I think you’re overreacting. He lived there, picked up the accent, and instinctively started using it when he came back to visit. It would probably take him a lot more self-consciouness to deliberately hold on to his American accent. I do the same thing, and I honestly don’t think it points to any deepseated inadequacies or inherent dishonesty in my nature. It’s just what happens when some people are surrounded by people who speak differently than they do.
That’s backwards from what I would have said it was–but that may be because I watched it at the urging of someone who knew only that I had been raised in MN (and whatever he could tell from 15 minutes observation, while eating breakfast) and my mother. I only watched it once, the “Minnesotan” aspects were interesting, but not appealing enough to overcome the aspects which didn’t appeal to me.
And I do have this vague memory of seeing Fargo, ND in the onscreen at the beginning of the movie.
And, anyway, I highly doubt the average North Dakotan speaks with the accent affected in the movie anymore than the average Minnesotan of my acquaintance does.
Still, for the benefit of anyone who doesn’t know their geography well, Fargo is across the Red River from Morehead, Minnesota. It’s significantly north, and quite a bit west of Minneapolis-St. Paul, and arguably much more likely to be a place where people speak with accents.
A Canadian I know through work (and a few nights out) has been living in England for 3 yrs and has the worst half-accent I’ve ever heard. He explained it by saying his Mother had been born in England but I found out later that she was a toddler when she moved to Canada so I can’t imagine that had any impact.
I’ve been living here for almost 2 yrs (in Feb.) and I can barely do a fake english accent (cup’a tuy?). I do find myself using common English words (mobile, wobble, whinge, queue) and refusing to say others (fag as in ciggie-I just can’t). I figure if it makes him happy then I won’t poke fun.
It was also set in Minnesota. Marge is the police chief of Brainerd, Minn., where the crimes take place.
It’s also partially set in Fargo, because that’s where Jerry went, out of town and far away, to hire the two thugs to kidnap his wife. I always thought it was called Fargo to emphasize the “out of town” nature of the crime. As in, this kind of thing would never happen here, in our sweet little town, if it weren’t for outside influences.
I may have been wrong. Mark your calendar’s, it doesn’t happen often!
I have to learn to get my replies in faster!
Speaking as a hobbyist actor, I once thought it’d be great fun to go to England (or any English-speaking country) and learn the dialect from immersion with the natives.
I now know that’s a terrible way of picking up an authentic regional accent — what you really want is to listen to the same people over and over again until you get a very specific dialect down, so you want Mersey or Liverpool or Scouse or Yorkshire. Doing it just by visiting London and listening to people from all over gives you “generic mishmash British from all over the map,” contaminated with every accent under the sun.
I’ve often wondered if my imitation dialect is good enough to pass inspection, but it’d be rude to just use it everywhere in England, so I wouldn’t dare.
I do sometimes enter a restaurant and use a different accent when I order food, once in a very rare while, because it’s fun to see how people treat you differently when they presume you have a different origin.
Put on an accent all the time and pretend I’m really from there, even to my friends? Please. That’s delusional.
Odd. I heard through the grapevine that he did exactly this to a girl he was seeing for a few weeks.
I totally understand putting on an accent as an experiment or for fun, but as I mentioned it was more that he refused to even acknowledge that he was doing it and then that he wouldn’t stop when I asked him to knock it off. Also, the whole attitude thing that came with it. What I don’t understand is how he explained it to his Brit friends. If someone born and raised in London came to America and spoke with an American accent immediately (I mean hardcore-- the second he got to the country, and shed the second he returned-- not like how Oprah unconsciously mimics guests’ accents-- which I guess everyone does, to an extent), I would ask them why. Gradual, I get. My brother has lived in the UK for the past six years and is only now sounding a bit like a Brit.
But yeah. I should just give it a rest. It was just so… not subtle, you know? Like if he’d sported a fake beard the whole time and I was just supposed to take it in stride and not ask questions.
He used an accent to get chicks?
Okay, now I totally don’t understand. If the given principle is “chicks dig dudes with accents,” why’d he bother to shed his when you two went to England?
(Which raises a question for a separate thread: do English girls think an American accent is sexy?)
I think it’s horribly pretentious and stupid. I can understand why you’d be annoyed and have a physical reaction. Faking an accent just seems so useless, it’s disingenous and affected.
As someone who has studied language it just seems deceptive, dishonest, and unnatural to turn an accent on or off consciously. Naturalized accents happen, but to affect them like a change of clothes, well, it just undermines honest communication. I would distrust someone who consciously tried to deceive me of their origin. The thing is, unless his accent is natural, any airs that he puts on would be easily detectable by a native speaker anyways and would probably raise some eyebrows.
