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Comment by George83728 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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