What are they saying instead of th, when did this start, and is it particular parts of Britain or particular social groups?
(Using f/v instead of th has long been a feature of some London dialects, and using t/d instead of th has long been a feature of some Irish dialects, and young children often use f/v instead of th, I think. Jocular references to "the youf" have been around in print for a while.)
EDIT: Of course there's also Jamaican pronunciation with t/d instead of th!
As an aside, the dialect I used in my youth used "f" a lot - fit, fa, fan and far for what, who, when and where. Leading to "Fit fit fits fit fit" making sense...
There's nothing sudden about it. Many regional (mostly city) accents have common mis-pronounciation. "th" being mis-pronounced as either "f" or "v" was extremely common in the area I grew up 20+ years ago, and I'm sure it predates me.
I believe this is a sign of a hearing problem. Some children are unable to hear a strong difference between certain sounds so, to them, they are speaking the same as everyone else. It used to be that those children would be identified and given special help to allow them to hear better. I remember having eye and ear tests at school. Maybe this has stopped now?
The tragedy is that this is a huge dividing factor in the UK. In all the places I've worked the vast majority of people use the distinct "th" sounds. Use of "f" and "v" sounds is, to use the current terminology, a "red flag".
Doesn't seem likely to me - it's common with specific strong dialects and often associated with working class people. As it's regional, I don't see it being a hearing related issue (not that I think it's an issue anyhow).
Why have Americans always been unable to pronounce the intervocalic T?
Bread and budder? WTF?
I'm an author; I love horseback writing?
I'm tired of wading for the flood?
I want to ride my modercycle?
It's so pervasive that we really ought to update our dictionaries to replace these, now phantom, "t"s with proper "d"s. Think of it as antipsychotics for a batshit crazy language.
I'm American. But this has always been annoying, along with most of the eN language.
To cast a cynical eye on the bright side; it seems both the "t" and "d" will soon be obsolete as the entire eN language is refined to tonal variations of our most common word/punctuation/expression/noise, "like".
I may be mistaken, but I believe there's evidence that new humans are forming a "like-gland". The sound will become as natural and necessary as that of frogs bleating* after rain.
Reminds me of going into a shop while visiting the U.S. and trying to buy some batteries. The employee struggled with my english accent, so I had to try to explain what batteries where. He eventually understood and exclaimed "oh, badderies!".
I've got a friend with a story from his high school job at a retail store, about his having to translate for the other workers so they could figure out WTF this British guy was asking for.
"Batcheries"
[EDIT] That's not me trying to, like, contradict or counter your story—occurred to me it might come off that way. I just think it's funny that that specific word has so many cross-accent issues.
The t can also disappear. I've heard people say "twenny" instead of "twenty". Perhaps because "twendy" sounds more like Elmer Fudd giving Bugs Bunny decoration advice.
> Why have Americans always been unable to pronounce the intervocalic T?
> Bread and budder? WTF?
In this and most cases there isn't really another word that would fit in context. Also plenty of other dialects (i.e. Australian English) do exactly the same thing.
> I'm an author; I love horseback writing?
I'm this case, "riding" and "writing" have a marked difference in the length of the initial diphthong sound "ai".
I general American English is nowhere near the most ambiguous in this way. Many languages rely more heavily on context because they use ambiguous phonological and grammatical marking in common speech (i.e. spoken Japanese).
Are there that many? Off the top of my head, I can think of Hugh Laurie, but no-one else springs to mind (I'm british though so it might well be less visible to me).
Christian Bale, Damian Lewis, Millie Bobbie Brown, Idris Elba, Henry Cavill, Tom Holland, Dominic West are all actors people are surprised to learn are British.
Also Damson Idris, Daniel Kaluuya (though somewhat known), Robert Pattinson, Andrew Garfield, Daniel Day Lewis, Chiwetel Ejiofor… Actually the list is very long if you keep going
Thanks. I'm surprised about Christian Bale, Millie Bobbie Brown and Henry Cavill. Can't say that I'm familiar with Dominic West (haven't watched The Wire).
The Wire even has a scene where Dominic West's character puts on a British accent. So a British man pretending to be an American pretending to be a Brit.
The Wire is very good.
It also features Idris Elba, so it has two British people playing Americans on either side of the law .
Reminds me of Hugh Laurie in Avenue 5 when his character puts on a U.S. accent to appear more reassuring to the passengers, but falls back into an english accent when he's panicking.
I believe this native-accent is a common gag; Laurie also in one episode of House MD did the American-faking-a-British accent when he telephoned an overpond doctor in GB to learn more about the medical history of a patient.
I also recall an episode of The Mentalist, where agent Rigsby (played by Welsh Owain Yeoman) says he can imitate a british accent and proceeds to do so, only to receive a “nah, not good enough” by the protagonist.
The issue I (as a non-native English speaker) sometimes have with British actors is: how to pronounce their names?! Examples: the aforementioned Owain Yeoman, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Siobhan (pronounced Shivohn IIUC) Finneran…
> The issue I (as a non-native English speaker) sometimes have with British actors is: how to pronounce their names?! Examples: the aforementioned Owain Yeoman, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Siobhan (pronounced Shivohn IIUC) Finneran…
I don't think it's purely a non-native problem with those names, though they're not exactly English names.
I enjoy names such as Sean Bean ("Seen Been" or "Shorn Born"?) or even Mary Berry ("Merry Berry" or "Mary Bary").
Cara Delevingne, to name another. Each of the HP core cast have had unrelated roles where they do - Emma Watson (The Perks Of Being A Wallflower), Rupert Grint (Servant) and Daniel Radcliffe (Horns).
British actors are generally good at American accents[0], but not the other way round. That new Zelda game what came out yesterday has surprisingly poorly directed voice acting in general, but especially Zelda herself, who in a sea of American accents is a Canadian-American actress doing an ultra-fake British accent where half the time it still has American vowels.
> That new Zelda game what came out yesterday has surprisingly poorly directed voice acting in general
OK, so it's not just my wife; she sometimes directs voice actors, and within the first five minutes of the game as part of the big intro sequence everyone who plays the game has to see it got an "oof, that needed another take" out of her, LOL.
I thinks it's possible with the access we both have to the other country's media via Netflix, prime, Hulu, et c., that our accents re-merge. When I was a kid, British accents were a little harder and Scottish accents were impossible, but after 15 years of Netflix, I don't even notice British accents anymore and Scottish accents are noticeable, but understandable.
When I was a kid, no way could I understand a Geordie accent. I was raised with a RP accent, but I lived in Liverpool; I could understand ordinary scouse fine.
But my mates would sometimes launch into a very broad scouse accent to tease me; I could only just understand that.
Things have changed. Nobody nowadays speaks Geordie with the very broad accent that I couldn't understand as a kid.
Yes, you hear that a lot with teenagers in the UK, especially streamers, who dont even live in the US and havent been within a 3000 miles of it. Maybe we just like each others cultures so much?
I never understood that either but that's also common for Swiss or Austrian streamers who adapt a near to perfect German even thought most people would understand them, or at least would understand a light version of their dialect.
