As Madonna would probably say, I’ll give it a miss.
Interesting. Having heard him on his Notes from a Small Island TV series I would only have thought his accent a soft mid-western one, not dissimilar to many of the people I worked with in Davenport and Des Moines.
I wonder how much immersion and reinforcement play a part. The first time I went to the US I was alone at a big convention, doing lots of sales negotiations with US folks. A couple of days in I met up with a friend, a fellow Kiwi who was doing much the same thing for his company, and we each noted that the other seemed to have picked up something of a US accent. I’m sure that to all the Americans we still sounded positively foreign, but we could detect a change.
One later occasions when I lived for months at a time in Canada and the US I’ve not noticed a change, but in those cases I’ve been there with a handful of other Kiwis, working with them alongside the Canadians / Americans, and I think perhaps our accents / speech patterns reinforce each other so that we don’t start mirroring our hosts’ accents.
:eek: Nevermind. I’m gonna go… somewhere else now…
I didn’t even look at your location, just your username. I thought you were someone else. Very sorry.
Oh! I just thought of another celebrity whose accent is hard to place unless you know where he’s from. Phil Keoghan of The Amazing Race is from New Zealand, but his on-camera accent is so mild that, while I knew he wasn’t a native speaker of American English, I couldn’t place him. I think I saw he was a Kiwi in an article in Entertainment Weekly.
Ditto but opposite - friends and family back home seem to think i’ve been Britishified, but the Girlfriend only really notices my accent when I come back from being in the US. Apparently the US accent gets stronger after being back in God’s Country for a time.
Agreed. This is true of every ex-pat I know. Some brits that live here in the states tell me that when they go home they are told they sound american. Same with some people I know from Peru and one I know from Portugal.
A couple of personal anecdotes:
(1) I was born in Australia, moved to Leeds in England at age 2, moved back to Australia at age 9, and moved to Ohio at age 54 (I’m 63 now). I don’t have a US accent at all, though I use some of the vocabulary (e.g., “elevator”, “shrimp”) in order to be understood by the locals. However, some years ago, in Australia, after hearing me speak a few words, a person said that he couldn’t pick whether I was from Leeds or Leicester> Why the Leicester connection for me? My mother came from Leicester. And from that you might deduce that my accent is sort of modway between English and Australian.
(2) When my family moved to Australia, my younger brother was 7 years old. I spoke a sort of Received Standard English, while he spoke pretty broad West Yorkshire, which amused our Australian relatives when they heard him. But, after a few weeks at school, while my accent was still much the same, his had moved to Broad Australian. I’d guess it was partly the age difference, and partly a difference in how much we needed to fit in at school.