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Comment by ErrantX | Hacker News Reader

Try being a Brit without an accent. It's so bloody boring I have to fake the Queens English to get laid. ;)

Bring that accent to America and you might land yourself an endorsement contract with a condom maker.

Enlighten me, what's the the British accent popular in movies like Football Factory, Human Traffic etc. which I find cool; while every Brit I've met in my life had this 'royal' accent I personally don't find understandable (sorry, no offence)? Actors of international-targetted movies use some other accent for a certain effect?

Also, once I've met a guy AFAIR south London or sth, he spoke that his wife told me even most of Brits don't get him (it was an accent, not just that he was mumbling).

Enlighten me, what's the the British accent popular in movies like Football Factory, Human Traffic etc. which I find cool

They will be London accents; of which there is quite a broad range anyway. It can be a pretty strong accent.

* while every Brit I've met in my life had this 'royal' accent I personally don't find understandable*

Queens English should be pretty understandable; so it might not be what you've heard (the whole point of it is precise pronunciation and erudition). "Normal" baseline English can vary quite a lot; down in the south they tend to clip words (my mother does this) and, if speaking quickly, it can be hard to follow.

We also have a tendancy to mumble :)

Once I was on a trip and landed with a British family in one car, couldn't understand a word, it was sth like (hard to write it) "Ncaaaw, intt!" and took me 2 times repeat and focusing hard to get it was "Nice car, isn't it?". And the whole family was talking like that all the time.

It wasn't any Scottish (this one I recognize). I have no problem understanding and talking to most Brits, Americans, Canadians, but sometimes you (Brits) really surprise me :D

Yeh, that's certainly not a common British accent or dialect.

I can't place it exactly but it sounds like a London or non-posh southern accent.

"Cockney" is a good term to search for. It's a London accent you'll hear in Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels. Michael Caine has a Cockney accent.

What does "no accent" mean? How can anyone not have an accent?

I just mean there is no discernible accent; you can't tell where in the UK I am from.

But you do sound distinctively British? Similar to Americans that saw they have no accent but there's no mistaking they're American.

Ethnocentrism 101: Only other people have accents, never us.

Yeah, the American English that people use in the Midwest and on TV is the correct form of English. Everyone else has an accent.

I served this one up on a platter for someone to take but I think lkozma's reasoning is more plausible. I don't think ErrantX's comment was based in ethnocentrism. It's just a way of describing a non-regional accent in the US and apparently the UK.

Do you mean a Californian accent? A New York accent? Boston? The accent of a hypothetical guy who immigrated from Mexico when he was 5, went to an all black school in Chicago for 3 years, then moved to South Africa till he finished high school, and now lives in New York? Because while he would have a "non-regional" accent, he will kinda sound a bit different.

All of the above. It could be a person from anywhere without a distinctly regional accent. The news person is the common example. It's what Veronica Corningstone refers to in Anchorman when she says, "But while they're laughing and grab-assing, I'm chasing down leads and practicing my non-regional diction."

People that think they have this accent or that someone else has this accent will often refer to it as "no accent". It's not an ethnocentric viewpoint. Now, I definitely think the average person is not aware of how distinctive their accent really is and mistakenly think they have a non-regional one. But I do think it exists.

Just to give an example off the top of my head: take Conan O'Brien. He's from Boston, went to college in Boston but does he have a Boston accent? Maybe you could pick it out of his voice, but the average person probably wouldn't and he certainly doesn't have a strong one.

Grew up in Australia and then moved to the UK for 10 years. English people think i'm Australian. Or sometimes American (too much time watching US TV, I think). When i'd return to Australia, people would think I was English.

I then spent 2 years in Boston. And now 2 years in Toronto. My accent is completely mangled and jumps all over the place (ie, I might sound vaguely North American, but I know that you there's a 'h' in 'herbs').

I have the same problem with Americans thinking my accent is English, and vice versa. My accent was originally South African, but it has changed into some sort of weird hybrid.

I once talked to a Frenchman who learned English in Australia. I could clearly hear the two accents. It was fascinating.

There's no such thing as a non-regional UK accent - there's perhaps a non-regional middle-class English accent, but no non-regional UK accent.

So you have a nonregional English accent, then?

Yes (though it's not the accent most Americans expect).

It's worth pointing out that whilst I often get ribbed for having no accent...

it was a light hearted comment :)

Can you point us to an example of you speaking a few sentences of unprepared material - let us decide.

I find accents hard to pick up but fascinating. I can just about make out the accent differences between my (town-sized) city and the next one though as there is a specific inflection that differs.

Speaking with "no accent" is the same like not speaking in a dialect: it means you speak the dialect which has become the "official" one.

No, everyone has an accent. They just think that they have a "neutral" accent, because that's the way they expect everybody should talk.

Actually, if you record your voice, you will find that your spoken voice has a slight accent, while your "inner voice" (the one you use to compose emails) has no accent. This is because talking to yourself sounds different, due to the acoustics of your head and ears (or whatever).

Even southern Californians? We're the only ones I've met who seem to speak 'by the book' as far as I can tell. No noticable, random infections. Every word pronounced like the dictionary says it should be. Not talking about "valley speak," which no one uses anyway now.

Southern California definitely has an accent. I live here and I can hear the natives.

I think the fact that Socal has become the defacto American accent via TV may be distracting you.

Could be, but I stand by my point that we mangle language the least when we speak. No pronouncing college like "callage" etc. I wonder if the schools really teach that.

Language's are impossible to mangle. Dictionaries only describe, not dictate. If the majority started to say "callage," then "callage" would become the "correct" (i.e standard) form.

Except if you live in a place like France or Quebec. They have white beards in some tall towers creating the one true French (I swear they look like Saruman). One such example is the crap they are trying to implement with the new spelling convention.

Wikipedia page about it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reforms_of_French_orthography

Farsi needs a similar thing, at least on Wikipedia. There is absolutely no effort in translating words to Farsi, so they cheat and transliterate the English version. I have a habit of hovering the mouse over the "فارسي" links and always see the English title with Farsi conjugation, transliterated into Arabic script :-(

It's sad because it's such a beautiful and rich language; the young folks doing the translation are doing it a great disservice diluting it in their rush for volume.

For Arabic; almost every Arab is a gray-beard language nazi! All traces of foreign influence are removed with urgent and great prejudice. Which is good.

There are examples of "mangling" which were successful. In Hungarian for example in the late 1700s a few writers have coined tens of thousands of new words. Today some thousands of these are so widely used that it's impossible to guess they were invented. Others failed and sound ridiculously funny today. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_reform

Sorry, but it's Iowa / the Midwest, not Southern California. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_American#Regional_home_...

Australian here .. I've always had a bloody atrocious time in my travels, with my accent .. so I just standardized on "American-sounding" and I get along just fine with people understanding me, mostly, about 100% of the time .. except when I reveal I'm from Australia, and the whole thing unravels into a nationalism-filled diatribe about how I'm not a "true Aussie" since I don't speak A'Strine properly ..

I am a true Australian, since I don't actually live there, and consider anyone else living there, not an Aborigine, to be just a bunch of bloody tourist wankers, heh heh ..

Yes, same here - I need to pronounce certain things in an American fashion to be understood at all when at work in the US. And much like this example, it revolves around the 'r':

'Excuse me, do you have you wireless internet access here?' (pronouncing it British / Australian style as a two syllable word)

'Sorry sir?'

'Excuse me, do you have you wireless internet here?'

'I'm sorry I don't understand'

'Do you have you wiYERless internet here?'

'Yes Sir, we do have wiYERless. Here's an access card...'

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