You're elongating vowels etc. when you sing. If you sing in English you're most likely going to sound like every other English singer.
The only way you don't is if you purposely slow down your singing make it sound like your talking accent. This works with some genres (e.g. rap) but not others.
a very long time. Jeff Lynne, who has a strong Birmingham accent, sang a lot of ELO’s songs in the 70s and 80s with a noticeable American accent. Sweet Is The Night being a prime example
I'm British and this article still made a lot of sense. I probably have "exaggerated posh" and "exaggerated cockney" modes that I use for similar reasons.
My father was instructed in no uncertain terms that if he wanted to get anywhere in the legal profession in the 1960s, he'd have to drop his Welsh accent. This was in Wales.
I thought this was going to be another article about kids watching Peppa Pig. My three year old has a sort of mixed vocabulary, but mostly from watching Matilda, the Musical on repeat.
Yeah, just finished it. It's a funny thing. My kids haven't watched a ton of Peppa Pig, but they all have managed to pickup what I'd call 'different' pronunciations and vocabulary than a lot of their peers.
I've always thought the difference is more pronounced with the short forms, "mum" vs "mom" (and the red underlining of the latter reminds me of my biases!). I don't think I've heard an American pronounce "mommy" though, so I can't say for certain.
Like a lot of American 'o's, 'mommy' often sounds (I don't know the IPA for it) more like 'mahmmy' to me (my British ear) - but it's presumably regional. I mean mainly from TV/film, 'valley girl' sort of accent for example: 'oh my gahd he's so haht'.
I'm struggling to think of a single word in an American accent (from American people I have listened to) that has a letter "o" pronounced correctly, as IPA "ɒ". If that's true, and Americans never learn to make that sound until they try to mimic another accent, then shouldn't this be described more as a speech impediment, rather than an accent?
But yes, it's "mahmmy", which is only very subtly different from a British "mummy" - in the American version, there's almost a hint of an "r" at the end of the vowel, whereas the British version has a straight (and short) "u".
I used to watch a lot of Danger Mouse back when it aired on Nickelodeon. To this day when I do a fake British accent, unless I'm imitating someone in particular I sound a bit like Sir David Jason.
My favorite Greenback line is from "The Four Tasks of Danger Mouse". He was holding Penfold hostage in exchange for DM retrieving the components of an ancient alchemical formula to create a monster with which he could conquer the world: "I have always wanted to try the recipe, but the ingreeeeedients are so hard to come by."
The writing on that show was top tier and holds up well today.
Guess it's the right time to smugly lean back as a continental European and point to your absolutely disgusting freeform mix of AE and BE terms, pronunciation and spelling, the only saving grace usually having decided to be consistent with o vs ou, at least in a single document or conversation :D
Also yes, I think we mostly learned Received Pronunciation in school but at least half of the people diverged towards American (in words like "can't") pretty soon and I honestly couldn't tell you if I'm still being consistent, 20 years after school and using English for a huge part of my working life, as a software developer.
Another continental European here (also software developer). I know most non-native speakers will never learn "proper" English pronunciation (whether AE or BE or Australian English I don't care) and international English is here to stay but, man, the many ways in people butcher English pronunciation (not because they pronounce everything as in their mother tongue – that's fine – but because they actually try to put on a native AE or BE accent) still makes my ears bleed on a daily basis.
Pronouncing English literally as if it were Spanish, French, etc. would make it impossible to understand.
Every non-native English learner tries to imitate natives, to the best of their ability. I don't think there's any other way to learn. Some people relax and stop trying to improve once they notice that they get to a level where they are understood, though. And then, one can be aware of one's limits (I don't think I'll ever get to distinguish "ice" and "eyes", so I don't even try anymore).
What you describe seems to be some kind of linguistic "uncanny valley" effect.
> Pronouncing English literally as if it were Spanish, French, etc. would make it impossible to understand.
I was chatting to a French-born colleague and he mentioned visiting the camping store "Millets". He pronounced it as a French word (something like "mi-ey") and I had no idea what he was talking about. It was unusual as otherwise his english was flawless.
Brits can occasionally run into this problem with US or Canadian place names that look like they ought to be of French origin, but really aren't pronounced that way. (someone else can provide examples)
I hate these articles with a passion, they make me think so much less of the "news" org putting them out. Another headline I saw recently on HN that drove me nuts:
"Paper map sales are booming" [0] - with a subtitle of "Fans say physical maps—though less efficient than digital options—enhance one’s journey. Among devotees: a surprising number of millennials and members of Generation Z" - Bullshit. Subtitle should have been "as art", almost no one, especially Gen-Z is using paper maps as actual maps.
Also all the articles about "people are going back to flip/dumb phones" no they aren't. You found a handful of people who did it, half of which I doubt are still doing it 1-2 months later and you want to pretend it's a trend. It's so tiring.
My dad has been doing this since the 1950s, and I'm willing to bet his dad was since the 1910s. We're from Ireland though, is putting on a funny accent really a new thing in the us?
The pronunciation of "Gloucester" (gloster) and "Leicester" (lester) follow a similar scheme for the "-cester" bit which leads to "Worcester" being pronounced "wooster", but Worcestershire sauce is often pronounced "wooster sauce" which doesn't make much sense.
Apparently, Frome in Somerset is one of the hardest place names to pronounce in England, though it certainly doesn't compare to some Welsh towns. (I say it as "froom")
It amuses me when english words are pronounced differently to make them seem posher. We have a nearby town called Yate (rhymes with gate), but the posh version rhymes with latte.
I think the sauce is either Worcestershire Sauce, or Worcester Sauce, either is acceptable.
Worcestershire and Worcester follow the same patter as Gloucestershire/Gloucester, Leicestershire/Leicester and (Towcestershire doesn't exist)/Towcester. Towcester, incidentally, being the same pronunciation as "toaster".
The one that annoys me is Cirencester, which is usually "sai-ren-ses-ta", and only occasionally "sai-ren-ster".
I like the Northamptonshire village of Cogenhoe, which is obviously pronounced cook-no.
It sits on the River Nene, which is pronounced Neen or Nen depending on which bit of Northamptonshire you live in (Northamptonshire is not very big...)
"That's just incorrect. It's pronounced "wooster-shuh". The double-O is short, as in "book". Worcestershire Sauce is sometimes simply called "woosters", as in "a dash of woosters".
> Frome in Somerset is one of the hardest place names to pronounce
Hardly. It's pronounced "froom". That's not so hard.
>There’s a town in Massachusetts called Worcester, pronounced something like Wooster/Woostah/Woostuh.
And there's a Gloucester[0] (pronounced 'Gloster' or, more likely in MA 'Glostah') there as well. And there's one[1] in Virgnia too, (Wikipedia says it's pronounced 'Gloster', but I don't know the VA accent well enough to know if that's locally correct).
There are other similar place names around the US, mostly on the eastern seaboard, for obvious reasons, as well.
You start with a pinch of dyslexia and end with a bit of a lisp. Pretty straight forward when you imagine what it would sound like in a game of telephone between 10 5 year olds.
The pronunciation is what it is. The orthography is the problem.
