Hacker News Reader

Comment by Brajeshwar | Hacker News Reader

I think when people outside refer to "British Accent", they meant the Received Pronunciation accent, common on TV/Movies.

View on HN

On the one hand they do, as they certainly don't mean Cockney or Essex or Manchester.

But on the other hand they don't, because true RP is generally far too pretentious. Even in movies/TV, you see it mainly only in villains and historical dramas, or for comedic effect.

Most people are generally referring to a kind of middle-class London accent. Like Jude Law for example. Neither "posh" nor "regional" nor "lower class" nor "multicultural" (quotes for irony where necessary, obviously London is a region). I'm not sure what the name for that is though?

The Surrey accent is close what most people most people consider middle class / standard English which is close to received pronunciation, but more natural sounding. In other areas other the country it's considered posh!?

Mummy Pig accent? Referring of course to Peppa Pig

Home Counties accent perhaps.

Estuary English [1] -- the English spoken around the Thames estuary. It has, arguably, been the "standard" non-posh British dialect for a while.

As a North American, I find it one of the harder accents to understand. It has undergone a lot of interesting sound changes in recent decades, not shared by many other dialects. Likely a result of dialect flattening from 20th century population movements. "Football" -> [ˈfʊʔbɔo] (sounds like "fuh-baoh" to me) or "bottle" -> ['bɒʔo] {"bah-oh"?) or "Tuesday" -> [tʃuːz.deɪ] ("choose day").

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estuary_English

“Bottle of water” is one that my French colleague used to make fun of. Ends up something like “boh-ooh a wa-uh”.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKRuG4oIu_o

"The water in Maiorca doesn't taste like what it ought to"

"THE WARTER IN MAJORKER DUNT TASTE LOIK WORRIT ORTER"

I think the average American doesn't / can't distinguish Michael Caine's Cockney accent and David Attenborough's RP. Caine's working class accent is perceived to be just as posh and sophisticated as RP, so he gets cast in the role of butlers for bat-themed billionaires, etc.

> I think the average American doesn't / can't distinguish Michael Caine's Cockney accent and David Attenborough's RP.

You really think so? Maybe it's just me, but I can't imagine how anyone could mistake the two. (Possibly different people have different ears for accents.)

I can hear them and tell that they're different accents, but I don't really distinguish them, I would call them both "British" and I wouldn't know which one's more posh.

I think most of us just don't have a need to distinguish them, they go into the "English accent" bucket without further categorization.

Not in a million years would I have ever guessed Michael Caine's accent to be anything less than posh and sophisticated.

As an American, I find it most noticeable/funny in Helen Mirren's Fast & Furious franchise role. You can tell she's having a blast putting on the intentionally worst working class accent she can (in a way that it sometimes seems like she assumes Americans aren't in on the joke and it is mostly just for herself) to fit her role as Jason Statham's "mum", and there are definite fun moments of "Is she intentionally parodying Michael Caine here?" that do give me (as an American) silly, brief moments of "Americans still think that sounds posh", plus it does serve to more directly connect Statham's accent to Caine's. I don't think a lot of Americans notice how close they are and yet do notice that Statham and Caine have very different stereotypes in American cinema.

Most American actors do a terrible job with British accents, to the point that it becomes a meme in of itself.

Whereas most (not all -I'm looking at you, Daniel Craig) British/Australian/Kiwi actors do a great job of adopting American accents.

My favorite is Margot Robbie's over-the-top "Brooklyn" accent for her Harley Quinn character.

I thought his Foghorn Leghorn impersonation was fantastic

There are ample rea$on$ why non-American actor$ can do decent American accent$.

It opens up American roles for them. Nobody is going to cast Brad Pitt as a Brit, an Australian, or a Kiwi. He's a fantastic actor, but they're going to use the homegrown talent. So there's no incentive for American actors to really learn another accent. Instead, we get a mountain of non-American actors doing mostly-good-but-sometimes-awful accents because that's where the money is.

> Nobody is going to cast Brad Pitt as a Brit, an Australian, or a Kiwi. He's a fantastic actor, but they're going to use the homegrown talent.

Except for Irish roles, for some reason.

Brad Pitt as a northern Irishman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FjQQrxBhwQT

Brad Pitt as an Irish Traveller: https://youtu.be/9Jar2XkBboo?t=28

> Nobody (except Guy Ritchie) is going to cast Brad Pitt as a Brit (Irish is ok tho)

FTFY

It was a throwaway line on my part, but you're right.

Since you mentioned Pitt, a funny anecdote: he wanted to be in Snitch because he was a fan of Lock Stock. But his London accent was so terrible that they went and made up the whole indecipherable gypsy thing just so he could have a role to play in the film.

Not only that, but a lot of British films will make british-only casting decisions, eg the Harry Potter series. I've never heard of a major American film making that choice, and it would probably be blasted as xenophobic if it did.

Er how many American movies have a single non-American? The only foreigners that consistently find employment in American cinema are Britishers, and that’s because the British English accent is perceived to have an at least equal prestige to the American one. You’re not going to find many main characters that are, say, Middle Eastern or South Asian or African.

I have to wonder if it's related to subsidies by the government.

There are notable exceptions, of course. Spinal Tap springs to mind.

This isn't what the article says, however: "Gen Z has embraced bad imitations of Cockney slang or a Yorkshire dialect" and then name-checks accents acquired from Love Island and The Only Way is Essex, neither of which are known for their RP!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com