Accents - can you fake them?

i thought dick vandyke sounded british, i'm sure he sounded like someone in my fair lady.

 

There's gotta be at least a dozen different British accents, probably more. They're very useful in determining one's social status.

 

One accent switch that I have noticed, was that of David Tennant.

On Dr Who, he has a delightful, "generic" British accent. Watching the special features, and seeing him talking out of character, his accent seems to be something between Irish and Cockney... though I may be totally wrong

 

That's interesting, I'll have to listen to that next time there's an old re-run on. My wife claims my Minnesota accent gets stronger when I travel home, I think that's a fairly common thing from other stories I've heard (and listening to a British guy making phone calls home).

I was born in Montana and moved to MN in first grade, where they told me I had a western accent. I picked up the whole MN accent without trying. After college I've lived in Texas, Virginia, Connecticut and Illinois, and I enjoy hearing regional differences, but I'm no expert on them. I once asked a guy who grew up in Chicago what country he was from. (He had some kind of Italian accent that apparently persisted in his neighborhood, and he was unaware of it).

People can definitely fake accents, that's the business of impersonators after all. Dana Carvey is good at that, flipping between one person and another without a pause.

When I was in London a few years back for a trade show, there were some blue-collar workers from the midlands putting up our booth, and it was fun listening to them. I couldn't understand hardly anything they said until an Indian guy who was with them started talking, and then I had to have the Indian guy repeat what the British people were saying so I could understand it. I didn't even get all the words that the Londoners would say to me, but I could usually get the gist of that.

And just for the record - the movie Fargo overdoes an accent that does show up in some parts of MN, but generally only among the older Norwegians, and not that strongly. If you tried to talk in Minnesota like they do in the movie, people would look at you funny. And they never used "uff da" in the movie for an unknown reason.

 

I could see what you mean, but I wasn't sure if it was Irish or more Scottish, so I had to Google him - turns out he's a Scottish actor. Surprised myself that I got it right

 

Ah... well, I haven't been to Scotland yet...

 

Yeah, I had to laugh at Hyo on that one. There's way more than a dozen accents in the U.S. but people only tend to think of the big ones, like "southern" or "bronx". Southern for instance, has the Texas subtype, 'bama, Cajun, etc. One accent tends to blur into the next, so it's hard to really call them out specifically. In a large city it's usually more cosmopolitan and local dialects are diminished, at least among the white collar crowd.

In MN I can tell the difference between northern MN (fairly similar to what you hear in the Ice Road Truckers show) and the Twin Cities/St.Cloud area, both of which are not the Norwegian 2nd-generation type of accent that you might find near Duluth, then there's the Chippewa Indian accent in and around the reservations. My grandparent's generation (from ND) had a German accent like Lawrence Welk (I sometimes watch that show just for nostalgia), but they don't sound anything like Germans I know who've come over recently (probably because the latter Germans were taught the BBC English before immigrating, or because my ancestors had a different German dialect).

 

I had posted the dialect survey link on another thread.. more relevant to this thread is Prof. Labov, one of the leading experts on North American accents (mostly US). Much of his work has been incorporated into Wikipedia's various pages on American accents, and he is one of the authors of the Atlas of North American English, parts of which are available online.

William Labov Home Page
Atlas of North American English

 

Yeah, OK, the dozen was slightly off. My point was there's really no such thing as 'a British accent', even though it may seem that way to the rest of us. At the other extreme of dialects and regional influences, it could be said that each of us has a unique voice. In that sense, there are about six billion accents, and counting.