(Many words place names long pre-date any kind of attempt to regularize English spelling, and in any case come from fusions of Brythonic, Norman, Roman, Norwegian etc languages. This is why it's difficult to predict the pronunciation of one word from the spelling of another.)
Maybe, but 'we can't provide logical rules for names acquired over a millennium ago' seems like a poor reason to say 'therefore we shouldn't apply consistent rules to recent conventions'.
Someone asked about physic ... well people used to use physick in [late medieval?] British English... but that's for what we might call medicine now.
Oh, defending the pronounciation is easy, because the problem is not with the pronounciation at all -- it's all about English language spelling not keeping pace with the changes with the pronounciation.
I mean this in the most genuinely curious and interested way possible.... but if you're doing geometry or trig... do you refer to it as "math" because you're just doing one type of mathematics? Is there every a point where it isn't plural. Is even 2+2=4 referred to as "maths".
I think its funny that terms like math v maths come about very organically and then after the fact everyone feels the need to back into a reasoning that was likely never there. Obviously neither are wrong because they are the "correct" way for a given dialect/region etc.
Here in the UK, it's just called maths or mathematics and the term "math" is never used (or at least I can't think of an example).
I find it generally amusing to examine the differences between U.S. and British English and quite often get confused over whether I should be using "licence" or "license". It's the little quirks of language/spelling that make it interesting. (Though english, I'm a big fan of some of the U.S. contractions such as "y'all'd've")
> Obviously neither are wrong because they are the "correct" way for a given dialect/region etc.
I would say "math" is an objectively better shortening of "mathematics" as it preserves the singular collective meaning than "maths" which preserves more of the incidental textual form.
>I think its funny that terms like math v maths come about very organically and then after the fact everyone feels the need to back into a reasoning that was likely never there. Obviously neither are wrong because they are the "correct" way for a given dialect/region etc.
We Americans use the phrase "do the math," which means to go figure something out, not necessarily arithmetically.
Is there a similar phrase for the Brits? As in "do the maths?" Which seems unlikely. As such, I'd expect those using British style English to have different phrase for the same thing. Is that the case? If so, what might it be?
As an American who doesn't say "maths", my assumption is that algebra is one math, geometry is another, calculus is one, discrete math is one, etc. Together, they are "the maths."
Probably a "just so" definition to satisfy my American ears. I bet they'd say that any one of those is still "maths" by itself.
True, but it always comes off as sounding a bit pretentious to me since the social norm (as far back as I can remember) has been to simply refer to it as "math".
> That's the only correct way of contracting "mathematics"
That's the correct way of doing it if you've naturally got a British accent (or really any accent where you clearly learned British English as a second language).
Americans saying 'maths' is like dragging fingernails down a chalkboard.
I have to object to trousers - that's because it's already plural - 'a pair of trousers'; we just don't use the singular much, but trouser leg, trouser press.
You've just dredged up a memory of an educational video we watched at school years ago for Corel-Draw, which was rendered in the most Canadian accent any of us had ever heard.
A friend jammed all the drawls into a single catchphrase which he used for laughs for weeks. "The daaataaa on the staaatus baaar is made of an aluuuuminum cahhhhmpaaaund and stahred on a cd-raaaaaaahm"
Because they only know English. Let me explain a bit. I’m a bilingual person, since I’m not living in a English speaking country and I’m 21. They’re saying that switching accents are their defend mechanism or coping mechanism with serious situations. Well, when I say this i think I’m talking for most of the bilingual people, our defend mechanism or us “being playful” is adding some English words into the sentence or switching to English. So it is not something to be shocked
We don't know that (and the article is quite low on the quality scale expected from Guardian).
I speak three languages, and I don't see a reason to mix. Of course, you might be right, but also that's a one trick point. You will be called for being pretentious or just obnoxious.
Sometimes there is a reason to mix, when the word in one language doesn't quite match the meaning you want, but in another it does. Like, for example, in Polish "security" and "safety" are the same word ("bezpieczeństwo"), so it would become weird when you're talking about the difference between them.
But I feel like this article is about something else. We don't think in terms of words, we think in terms of phrases, and when we remember those phrases it's not just their literal meaning, but also the context, and this can include the accent they were heard in.
In the ideal world we'd just play the sample that we have in the head, but we don't have that yet.
It's taken a tabloid turn (not just in terms of the page format). It's got noticeably worse, even in the last 6 months. It's packed with "listicle" articles ("10 reasons..."), and it's moving rapidly to the right, politically.
I don't think it's anything "reasonable". Like, OK, there might be objective reasons why you need to clarify which technical term you mean by a word that has multiple meanings in your native language, and use (typically) English to clear it up.
But I think most of the time it's just seen as hip, interesting, an extra flavor (flavour?). I do this occasionally -- sprinkle a foreign phrase here and there in my native Czech when I see that it fits and the other party might get it. More if I'm drunk. Some of my friends do it as well, in some social settings a number of jokes could be foreign language references. On the other hand, some people find it infuriating, as you note.
Personally, I have no idea what makes a Canadian accent, and the only Australian one I can think of is over-exaggerated Steve Irwin. British accents on the other hand are pretty common in TV/movies.
A lot of British television is popular on streaming here, and there is very little Australian television.
Canadian accents are largely indistinguishable from the generic American "TV accent" aside from a few specific sounds and vocabulary choices. If you go into the Boonies of Canada you hear more distinctive ones, but those are more like regionalisms, you don't hear them as much in the media.
The average American would likely fail to identify all but the most exaggerated Canadian accent (adding "eh?" to the end of every sentence). That's why we're constantly shocked when Hollywood blockbuster actors are Canadian.
My limited experience is that differences inside these two countries (e.g. New Foundland accent to Winnipeg accent, or Texas to Boston) are way bigger than averaged difference between countries (i.e. Manitoba to Minnesota). Most "Canadian" English is broadly similar to most "American" English, especially the standardized TV / Movie kind.
Yes. Central Canada is where 'eh' is said the most; I say and hear it a lot. Atlantic Canada certainly has the most distinctive dialect, and you can immediately hear it's gaelic roots. When a Canadian accent is being poked fun at, it's usually an extreme version of how the prairie provinces speak.
Then splash in some Quebecoise and that will really diversify things. Much of rural Quebec may not even speak English altogether. But you can tell the difference between Quebec French and France French pretty easily, with the latter sounding smoother. I've never been out west but I assume that BC and Alberta is the most 'normal' of the Canadian differing accents.
Even Ontario has regional accents, Toronto/Southern vs Eastern/Ottawa valley vs northern/western. I can't describe the differences but if you blindfolded me and had three different people speak, I'm pretty sure I could pick who is from where.
> I've never been out west but I assume that BC and Alberta is the most 'normal' of the Canadian differing accents
If Linus Tech Tips is anything to go by, this tracks. All of their hosts have very "generic American" sounding accents. They are very very close to Washington state which doesn't have a strong accent in my experience. Contrast this with Minnesota or northern Michigan and how "similar" they sound to the stereotypical Canadian accent.
