Why don't Americans have a British Accent?

[flandry84]

That southern states accent...
Holly Hunter!
Kyra Sedgwick(in "The closer")


Oh,boy!That accent does it for me and...
That is all.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

As for England only having one accent to our ears over here... it's not exactly true. There are two... you got the one that we can understand, and then the one that's completely incomprehensible . Oh wait, there's also the Chimney Sweep accent, so I guess you get three.

brings up an interesting point, what if the Ent-D's chief engineer wasn't *named* Geordi, but was *a* Geordie...

"Why aye man! Get the warp drive on line for ya's like!"

 

[QCzar]

That southern states accent...
Holly Hunter!
Kyra Sedgwick(in "The closer")


Oh,boy!That accent does it for me and...
That is all.

Kyra's charmingly realistic accent always floors me, considering she was raised in New York. Hollywood (and Connor Trinneer *ducks*) should take notes.

 

[Count Zero]

I've often wondered myself how appreciable the difference in English accents are to non-native speakers and people who don't speak English at all. The Beeb's OmniEnglish is certainly widespread enough, I'd think, to suss out the difference between it and American/Canadian NewsAnchorEnglish. But I cannot for the life of me pick up the differences between a Taipei and Shanghai Mandarin speaker, even though they're said to sound as different as the above two examples. So who knows?

I wonder about that myself: Just how much of the differences does a non-English speaker notice? In college, I spent a month in Russia (the USSR at the time). When in Moscow, I often heard Muscovites comment (often derisively) about the accents of other Russians, but I couldn't notice any difference. I only had a few semesters of Russian, though. But I do notice differences in Spanish from one country to the next. But not so much the accent- it's the difference in the language itself that I notice.

Well, I hear a lot of differences but naturally, can't place them for the most part. Thanks to Doctor Who, I've heard a lot of different British accents. American accents, on the other hand, don't stand out as much to me, but again, I only hear them through the media filter and the British seem to be very enthusiastic about their various accents represented on screen. It's hardly ever done here.
Some people are not as good as hearing accent/dialect differences, though, even in their own language. I'm pretty good at it in my native tongue as well, but many people here can't distinguish between Saxonian (not to mention the local veriations thereof) and Thuringian, for instance.

 

[captcalhoun]

As for England only having one accent to our ears over here... it's not exactly true. There are two... you got the one that we can understand, and then the one that's completely incomprehensible . Oh wait, there's also the Chimney Sweep accent, so I guess you get three.

brings up an interesting point, what if the Ent-D's chief engineer wasn't *named* Geordi, but was *a* Geordie...

"Why aye man! Get the warp drive on line for ya's like!"

"Don' panic, pet. It'll be areet!"

 

[scotpens]

. . . Oh wait, there's also the Chimney Sweep accent, so I guess you get three.

If you mean Dick Van Dyke's ear-grating travesty of a Cockney (more like "mockney" ) accent in Mary Poppins, that one doesn't count.

 

[Q2UnME]

Actually, the "newcast" accent is very prevalent in the Great Lakes area of the US. I'm in Buffalo, NY and the same accent can be found from here, through Cleveland, OH, over into Michigan and into Chicago.

I don't know about that... I was born and raised here in Toronto, and my mother always insisted on watching Eyewitness News on channel 7 in Buffalo, with Irv Weinstein. I could hear a difference in accent between him and, say, Knowlton Nash on CBC.
snip

Ahh.. that's a little like comparing peaches and nectarines. Yes, the "standard news accent", but the Canadian accent is still going to be somewhat there (in the CBC case). Growing up so close to Canada, I'm used to Canadian accents (having worked closely with several folks from Fort Erie and St. Catharines for many years) and can hear the differences easily too. The minor point I was trying to make was the "newscaster" type accent here in the US is not just due to professional reading or neutral pronunciation for broadcasting, it does exist in a broad area of the Great Lakes among the populous. (and Canada has thier own "spin" on it too... )

Q2UnME