenage syndicated shows, you know?
I mean, as if!
It’s more of a vocabulary and intonation thing than an accent thing, at least to me. Most “Valley Girl” I hear in movies and such sounds generic Californian to me, as far as the accent itself goes.
I’ll tell ya, we Californians for a long time were immune to being making fun of from Asians, et.al. because unlike Southern or New Yawk, it’s hard to sound “Californian.” That is, until the Valley Girl thing hit big. Now it’s “omahGODDD” this and “groady to the max” that. Terrific. :o
In Japan I hear “Oh my god,” “Oh shit,” and “Fuck you!” all the time, but it comes out as “Oh mah-ee gottto,” “Oh sheettto” and “Fahkku Yooo!” As you may have guessed, they learn about us from movies. They also say “Kah mon” (come on), “Wah-oh!” (wow) and “Oh-rai” (alright).
I heard once that Frenchmen imitate English speakers by tacking “-ation” onto the ends of their statements. Can anyone verify?
If I’ve got this correctly then Valley Girl would be like – Clueless, Bring it On, Season 1 Buffy? I’m trying to think what else here but “its like soooo hard”.
One of my Japanese friends was wrestling with a packing box, and ended up dropping it. Her “American style” response? “Burr SHEET!”
On the subject of typical names, I once saw a Japanese children’s cartoon where “Sam” was treated as a typical American name. I don’t know if that is a common joke or if it was unique to this program.
My parents (who are British) will imitate Americans by using a sort of generic Texan accent, no matter what part of the country they are mocking. They overpronounce everything though (as Recursion said), so it becomes a kind of mangled, all-purpose American accent. It’s really quite amusing.
Here in Canada people usually imitate Americans by using either a Valley-girl California accent, or a sort of dopey Southern accent.
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