I have been told by Americans friends that I have a British accent; which I don’t and nobody else has mentioned it. I have lived in the UK for a while so perhaps I did pick something up.
But I have also been told (by Americans) that Billy Zanes accent in Titanic was a British accent (huh) that when Carrie Fisher spoke to Tarkin in Star Wars, she adopted a British accent and Padme Amidala had one as well?
So; for Americans, a British accent is= speaking clearly, enunciating every word and employing complex vocabulary?
Zane in Titanic, and Carried Fisher in the scenes in question, both affected a “patrician” accent - think Katherine Hepburn. Many Americans confuse it with an English accent of some sort.
Also, no American would use the phrase “foul stench”.
The problem is that there is no ‘British accent’ There is a collection of different, overlapping regional accents (not to mention dialects) that is arguably as diverse as the range of all English-language accents across the whole world.
Some of us are flipped out by any accent that differs from the one we grew up with. Others have been watching Brit TV for years & can tell the Upper Class Twits from The Yorkshiremen–& the other exotic creatures found on those misty islands. (Yes, I’m including Northern Ireland.)
Not that we can understand them all without subtitles.
There is also the problem that the question “What do Americans think about issue X?” is even more vague than the question “What is a British accent?”.
It’s true that there is a wide variety of accents spoken in Britain. It’s still possible to do a survey of accents in Britain and come up with a few dozen ones at most, each of which describes fairly narrowly the speech of the thousands or millions of people who speak it. Furthermore, I suspect that the range of British accents is not quite as broad as you think they are, Mangetout, and the range of accents among English speakers outside of Britain is broader than you think. It’s common for people to overestimate the amount of diversity in accents in the region they live and to underestimate the amount of diversity in accents in regions where they don’t live. Thus, someone living in Lower Slobbovia will claim that there are many different accents in Lower Slobbovia and only a few different ones in Upper Slobbovia while someone living in Upper Slobbovia will claim that there are many different accents in Upper Slobbovia and only a few different ones in Lower Slobbovia. A linguist specializing in accents who comes from outside of Slobbovia might find that the number of accents in the two parts of the region are about the same. It’s easier to distinguish among accents when they are similar to yours and harder when they are different from yours.
The range of American opinions on what a British accent is will be harder to classify than to do an objective survey of British accents. Obviously Americans believe many things, many of them ridiculous and uninformed. What is even the point of asking them to classify the accents spoken in movies, usually by actors trying desperately to do an accent that’s far from their own?
Incidentally, AK84, what are all the places that you have lived? What do you mean that you have lived in the U.K. for a while? How long have you lived in other places?
Many Americans think that any time the r is dropped and the vowels are clipped, the accent is British. Those features are what most of us hear, at least initially, as “British”.
Especially when dealing with period pieces (Titanic) or older movies (Katherine Hepburn) this means that upper class and/or New England (especially Connecticut, where Hepburn is from) accents read to American audiences as “British” sounding.
“Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi,” is not complex vocabulary.
It’s more just that their manner of speech was obviously affected, and to an American ear, “unspecified affectation” tends to get thrown in a big mental box marked “British accent.”
IANA linguist, nor am I Mangetout, but I feel this may not be the case. I don’t know how linguists would measure it but I think the difference between an English accent and a Scottish accent is as great as the difference between either and a north American accent. Scottish and English accents are linguistically so different, even when reciting exactly the same text, that I don’t think there is an overlap. You wouldn’t even need someone with a strong Glasgow accent for this to be the case. (Some people have an accent that’s somewhere in the middle but that’s not the same thing as a linguistic overlap - you could have someone who’s accent was a mixture of New Zealand and New York without those accents actually being related to each other.)
I do find the term ‘British accent’ particularly irritating (most people in the UK have probably never come across it and they would wonder what on earth you were on about), though I would have to concede that the term I would replace it with in most cases, ‘English accent’, would be also be too broad to be of much use.
I don’t think that Americans calling something a “British accent” typically mean to imply that they think that’s the only accent that exists in Great Britain. It’s just a shorthand for saying “one of the British accents.”
The ‘Dick Van Dyke’ idea of a Hollywood British (London) accent is particularly notorious here.
Many British actors working in Hollywood have had their accents smoothed away by years of L.A.