Linus has a bit of a Valley Girl sometimes and wholly acknowledges it.
I once stopped in a small town in New Brunswick a couple hours drive south of the Quebec border. To my surprise, not only did they all speak French there, but the people we were trying to order lunch from didn't speak a word of English. I never realized that there were French-speaking places that far into New Brunswick.
I had an easier time communicating even in smaller towns in Quebec, where it seemed that most people were capable of speaking a little English, even if they spoke French all the time.
Midwestern accents seem to have a lot of Canadian influence and vice-verse. Of course, we’re nearby friendly countries, it would be weird if we didn’t share some accents.
It's recognizable and easy enough to fake, at least to the degree that another American would recognize it as British English. Most people would not recognize a (say) New Zealand or South African accent, much less be able to replicate it.
It's also interesting that it's always a "posh" British accent: nobody ever fakes Cockney or Scouse or something.
> nobody ever fakes Cockney or Scouse or something
The article specifically refers to faking an "Essex" accent. The Essex accent they're referring to is basically a cockney accent, softened a bit. When East London was gentrified, from roughly the 70s, many East Londoners moved out into Essex.
Because stereotypically British aren’t seen as very threatening people, they sound quite docile really. There’s also a lot of exposure to British accents in popular media compared to the others.
Because Hollywood has been promoting* that accent.
* Review films made in the past 2 decades (that’s roughly when I began noticing the trend). Invariably, an English accent is used to imply authority or superiority (of some kind). Why this is happening in American movie industry is unknown to me but that it has been going on is clear for me.
Some British accents have implied a sort of eliteness in the US for much more than a couple decades. See the transatlantic accent. By the late 19’th century it a widespread enough sentiment that we made up an accent to copy it.
Americans used to have an inferiority complex vis-a-vis Europe (in general) and English. WWII put an end to that. People the world over started aping Americans, including the English. It is (strangely) after US decides to officially be ‘an empire’ that our propaganda organs started speaking posh language. (No one :) affects a cockney accent, ey?)
I've known a bunch of Canadians, and the ones who aren't French Canadians sound mostly identical to Americans. There's a few different words and pronunciations, but unless you stumble into those during a conversation, it's very hard to tell.
I'd love to hear this. It's not something I've noticed in my plentiful YouTube watching, etc, but I think it'd be an interesting development. The English-inspired "posh" American accents of yesteryear are beautiful, I think.
The similar thing that stands out to me like a sore thumb (and I appreciate this is all on me and anyone can talk however they like!) is when British people keep their accent but drop their "t"s to "d"s when speaking in public/on YouTube/podcasts/etc. ("Bedder" instead of "better", for example.) It doesn't seem to be a youth only thing, a lot of British speakers at tech conferences seem to do it, but it's not how we'd talk amongst ourselves in the UK. I wonder if it's something to do with subconsciously reducing plosives which often come out bad on mic?
I adjust my speech patterns based on the audience. I've done it since I was a kid. Different groups of friends speak differently and convergence ensured I wouldn't stick out as weird. It wasn't an entirely conscious decision but I've always been fully aware of it. This seems similar although more pronounced and I didn't use accents.
I'm re-watching The Wire. He's supposed to be a cop from Baltimore; I suspect his accent wouldn't be recognisable as a Baltimore accent to anyone familiar with it. I think he actually struggles to sound authentic as any kind of US accent.
Almost no one in the cast, including the Americans, save for the 3 actors from the area (Robert Chew as Prop Joe, Felicia Pearson as Snoop, Anwan Glover as Slim Charles) even tried putting on a Baltimore accent. Wood Harris and Idris Elba were supposed to be dealers from the Baltimore projects, but Harris just spoke in his Chicago AAVE accent and Elba sounded like a guy from New York City (his accent even breaks pronouncing the word 'responsibilities'). Lance Reddick sounded like Lance Reddick. Robert Chew tried coaching the kids in season 4 in a Baltimore accent and dialect but the accent didn't seem to land.
I do wish David Simon had enforced accents as strongly as he did with Treme.
I can't understand Snoop at all. I've watched this stuff more than once. I still can't make sense of what she says. I know the actress is the real thing.
I thought she was a bloke with a high-pitched voice the first couple of times I watched it. I guess her making like a bloke is part of the character's backstory.
I was on public transportation this morning, about to reach my stop, and I needed to ask a woman who was blocking my way to the doors to please excuse me. The train was quiet, I was right behind her, and I had the feeling that I'd startle her.
As the train rolled into the station, a thought popped into my head that I've had before - a friendly British accent would be disarming in a moment like this! It was a passing thought but an organic one, so it's funny to now read this.
you thought politely asking someone to move so you could exit the train would startle them? and then you thought you might do it in a fake british accent?
I don't know if it's Gen Z specific but I think people now just have a very difficult time interacting with strangers in public. It's kind of a bizarre phenomenon of the digital age.
Yes and yes. It's uncommon where I live to talk to people on the train - and being a bulky 6'4 male, whether I like it or not, I have a lifetime of experience that it's startling for women when I appear behind them without them realizing. It was a passing thought I found funny in the moment. I think it might say something about the reason why some segment of the population is apparently doing this.
Most British people I know in this situation would literally just say, "Sorry!", just loud enough for the person blocking hear you so that they move and reply, "Sorry!".
In general I think we don't like to converse too much, especially on public transport.
When I first visited Britain what stood out the most to me was how much chitchat there is between strangers in public places, especially on the train. Something I hadn’t witnessed anywhere else in Europe. Also, something that made me feel very inadequate as I just couldn’t keep up with that manner of communication. A Canadian friend had noticed the same.
Granted, it’s mostly the colder parts of Europe that I have the most non-tourist experiences with. So that’s that.
That is quite funny I have a British accent and live in the US and I often worry that my accent comes across abrupt and un-friendly, especially in situations like that.
This is just a bit of a vent (as a Gen-Z-er myself), because "I feel like" reminded my of something I've noticed in my fellow young peers:
"I was just going to say, <insert statement>." And,
"I was just going to ask, <insert question>."
This makes me sound curmudgeony, but I work with a non-negligible number of people that cannot avoid these constructions in any serious or professional setting. I'll hear it 10+ times in a half-hour meeting. It's so indirect, and I must admit I take the speaker less seriously when I notice it.
I'm guilty I think of 'I just wanted to [verb ...]' - softens what follows as if to say 'not a big deal but'. It hasn't bothered me/caught my attention particularly before now, but I'm sure it will henceforth.
I noticed someone say it at least three times in a meeting not long after writing that. Thanks a lot!
While I'm here, a similar one that does bug me (but at least for now I only hear Americans saying it, on Youtube or whatever) is 'I'm going to go ahead and [...]' or 'so I just went ahead and [...]' - why do you have to 'go ahead' before you do things over there, is there a problem with the Earth's gravitational pull?
Uptalk evolved to fill a social niche and is related to dialects/sociolects that commonly use "right?" or "eh?" to inter-punctuate sentences without using such filler words. (Admittedly, Valleyspeak is partly best known for different filler words so there was, like, no space for inter-punctuating sentences.)
