Do Americans think they don’t have an accent?
Oi. Gotta fucking love belter creole, pampa!
You’re joking but when living in Britain I did know a couple of people who weren’t middle-class English and whose natural accent wasn’t the so-called English RP accent (basically middle-class English / BBC presenter accent) and who made quite the effort to speak with the latter accent.
In Britain (most notably England) one’s accent is a huge part of presenting the “right” image, to the point that the upper class has their own accent (known as the “posh accent”) independent of region, something which is at very least highly unusual in other countries.
Americans code switch too. Southern people will definitely lean on their diphthongs harder when they want, New Yorkers will get more nasal pending context etc
I code switch all the time. I was a military kid, so knowing when to have an English accent, a Kentucky accent, a broken konglish accent, and a GenAm accent can really open people up and make them receptive to what your asking or trying to talk about.
I once met a Londoner who scolded me for having the worst English accent ever (“learnt” from comics, video games, movies, and public school). He was more concerned about my accent than my actual English, but otherwise he was an interesting man. We figured out each other, more or less.
It’s very unusual in most of England too.
In the other countries whose language I speak well enough to be able to spot it (granted, only 4), the upper class simply don’t have their own accent (though they do signal their status, just in other ways), but I can’t really know for sure if there are other countries out there in the World with an “upper class accent”.
Oi mate u best ‘av ur accent loicense reddy
*Bri’ish
Innit?
Are we solarpunk yet ?
And everybody sounds like they’re from somewhere in the Midwest?
Which one? Cause some days I don’t know which accent to do…
A right sticky wicket, innit?
You 'avin a laugh, mate??
What-o, plithering weather we’ve had of late!
OMG, how did you know?!
What does this mean? People putting on a ‘work voice’ or something?
I think it’s just a joke that the British accent is fake
Accents*. Yes, I’m a very nitpicky person.
Yeah, that’s how I interpreted it.
I read this in at least one British accent.
If you’re that nitpicky, surely you should have altered “is” as well.
Yes. It should be “s”. Maybe I’m not that nit picky.
They invented the language. It’s everyone else that has an accent.
We have so many accents, even within England, let alone the empire, that we had to invent a reference accent. Queens English is what the BBC used for a long time. It was intended that all ‘cultured’ workers should be able to converse in it. This meant the upper class could travel anywhere and not have to deal with local accents, when ordering the servants about.
It’s still quite useful, since it is intended to be easily comprehensible to all English speakers. Downside is that it makes you sound like a posh twat.
Kind of… Standard English is the reference dialect of english (used to teach foreigners) and it’s what received pronunciation (queen’s English/posh sounding) accent uses.
Kind of. In England we have many, many local accents/dialects. Most people speak their ‘mother tongue’ as a local dialect. Some of these dialects are so different to what you would think of as English (this is a dialect called Standard English) that you wouldn’t understand most of it. Even English people don’t understand other English dialects perfectly, only their own and maybe some others depending on how familiar they are with them, like neighbouring dialects which are closer to their own. Then consider that England is joined onto Scotland and Wales, which not only have their own dialects of English, but actually their own completely different languages.
So its the same effect as if you’re speaking a second language exclusively for a long time and then you can speak in your mother tongue again.
I am English.
Most likely you meant to reply to somebody else, but it’s possible you picked up and ran with a response to my question. If that’s the case then thanks for the effort!