Accents are useful for actors, perhaps, and maybe spies, but I’d save it for the stage or camera (or if I were a spy, a life and death situation.). I too would be annoyed if somebody did this in personal conversation as a friend, I’d tell them to knock it off.
A related question… Sometimes, I will do a German toast out of nowhere with friends or acquaintances. Am I being hypocritical? Is this as affected and strange a practice as an artificial accent? Usually, when I do it, we are raising a drink. It isn’t entirely out of purpose, I do the toast and that’s it- I don’t keep going on, unless it is requested, or people want to hear something else in German. Objectively, I don’t believe it’s the same practice nor quite as annoying as an accent…or? What do you guys think?
A parent’s accent absolutely influences the children’s accents, even if the parent is displaced. While my accent is different from my parents’ because we grew up in different regions, there are many words or phonemes I pronounce as they did, and it’s very easy for me to slip into their cadences. If I visit my mother for a week, I return with her accent.
Environment also influences accents. If I return anywhere I lived for 6 months or more, I fall right into the accent, even if (as in the case of Southeastern New England) I attempt not to. Put me in a room with somebody from South Boston and suddenly I’m using glottal stops. I don’t want to; it just happens. I’m also very good at memorizing music, and recently have found that I pick up tonal languages well. Put me in an environment where I spoke another language frequently and my English grammar goes to hell. I assume these are all related aspects of my language-learning style.
Your friend might be a little weird, but I have to say that I’ve known several people to affect the accent of the region in which they live, often unintentionally. Yes, it’s useful to know about him, but that it nauseates you suggests to me that it means something to you that’s different from my usual experience of this phenomenon.
It doesn’t nauseate me at all he just sounds like an idiot. 
As I said if he is happy than it doesn’t really matter to me.
Same here. I talk to people all the time on the phone, from all over the world, and once I hang up the phone I have to try to shake their accent back out of my head or I’ll pick up the phone and starting mimicking it.
Some little things stick like taffy. I once tried to say “coat” exactly like my mother-in-law, who is from Bowling Green, Kentucky.
I still say coat like my mother-in-law from Bowling Green, Kentucky, and it annoys me no end. It’s a silly way to say coat, dammit!
They certainly do.
In another thread I told of the barman in my local who is from Iowa/Idaho or somewhere.
He has the girls drooling and slobbering over him.
We hate the bastard 
The first time I went to the UK, I was terrified to open my mouth. I didn’t want folks to think I was aping them, but many many years of PBS and Monty Python etc made me susceptible to the cadence of speech, inflection, as well as vocab etc.
Somehow, going back a few times (not enough, I’d like to hop a plane right now), eradicated this urge for me. 
But I am also someone who picks up accents easily and well. Is it affected of this guy? Of course.
But look at it this way: he if truly feels the need to do this, what else has he got? Let him be-it’s a phase he might just grow out of. As for your rather extreme reaction–dunno. Maybe you need to think hard about why it matters so much to you. Does he mean more to you than you’ll admit? Or are you somehow threatened by differing pronunciations? (just kidding). IOW, let it go-life is too short to get your knickers in a twist, lass!
this guy as an actor might just have been embedding the english accent just a little deeper for professional purposes ,or he might just have wanted to fit in /not get ripped off as a gullible american tourist by predatory locals. i have done a fair amount of world travelling and try to speak much more clearly then i do at home but not with a foreign accent . ,the exceptions to this are if im in a shady area where i might appear vulnerable as a foreigner ,and during the troubles in ulster if in an irish nationalist area and forced to speak at all would assume an ulster accent (though not for too long as i would be sussed ) cos all englishmen tended to be suspected of being british intelligence officers of one sort or another .my natural accent is southern english(which to yanks would sound cockney) ive known english to hold onto a geordie accent many years after moving away from englands n/e cos they think its cute !and english who have spent a little time in aus hanging onto the accent long after they would naturally cos it was until recently a magnet for women ! working in close company with different english accents for long periods i HAVE aquired a different accent myself ,the most embarassing being when i picked up a country yokel accent without knowing it and only became aware of it when my co workers started ribbing me mercilessly ! recently britain has had a flood of eastern european migrant workers and a few of them have aquired authentic sounding brit accents ,they genuinlly DO receive better treatment as brits look on them more as people "like us " rather then exotic foreigners . we have an american t.v. presenter over here with an absurd charicature of an upper middle class english accent (cant think of his name ,from through the keyhole /master chef) and dick van dykes "cockney "accent in mary poppins is judged to be one of the most hilarious ever ! my irish relations hold the american "irish " accent to be something from a comic book for the under 12 s and completely phony.and thats my lot !