(There's a whole genre of newspaper story that more or less consists of "Look! This generation are doing a thing that all the other generations did, too! How surprising!" There's always an audience for moaning about the youth of today, and apparently has been for literally millennia; ancient Roman commentators liked doing it, say).
That seems like a more organic evolution of language. It's across several generations and is not an intenional choice. It's also a bit far away from adopting an entire foreign accent.
> “If you like to think of yourself as somebody who’s easygoing, you might adopt a certain voice to express frustration, because you don’t feel totally comfortable with that part of yourself that complains,” he said.
Fred Rogers was reported by his children to express frustration or annoyance in Lady Elaine Fairchilde's voice rather than his own.
I’m from New Zealand. It’s staggering how many people in the US will repeat what I say back to me in a British accent. It’s hard to be annoyed because they’re “just having fun” but my god does it get old.
Fortunately I can do a bit of California surfer dude right back and that usually gets the message across
That's great actually, because it also works for South African (I often have a hard time with SA vs NZ) - 'fish and chips' with very short 'i', like it's reluctantly put in at all, I think.
When I'm talking to British friends they'll often repeat back what I said and exaggerate the rhoticity of my western US accent. I'll poke back with a "It's chewsday innit bruv?"
Ha. My defense is that my west coast US accent is closer to what Brits sounded like at the time of the American revolutionary war than a typical London accent is today.
Do New Zealanders ever speak with a British accent? I mean, the ones I’ve known, it seems different from a neutral American (Midwest accent) but not by much, I would be hard pressed to call them out as British or even non-Americans (well, there is one guy, but he was also born in London).
The Kiwi accent is quite different. It's certainly closer to your typical southern English accent than a US Midwestern one, but the vowel qualities and rhythm of speech are completely different from both. As somebody from Ireland, I don't have issues picking out somebody from NZ. I could understand getting a New Zealander mixed up with an Aussie if you don't notice with differences in vowel pronunciation between the two countries, but that's about it.
That said, both AU and NZ have their own "TV accents", which in AU is referred to as "Cultivated Australian", which is relatively close to British RP (though not the same), and I expect NZ has their own equivalent, but most people would have something close to what you would generally think of people from that part of the world sounding like.
In tech you'll run into at least a few during your career. If you lived in Asia, you'll probably see more than that (more common than Australians for some reason).
Uh? I get saying its resembles more of a midwest Canadian slant than sounding like pure midwest American english, but Southern English? Having lived in Mississippi and worked with plenty of New Zealanders, I don't see that.
I think the parallels that people draw with the American south are typically the northern UK, like the Scots Irish.
In terms of US-UK parallels, there's also the effect that geographical isolation has in making a sort of language "time capsule" where colonies stick with dated pronunciations or vocabulary. I've heard an attempted reconstruction of London accents from the early 1700s that sound a lot like General American or Canadian English. The same source had an early 1800s reconstruction that sounded rather Australian to my ears. One imagines that English people colonize either place at a given time, leave some trace of their time and place in speech patterns, and their relatives in England
go on to evolve speech patterns in different ways.
Non rhotacism (lack of pronunciation of R) also left some traces in the American south (and northeast). That feature began in southern England after colonization, so I believe it was generally fashionable people keeping up with the latest English trends who brought it west.
No, their accent is quite clearly identifiable as Kiwi to us Brits.
They're easy to understand, they enunciate when they speak but the intonation and inflections and general sound is very different.
As for "a British accent". Would an American say there's "an American accent"?
There is no single British accent, we have, English, Scottish, Welsh, Irish and others with their own languages (and thus accents), then in England, we have widely varying accents, many clearly identifiable to a Brit; Newcastle (Jordie), Birmingham (Brummie), Liverpool (Scouse), London (Cockney), Essex, Yorkshire, etc.
I think when people say "British" like the article in OP, they really mean what we call "posh". We do it ourselves at times, but most people don't actually speak that way.
> As for "a British accent". Would an American say there's "an American accent"?
Of course, just the same as British. "American accent" for foreigners usually means "Southern Foghorn Leghorn" e.g. Daniel Craig in Knives Out, but can also mean New York, Boston, Chicago, Dakota (aka Fargo) or some other variation. To Americans it really means "unaccented" Midwestern English, aka broadcast (radio or TV) voice.
Americans know "American accent" from "British accent" by the same standard, the British "unaccented" voice is called RP and sounds posh or overly fancy to most Brits, but Americans don't distinguish RP from Cockney, Yorkie, Jordie or any of the other variants. RP is the broadcast voice.
To be clear: I used to be the same. "British" was one accent that Michael Caine, the Queen and Chris Ramsay all spoke. (For Americans: "Robert DeNiro, Harrison Ford and Dolly Parton have one accent" is equally wrong and hilarious.)
I cannot say that your experience includes this phenomenon, but whenever people gather they tend to talk like each other, and pretty rapidly. I've found that I've a tendency to unconsciously modulate my "accent" when I'm with my in-laws in Europe, or when visiting the UK.
When I'm staying for a few days in a different part of my country (Italy) I end up switching to the local phrase construction pattern if it's notably different from my native one. Accent not so much, I guess it takes quite a long time. Words are easy to swap (like truck/lorry in English) and pronunciation quite easy too (change of vowel sounds in my case.) BTW, none of this involves speaking dialects, it's all Italian with regional differences that everybody understand.
Not in Italy. Dialects here are languages. They basically belong to the same family of Italian but I won't be able to understand a dialect 50 km from where I live if speakers don't want to italianize it a little. What I was writing about is standard Italian with regional inflections in accent, phonetic, dictionary and syntax but still understandable by any Italian speaker.
Yeah it's "accommodation". But people also do the other thing where they repeat what you say and honestly I think they're just relishing this other similar sound they enjoy.
True! Almost all of my extended family lives in South Louisiana and many have quite thick Cajun accents. When I spend too much time around them, I end up sounding a bit different when I get home.
"imitation is the sincerest form of flattery" comes to mind, though I get it's hard to take it as a compliment when it's so commonplace for you.
That said, in that moment, they're not "having fun" (in the mocking sense) they're relishing the sound of your voice and wanting to imagine a version of ourselves being uniquely interesting, like you, in the mimicry.
I get that it gets old, though, as your accent isn't novel to you.
I would imagine that part of the reason it gets old is that it isn't "your accent." It is a NZ accent after having been filtered and ruined by US ears and speech patterns.
Old joke. What do you call someone who knows three languages? Trilingual. Two languages? Bilingual. One language? American (US). Speaking as one myself...
I watch a YouTube channel that frequently features a guest from New Zealand, and in every video in which he appears, different people in the background will parrot the guest after he says certain words that really show off the NZ accent. I think he's become numb to it, because he shows no reaction. I'm sure it gets very old, but hopefully it's seen as endearment. imo, it's the best accent one can have :)
I love the British accents so much, I would put months of practice if I could. Their wit and dry humour parallel closely to mine in daily lives.
The other day we were mocking Brits on received pronunciation or what people call the 'royal posh talk'. Oh god, their novels are too fun when adapted into play, drama or theatre. My nephew had so much fun, it consumed the whole afternoon and evening in a jiffy.
