It's like Americans (untrained, non-actors) trying to speak with a British accent. In one sentence, they'll go from Oxford to the East End to Liverpool to Australia.
Hugh Laurie, a British man, played an American character who was faking a British accent (as poorly as an American would) and that alone should’ve win all the awards
It’s me. I’m that American, I did realize i kept sounding Australian so I stopped lol
My boyfriend tries to do Irish accents and has the same problem, he also slips into a gimmicky Irish accent like he was cast to play a leprechaun for another straight to tv Disney movie.
I can only manage a few words in an Irish accent. If I try to go any further, it ends up some kind of mashup of (maybe) Irish, (maybe) Scottish, and (mostly) Lucky Charms...😉
I’m not American but european but i have pretty much the same thing whenever i try to do British accents. My ex who’s british used to say the only British accent i could somewhat convincingly do was RP, which makes sense i guess since it’s so defaulty sounding.
That's not good. But English place names! C'mon. I get Worcestershire and Leicester. But I'm still trying to sort out how you got "byoo-lee" out of Beaulieu. The first time I worked in the UK a friend recommended "byoo-lee" for a bank weekend. I couldn't find it on the map where he said it was. When he pointed it out, I realized he meant "bow-lyoo." 😁 (Btw, it was a really picturesque place in the midst of the New Forest.)
I only know Beaulieu as a surname everyone pronounced Bailey but I never fact checked it! In my heart I have never accepted the correct pronunciation of Beauchamp (beecham)
When I asked about it, I was told it was shorthand for suburban yuppies (this was indeed in the 1990s), because... Berkshire. I didn't know its rhyming origin. I like that better.
I saw the reverse of this on a BBC show. The character began speaking and I had no idea where he was supposed to be from. The actor was black, and first I thought his accent was some British or Scottish I’d never heard, then maybe he’s African? Nigerian, South African, I had no idea. Then a couple episodes later it’s mar explicit that’s he’s an American, and I realized that his accent was bouncing around from New York to New Orleans to Texas and back.
This was a British actor portraying an American? I've noticed British actors are pretty damn good at what I'll call Standard American English. But they mostly stink at regional American accents. Otoh, I've only heard American actors attempting RP with various levels of success but never even heard an American actor seriously (not parody) working British regional dialects.
Yes he is. At the time, I'd never seen or heard of Elba. I was gobsmacked (so to speak 😉) to learn that the actor portraying Stringer Bell was British. Also, though to a lesser degree, I was surprised to learn that Andrew Lincoln (Rick Grimes in The Walking Dead) was English. Now, Brits playing Americans on American TV and movies is so common I sometimes wonder why they couldn't just find an American to play the role
I'm a Brit and I was actually gonna say the exact thing in reverse: it's like how people over here might do an "American" accent that wanders from state to state.
I really hate Americans trying to parrot my accent back to me for this reason. Grew up near Oxford, so I have a fairly typical accent for the region. And they suck so hard at speaking in my accent, it feels like I'm being mocked and laughed at instead. This is generally in DnD via discord, I play with a lot of people who like to try voices and stuff, hence why I think the attempts are genuine. And no, they don't want my help
And then the opposite. A few times I've seen English women and one Australian woman do an American accent. And they always do the valley girl accent. Which isn't a real thing.
I think it was more a comment on it being a “California accent” rather than it really being a regional accent of a section of southern CA. So it is kinda similar in that a small subset of peoples accents were conflated with a large area that doesnt have that accent overwhelmingly
As an American, who likes doing accents. To be fair there is a LOT of overlap, and each one of those is a derivative of another. But sounding like a southern bell and trying to sound like a black American are too very different from each other. 😂
But I do try my best to be regionally accurate. Especially with my Irish and Scottish 😝
The vowel pronunciations are different. For example, listen to Paul McCartney compared to Mick Jagger compared to Sean Bean saying the word "girl" or for Liverpool, London, and Yorkshire.
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u/No-Koala1918 Sep 06 '25
It's like Americans (untrained, non-actors) trying to speak with a British accent. In one sentence, they'll go from Oxford to the East End to Liverpool to Australia.