Or cockney as well, have any Americans heard any accents from the north of ENGLAND? As a native from that area I hate it when foriegners think all we eat is crumpets and drink gallons of tea.
Have any Americans heard a scouse accent?? Or a Manchester accent?
Sorry it’s just that I’m sick of those toffee nosed imperialists I call the upper classes of British society that keep this streotype enforced on all of us.
Do you think it is a good streotype or a bad one? Personally I think all streotypes are bad as they tarnish evryone with the same brush.
Partly it’s because these stereotypes are reinforced by TV and the movies. Partly it’s for the same reason that all stereotypes arise, which is that some people don’t want to understand the world in all its diversity. They want to restrict the amount of information they have to deal with, and stereotyping allows them to do this. For what it’s worth, Britons do a certain amount of stereotyping about Americans also.
Have another look at Lonsang’s “You Americans…” food fight over in MPSIMS for example. Americans must have heard a Somerset accent though - they use it themselves all the time ;).
As a fellow northerner I do agree that the full range of English accents is not represented in US films and TV, and there have been plenty of threads here that confirm that most Americans can’t tell us apart anyway. But most British people have no concept of the range of accents in the USA either.
What I object to about the treatment of the British in US media is not that we don’t speak naturally, but that we’re generally portrayed as The Bad Guy. My explanation for that is that US producers often want the villains to be foreign and the Brits don’t need to learn a foreign language to play the roles.
Meanwhile we are also guilty of thinking everyone in the US either sounds like GWB or Robert de Niro in Taxi Driver (ever listen to any plays on Radio 4?). BTW at the time of the Beatles’ popularity there was a lot of scouse doing the rounds in the US too. And there’s Daphne’s “northern” accent on Frasier.
IMO it’s down to 1. Lack of exposure, 2. Media influence, and 3. Lack of ability to hear the subtleties that indicate regional difference.
No biggie, and not something to get worked up about.
Having said that, I do think Dick van Dyke needs to be tried for crimes against humanity for what he perpetrated in Mary Poppins.
Where I grew up in South Texas, we could tell the differences among other Texan accents and where they were from. I could immediately tell if someone was an East Texan, a Panhandler, a Hill Countryer, etc… The most obvious was the Damn Yankee Texan from Dallas.
Yet elsewhere, everyone thinks we Texans all sound like George W.
Rarely is a role in movies about a Texan actually filled by a Texan, except for maybe Matthew McCaughnehey (sp?).
So, why would you all be surprised that we Yanks can’t hear the often subtle differences that you take for granted? Not a rant, just a rave.
And yes, in Texas, a sentence is often ended in a preposition. And just as often in a proposition. Wink wink, nudge nudge…
I’d rather spend eternity eating shards of broken glass, than spend one more minute with you.
Eh. We live in a huge world with so much variety no one person could ever hope to become acquainted with all of it.
So what does it matter that someone from another nation isn’t acquainted with a certain amount of nuances for your nation? I can’t even tell various cultures in my own country apart, for instance does a certain person come from coastal Virginia or from the mountains? I don’t know and I don’t feel bad about it at all. I’m no Prof. Higgins and nor do I care to be one.
And in the reverse I certainly don’t expect people to be able to tell a person from Honolulu apart from a person from Molokai. As long as they get that we don’t wear coconut bras, hula and surf all day and aren’t too amazed at my English skills I’m happy.
Not only that, but foreign villains in American movies usually have posh English accents too - be they Russians, Germans, or indeterminate. That avoids subtitles while still letting American audiences know the character is “foreign”.
> Anthony La Paglia may be a good actor but he can’t do accents!
Um, you do realize that Anthony La Paglia is Australian, don’t you? In fact, he’s a really interesting case of someone who does do an accent. I’ve noticed that in the past ten years that there has been a significant increase in the ability of actors from English-speaking countries to do the accents of all other English-speaking countries well. I presume that this is because there are more rigorous classes in dialects in acting schools. Before about ten years ago, I was often able to notice that an actor wasn’t getting the accent quite right.
This is particularly noticeable in Australian actors doing American accents. This is part of the reason why so many Australian actors are starring in American films and playing Americans. Most of these Australians have been taught to do something like a Midwestern American dialect, but La Paglia is a weird case. Apparently he must have asked somebody when he was in acting school, “Suppose instead of immigrating from Italy to Australia, my grandparents had immigrated to the U.S. Where would they have moved to and what would their grandchildren’s accents have sounded like.” And somebody told him, “O.K., this is as good a guess as any: They would have immigrated to New York. Your parents would have lived in working-class neighborhoods in Brooklyn or Queens and you would have moved to a nice neighborhood in near-by Long Island.” So he decided to learn to do an accent that’s right for an Italian-American from Brooklyn, Queens, or Long Island. If anything, he pushes it too hard. Most actors who were actually born there have moderated their accent a little to get more acting jobs.