Anybody who grew up in different mother tongue will appreciate Brits and their culture, language being just the start.
Not bad, I read your comment in an English accent. Too much positivity though. We can only give that level of enthusiastic complement as an insult.
Your "so much fun" and "too fun" makes me think of "such fun" which is a complicated phrase now I think about it. It's rarely used to express something positive about having fun... Even just the word "fun" is rarely used positively. If an English person ever reacts to something with "well isn't that fun", be worried.
Oh, and jiffies are passed rather than consumed. Don't ask me why.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 99.9 ms ] thread(Using f/v instead of th has long been a feature of some London dialects, and using t/d instead of th has long been a feature of some Irish dialects, and young children often use f/v instead of th, I think. Jocular references to "the youf" have been around in print for a while.)
EDIT: Of course there's also Jamaican pronunciation with t/d instead of th!
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Th-fronting
Apparently it's been around for quite a bit of time.
There's "bovvered" or there's "what da hell" or there's "fankyou"...
I can probably think of several more dialects where "th" is replaced with something else.
The tragedy is that this is a huge dividing factor in the UK. In all the places I've worked the vast majority of people use the distinct "th" sounds. Use of "f" and "v" sounds is, to use the current terminology, a "red flag".
Bread and budder? WTF?
I'm an author; I love horseback writing?
I'm tired of wading for the flood?
I want to ride my modercycle?
It's so pervasive that we really ought to update our dictionaries to replace these, now phantom, "t"s with proper "d"s. Think of it as antipsychotics for a batshit crazy language.
I'm American. But this has always been annoying, along with most of the eN language.
To cast a cynical eye on the bright side; it seems both the "t" and "d" will soon be obsolete as the entire eN language is refined to tonal variations of our most common word/punctuation/expression/noise, "like".
I may be mistaken, but I believe there's evidence that new humans are forming a "like-gland". The sound will become as natural and necessary as that of frogs bleating* after rain.
*Yes, bleating, not bleeding.
"Batcheries"
[EDIT] That's not me trying to, like, contradict or counter your story—occurred to me it might come off that way. I just think it's funny that that specific word has so many cross-accent issues.
> Bread and budder? WTF?
In this and most cases there isn't really another word that would fit in context. Also plenty of other dialects (i.e. Australian English) do exactly the same thing.
> I'm an author; I love horseback writing?
I'm this case, "riding" and "writing" have a marked difference in the length of the initial diphthong sound "ai".
I general American English is nowhere near the most ambiguous in this way. Many languages rely more heavily on context because they use ambiguous phonological and grammatical marking in common speech (i.e. spoken Japanese).
The Wire is very good.
It also features Idris Elba, so it has two British people playing Americans on either side of the law .
I also recall an episode of The Mentalist, where agent Rigsby (played by Welsh Owain Yeoman) says he can imitate a british accent and proceeds to do so, only to receive a “nah, not good enough” by the protagonist.
The issue I (as a non-native English speaker) sometimes have with British actors is: how to pronounce their names?! Examples: the aforementioned Owain Yeoman, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Siobhan (pronounced Shivohn IIUC) Finneran…
I don't think it's purely a non-native problem with those names, though they're not exactly English names.
I enjoy names such as Sean Bean ("Seen Been" or "Shorn Born"?) or even Mary Berry ("Merry Berry" or "Mary Bary").
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gillian_Anderson
[1] except David Tennant, who thinks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gp9K-rMdxg sounds Californian
Probably helped by trying to get voice controlled technology working - particularly lifts.... ;-)
Wait... there are voice controlled elevators?
OK, so it's not just my wife; she sometimes directs voice actors, and within the first five minutes of the game as part of the big intro sequence everyone who plays the game has to see it got an "oof, that needed another take" out of her, LOL.
But my mates would sometimes launch into a very broad scouse accent to tease me; I could only just understand that.
Things have changed. Nobody nowadays speaks Geordie with the very broad accent that I couldn't understand as a kid.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-Atlantic_accent
The only way you don't is if you purposely slow down your singing make it sound like your talking accent. This works with some genres (e.g. rap) but not others.
With a Birmingham accent being worst.
https://www.derbytelegraph.co.uk/news/uk-world-news/uk-accen...
I've thought "mommy" vs "mummy" was a spelling difference. The words sound the same to me, /'mɐmɪ/.
But either pronunciation of "mummy" (embalmed corpse) is how I would address my mother as a child: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/mummy
"Mom" always sounded like "Nom" with an M.
But yes, it's "mahmmy", which is only very subtly different from a British "mummy" - in the American version, there's almost a hint of an "r" at the end of the vowel, whereas the British version has a straight (and short) "u".
I ended up with Ted Kelsey, personally.
"Hehehehe... Stiletto, I'm so clever..."
The writing on that show was top tier and holds up well today.
Also yes, I think we mostly learned Received Pronunciation in school but at least half of the people diverged towards American (in words like "can't") pretty soon and I honestly couldn't tell you if I'm still being consistent, 20 years after school and using English for a huge part of my working life, as a software developer.
Every non-native English learner tries to imitate natives, to the best of their ability. I don't think there's any other way to learn. Some people relax and stop trying to improve once they notice that they get to a level where they are understood, though. And then, one can be aware of one's limits (I don't think I'll ever get to distinguish "ice" and "eyes", so I don't even try anymore).
What you describe seems to be some kind of linguistic "uncanny valley" effect.
I was chatting to a French-born colleague and he mentioned visiting the camping store "Millets". He pronounced it as a French word (something like "mi-ey") and I had no idea what he was talking about. It was unusual as otherwise his english was flawless.
"Paper map sales are booming" [0] - with a subtitle of "Fans say physical maps—though less efficient than digital options—enhance one’s journey. Among devotees: a surprising number of millennials and members of Generation Z" - Bullshit. Subtitle should have been "as art", almost no one, especially Gen-Z is using paper maps as actual maps.
Also all the articles about "people are going back to flip/dumb phones" no they aren't. You found a handful of people who did it, half of which I doubt are still doing it 1-2 months later and you want to pretend it's a trend. It's so tiring.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34469378
Also, do people in the U.S. study physic?
The pronunciation of "Gloucester" (gloster) and "Leicester" (lester) follow a similar scheme for the "-cester" bit which leads to "Worcester" being pronounced "wooster", but Worcestershire sauce is often pronounced "wooster sauce" which doesn't make much sense.
Apparently, Frome in Somerset is one of the hardest place names to pronounce in England, though it certainly doesn't compare to some Welsh towns. (I say it as "froom")
Worcestershire and Worcester follow the same patter as Gloucestershire/Gloucester, Leicestershire/Leicester and (Towcestershire doesn't exist)/Towcester. Towcester, incidentally, being the same pronunciation as "toaster".
The one that annoys me is Cirencester, which is usually "sai-ren-ses-ta", and only occasionally "sai-ren-ster".
It sits on the River Nene, which is pronounced Neen or Nen depending on which bit of Northamptonshire you live in (Northamptonshire is not very big...)
