1:57 in this video, where a narrator says “Long Beach has a reputation of being extremely challenging” and then continues. It’s American-sounding English with a subtly unusual inflection and some odd nuances in the words like “because” and “small”, in which the long “a” sound is enunciated almost like a French speaker would do. It also reminds me a bit of the narration beginning at 2:56 in this video, a promotional video from the early 90s for a device made by the Kawai company, which sounds as though it may be a native Japanese speaker doing an unaccented but oddly-inflected English voiceover.
I recently met someone whose accent I just couldn’t place and it turned out his parents had been diplomats and he had grown up in American schools all over the world.
To me it does sound rather like a mid-Atlantic or trans-Atlantic accent. It may be an affectation, either an American trying to sound more European or a European trying to sound American. Or it could be the speaker has spent time abroad and his accent has shifted.
Probably still the most well-known modern example of this accent, in the UK at least, is that of famous foodie Lloyd Grossman:
Not native English, the way he pronounces the word ‘cars’ with is R-heavy inflection is the giveaway and there are a couple of other similar ‘R’ inflections. Compare to the speaker at 2.47 which is definitely English.
Also at 2.17 the speaker mentions the 1979 grand prix, and a native English speaker would not run the words seventy and nine together in that way.
I had not heard of him before. That is a really interesting accent, shifting from word to word. Like he isn’t sure where he’s from.
The “seventy-nine” sounds like the American south or southwest. I suspect this guy is an American with a regional accent trying to use a “neutral” American accent for this. A good example of this is Dan Rather, who sounded bland midwestern on his news broadcasts but more like the Texan he is when more relaxed.
By “old fashioned posh Australian accent”, do you mean the same as what the guy in this video calls the cultivated Australian accent (with the examples of Cate Blanchett, Geoffrey Rush, and Malcolm Fraser), which is demonstrated at 1:36 through 2:40 in this video?:
That’s an interesting accent too, and I would have thought he was Australian if I had to guess. The way he says “tomato” is an immediate giveaway that he’s not American though. The narrator of that F1 clip has no such giveaways…I wish I could find the full video, whatever it is.
By “old fashioned posh Australian accent”, do you mean the same as what the guy in this video calls the cultivated Australian accent (with the examples of Cate Blanchett, Geoffrey Rush, and Malcolm Fraser), which is demonstrated at 1:36 through 2:40 in this video?:
[/QUOTE]
Possibly, but I’m not staking my reputation on it.
Maybe I’m reading too much into this but it also sounds like he enunciates the word “cramped” in a weird way, like he’s saying “kremt” when most Americans would sound out the consonants more clearly and pronounce the vowel with more of an A sound and less of an E sound.
Doesn’t sound like a typical Eastern European accent to me; I’m not saying it can’t be, but I’ve lived my whole life around Eastern Europeans in the USA, and that doesn’t really sound like any of them.