Or, according to my grandmother, "siss-iss-ter".
"That's just incorrect. It's pronounced "wooster-shuh". The double-O is short, as in "book". Worcestershire Sauce is sometimes simply called "woosters", as in "a dash of woosters".
> Frome in Somerset is one of the hardest place names to pronounce
Hardly. It's pronounced "froom". That's not so hard.
And there's a Gloucester[0] (pronounced 'Gloster' or, more likely in MA 'Glostah') there as well. And there's one[1] in Virgnia too, (Wikipedia says it's pronounced 'Gloster', but I don't know the VA accent well enough to know if that's locally correct).
There are other similar place names around the US, mostly on the eastern seaboard, for obvious reasons, as well.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gloucester,_Massachusetts
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gloucester_County,_Virginia
Bad example, since some accents pronounce "book" like "kook" (not like "suck") ;)
Also, this scene from Archer cracks me up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4jxLxZrMfs
I agree that it's not tricky to pronounce, but the difficulty is pronouncing it correctly.
Worcestershire sauce can be called "wooster-shuh sauce" or "wooster sauce" or as you say, "woosters".
Map men explain it best.
https://youtu.be/uYNzqgU7na4
That is at least the theory I've heard
(Many words place names long pre-date any kind of attempt to regularize English spelling, and in any case come from fusions of Brythonic, Norman, Roman, Norwegian etc languages. This is why it's difficult to predict the pronunciation of one word from the spelling of another.)
Someone asked about physic ... well people used to use physick in [late medieval?] British English... but that's for what we might call medicine now.
When you say "maths", how many do you mean? If you mean all collectively that would be singular, e.g. Mathematics is the study of ...
All of them.
I think its funny that terms like math v maths come about very organically and then after the fact everyone feels the need to back into a reasoning that was likely never there. Obviously neither are wrong because they are the "correct" way for a given dialect/region etc.
No, that's arithmetic (which is always singular, amusingly).
I find it generally amusing to examine the differences between U.S. and British English and quite often get confused over whether I should be using "licence" or "license". It's the little quirks of language/spelling that make it interesting. (Though english, I'm a big fan of some of the U.S. contractions such as "y'all'd've")
I would say "math" is an objectively better shortening of "mathematics" as it preserves the singular collective meaning than "maths" which preserves more of the incidental textual form.
We Americans use the phrase "do the math," which means to go figure something out, not necessarily arithmetically.
Is there a similar phrase for the Brits? As in "do the maths?" Which seems unlikely. As such, I'd expect those using British style English to have different phrase for the same thing. Is that the case? If so, what might it be?
Probably a "just so" definition to satisfy my American ears. I bet they'd say that any one of those is still "maths" by itself.
Brits are also comfortable that ‘economics’ abbreviates to ‘econ’.
Let’s not pretend either of us has a rational basis for this argument.
That's the correct way of doing it if you've naturally got a British accent (or really any accent where you clearly learned British English as a second language).
Americans saying 'maths' is like dragging fingernails down a chalkboard.
I love the irregularity of English.
Same with maths - if you only have one type of mathematics then math would make sense. But there are many types of mathematics, so we call it maths.
[0] https://www.grammarly.com/blog/fish-fishes/
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4J9MRYJz9-4 [video][1 min]
A friend jammed all the drawls into a single catchphrase which he used for laughs for weeks. "The daaataaa on the staaatus baaar is made of an aluuuuminum cahhhhmpaaaund and stahred on a cd-raaaaaaahm"
We don't know that (and the article is quite low on the quality scale expected from Guardian).
I speak three languages, and I don't see a reason to mix. Of course, you might be right, but also that's a one trick point. You will be called for being pretentious or just obnoxious.
But I feel like this article is about something else. We don't think in terms of words, we think in terms of phrases, and when we remember those phrases it's not just their literal meaning, but also the context, and this can include the accent they were heard in.
In the ideal world we'd just play the sample that we have in the head, but we don't have that yet.
It's taken a tabloid turn (not just in terms of the page format). It's got noticeably worse, even in the last 6 months. It's packed with "listicle" articles ("10 reasons..."), and it's moving rapidly to the right, politically.
But I think most of the time it's just seen as hip, interesting, an extra flavor (flavour?). I do this occasionally -- sprinkle a foreign phrase here and there in my native Czech when I see that it fits and the other party might get it. More if I'm drunk. Some of my friends do it as well, in some social settings a number of jokes could be foreign language references. On the other hand, some people find it infuriating, as you note.
/me a Brit; used to have a Canadian boss (from Ontario).
Canadian: What's that about?
Me: Yes, a big one and it sank.
Canadian accents are largely indistinguishable from the generic American "TV accent" aside from a few specific sounds and vocabulary choices. If you go into the Boonies of Canada you hear more distinctive ones, but those are more like regionalisms, you don't hear them as much in the media.
My limited experience is that differences inside these two countries (e.g. New Foundland accent to Winnipeg accent, or Texas to Boston) are way bigger than averaged difference between countries (i.e. Manitoba to Minnesota). Most "Canadian" English is broadly similar to most "American" English, especially the standardized TV / Movie kind.
Then splash in some Quebecoise and that will really diversify things. Much of rural Quebec may not even speak English altogether. But you can tell the difference between Quebec French and France French pretty easily, with the latter sounding smoother. I've never been out west but I assume that BC and Alberta is the most 'normal' of the Canadian differing accents.
If Linus Tech Tips is anything to go by, this tracks. All of their hosts have very "generic American" sounding accents. They are very very close to Washington state which doesn't have a strong accent in my experience. Contrast this with Minnesota or northern Michigan and how "similar" they sound to the stereotypical Canadian accent.
Linus has a bit of a Valley Girl sometimes and wholly acknowledges it.
I had an easier time communicating even in smaller towns in Quebec, where it seemed that most people were capable of speaking a little English, even if they spoke French all the time.
It's also interesting that it's always a "posh" British accent: nobody ever fakes Cockney or Scouse or something.
The article specifically refers to faking an "Essex" accent. The Essex accent they're referring to is basically a cockney accent, softened a bit. When East London was gentrified, from roughly the 70s, many East Londoners moved out into Essex.
*Dick Van Dyke has entered the chat*
There’s something endearing to me about working class and regional accents.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8xliaDUPwg
* Review films made in the past 2 decades (that’s roughly when I began noticing the trend). Invariably, an English accent is used to imply authority or superiority (of some kind). Why this is happening in American movie industry is unknown to me but that it has been going on is clear for me.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-Atlantic_accent
Source: Texan who has been close to Canada once by visiting New York City. I know a Canadian and wouldn't have known it if he didn't tell me.
Serious answer, we hear a lot more British in pop culture than we hear Australian or NZ.
Boo! Hiss! "On accident" is an abomination! </rant>
The similar thing that stands out to me like a sore thumb (and I appreciate this is all on me and anyone can talk however they like!) is when British people keep their accent but drop their "t"s to "d"s when speaking in public/on YouTube/podcasts/etc. ("Bedder" instead of "better", for example.) It doesn't seem to be a youth only thing, a lot of British speakers at tech conferences seem to do it, but it's not how we'd talk amongst ourselves in the UK. I wonder if it's something to do with subconsciously reducing plosives which often come out bad on mic?
I think he's great in the part, though.
Daniel Craig sounding like Foghorn Leghorn, now that's another matter.
I do wish David Simon had enforced accents as strongly as he did with Treme.
I can't understand Snoop at all. I've watched this stuff more than once. I still can't make sense of what she says. I know the actress is the real thing.
I thought she was a bloke with a high-pitched voice the first couple of times I watched it. I guess her making like a bloke is part of the character's backstory.
As the train rolled into the station, a thought popped into my head that I've had before - a friendly British accent would be disarming in a moment like this! It was a passing thought but an organic one, so it's funny to now read this.
Born too soon I guess
In general I think we don't like to converse too much, especially on public transport.
When I first visited Britain what stood out the most to me was how much chitchat there is between strangers in public places, especially on the train. Something I hadn’t witnessed anywhere else in Europe. Also, something that made me feel very inadequate as I just couldn’t keep up with that manner of communication. A Canadian friend had noticed the same.
Granted, it’s mostly the colder parts of Europe that I have the most non-tourist experiences with. So that’s that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PT0ay9u1gg4
:D
Also other generations. For instance:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valley_girl#Valleyspeak
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-Atlantic_accent
Novel sociolects aren't something that gen z has just invented; they show up from time to time.
Valley/Uptalk is the most annoying. Everything is a questionnn. No matter whaatt.
Those are mostly regional accents btw, not generational.
What's uptalk?
That particular affectation seems to have leaked into written text too. Damn annoying.
> Valley/Uptalk is the most annoying.
Add in a vocal fry and you'll have something to torture me with.
This is just a bit of a vent (as a Gen-Z-er myself), because "I feel like" reminded my of something I've noticed in my fellow young peers:
"I was just going to say, <insert statement>." And,
"I was just going to ask, <insert question>."
This makes me sound curmudgeony, but I work with a non-negligible number of people that cannot avoid these constructions in any serious or professional setting. I'll hear it 10+ times in a half-hour meeting. It's so indirect, and I must admit I take the speaker less seriously when I notice it.
Just say the thing! Just ask the thing!
Has anyone else noticed this construction?
(Not 'gen z' but 'millenial', I think, fwiw.)
While I'm here, a similar one that does bug me (but at least for now I only hear Americans saying it, on Youtube or whatever) is 'I'm going to go ahead and [...]' or 'so I just went ahead and [...]' - why do you have to 'go ahead' before you do things over there, is there a problem with the Earth's gravitational pull?
on the other hand: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qb21lsCQ3EM
One article on the subject: https://www.thecut.com/2017/06/the-real-purpose-of-uptalk-is...
Fred Rogers was reported by his children to express frustration or annoyance in Lady Elaine Fairchilde's voice rather than his own.
Button sounds like “buh-hen.” It’s borderline baby talk.
Fortunately I can do a bit of California surfer dude right back and that usually gets the message across
"Fush and chups" - New Zealand. "Feesh and cheeps" - Australian
If you want to tell Aussies and kiwis apart, listen for "Chance" and "Dance".
Kiwis will say the 'a' like in the word "aren't", whereas Aussies will say it like the 'a' in "ants".
Much more discrete to ask about dancing than fish and chips ;)
Seems pretty common.
That said, both AU and NZ have their own "TV accents", which in AU is referred to as "Cultivated Australian", which is relatively close to British RP (though not the same), and I expect NZ has their own equivalent, but most people would have something close to what you would generally think of people from that part of the world sounding like.
Not the US south.
In terms of US-UK parallels, there's also the effect that geographical isolation has in making a sort of language "time capsule" where colonies stick with dated pronunciations or vocabulary. I've heard an attempted reconstruction of London accents from the early 1700s that sound a lot like General American or Canadian English. The same source had an early 1800s reconstruction that sounded rather Australian to my ears. One imagines that English people colonize either place at a given time, leave some trace of their time and place in speech patterns, and their relatives in England go on to evolve speech patterns in different ways.
Non rhotacism (lack of pronunciation of R) also left some traces in the American south (and northeast). That feature began in southern England after colonization, so I believe it was generally fashionable people keeping up with the latest English trends who brought it west.
They're easy to understand, they enunciate when they speak but the intonation and inflections and general sound is very different.
As for "a British accent". Would an American say there's "an American accent"?
There is no single British accent, we have, English, Scottish, Welsh, Irish and others with their own languages (and thus accents), then in England, we have widely varying accents, many clearly identifiable to a Brit; Newcastle (Jordie), Birmingham (Brummie), Liverpool (Scouse), London (Cockney), Essex, Yorkshire, etc.
I think when people say "British" like the article in OP, they really mean what we call "posh". We do it ourselves at times, but most people don't actually speak that way.
Of course, just the same as British. "American accent" for foreigners usually means "Southern Foghorn Leghorn" e.g. Daniel Craig in Knives Out, but can also mean New York, Boston, Chicago, Dakota (aka Fargo) or some other variation. To Americans it really means "unaccented" Midwestern English, aka broadcast (radio or TV) voice.
Americans know "American accent" from "British accent" by the same standard, the British "unaccented" voice is called RP and sounds posh or overly fancy to most Brits, but Americans don't distinguish RP from Cockney, Yorkie, Jordie or any of the other variants. RP is the broadcast voice.
To be clear: I used to be the same. "British" was one accent that Michael Caine, the Queen and Chris Ramsay all spoke. (For Americans: "Robert DeNiro, Harrison Ford and Dolly Parton have one accent" is equally wrong and hilarious.)
That said, in that moment, they're not "having fun" (in the mocking sense) they're relishing the sound of your voice and wanting to imagine a version of ourselves being uniquely interesting, like you, in the mimicry.
I get that it gets old, though, as your accent isn't novel to you.
I would imagine that part of the reason it gets old is that it isn't "your accent." It is a NZ accent after having been filtered and ruined by US ears and speech patterns.
Old joke. What do you call someone who knows three languages? Trilingual. Two languages? Bilingual. One language? American (US). Speaking as one myself...
The other day we were mocking Brits on received pronunciation or what people call the 'royal posh talk'. Oh god, their novels are too fun when adapted into play, drama or theatre. My nephew had so much fun, it consumed the whole afternoon and evening in a jiffy.
Anybody who grew up in different mother tongue will appreciate Brits and their culture, language being just the start.
That's not RP. RP is the accent of the older BBC news anchors. The aristocracy speak (or spoke) a horribly strangled accent:
"Ee-aw, heelyaw, Meekyeh!" -> "Oh, hello, Mickey".
Your "so much fun" and "too fun" makes me think of "such fun" which is a complicated phrase now I think about it. It's rarely used to express something positive about having fun... Even just the word "fun" is rarely used positively. If an English person ever reacts to something with "well isn't that fun", be worried.
Oh, and jiffies are passed rather than consumed. Don't ask me why.
Always a way to learn!
Thanks!