British accents are heavily localized and class-based. I don't even know what a fake British accent means honestly. People in GB can spot an accent and a fake localized accent quite easily, and act accordingly.
I think Americans are just parroting pop culture from GB, and doing their best to sound, I dunno: posh or proper or whatever. It would be like someone in Kent trying to sound like a Wyoming cowboy. As the kids say: cringe.
This has had precedent. Years ago during the silver screen era there was a accent that most major movie stars had called the transatlantic accent, it has some elements of British and also American sounds.
Also for some reason I do not understand almost all US reality shows and other entertainment(contestant based shows mainly) have to have someone British judging Americans like we are incapable of having our own citizens be makers of taste or standards.
The History of English podcast just released a bonus episode about this. Highly recommended to anyone interested in hearing how it was historically used and how its use has changed over time.
> Also for some reason I do not understand almost all US reality shows and other entertainment(contestant based shows mainly) have to have someone British judging Americans like we are incapable of having our own citizens be makers of taste or standards.
Also, IIRC, infomercials, too.
I think America has some longstanding cultural assumptions that Europe is more culturally refined/upper class/fashionable. Probably dating from when America was mostly hick farmers and Europe had all that royalty setting trends. Throwing in a superfluous European accent is an easy way to hook into those assumptions.
My grandparents had this accent. It was contextual, they didn't use it with us but I did hear it come out when they would talk to certain friends or tell stories and voice characters.
And then my grandparents on my other side had thick Bronx and Queens accents respectively. I think there were a lot more variations in region and class specific accents 50+ years ago.
I've thought about trying to learn the transatlantic accent just for fun but wonder when/if I could use it. It doesn't have the same humor that the fake posh British ones do.
> I think Americans are just parroting pop culture from GB
Yes - a new "cool brittania" era, this time mostly via TV and TikTok/Youtube rather than music.
I consider this harmlessly funny, it's the reverse of the ubiquitousness of Americanisms everywhere and the extent to which non-English speakers usually have Americanish accents.
(Long ago, US East Coasters used to adopt high class English accents for much the same reason, and there is still what's called a "mid Atlantic" accent).
I thought Mid Atlantic was a completely fake accent taught to radio and movie actors because of better fidelity with the recording equipment of the day
> I think Americans are just parroting pop culture from GB, and doing their best to sound, I dunno: posh or proper or whatever
That contradicts the article. They’re imitating the Essex and regional accents they hear on love island and x-factor and TikTok. Unlike previous generations that probably heard ‘posh’ or cockney accents, Gen-Z are more likely to have heard Millie-B rapping than Alan Rickman in a movie.
For whatever reason that accent seems easier for US people. My wife can do a killer imitation of a Love Island-like girl but neither of us can do anything resembling the accents on the more posh side without it turning into caricature quickly. We used to watch a lot of British panel shows.
> I think Americans are just parroting pop culture from GB, and doing their best to sound, I dunno: posh or proper or whatever
Agreed with your take, but there is another reason as well - just the whole "rubbing off" effect.
I've seen quite a ton of comments in more serious/non-joke threads all across social media (including HN), talking about people from all across the western europe getting pseudo-american accents (usually something generic in-between or more general like californian, not anything like the boston one lol) from consuming so much american media. And that includes countries where english was already the de-facto primary language, such as the UK. So it seems like it goes in both directions.
Anecdotally, as someone for whom american english (and english in general) wasn't the first language (but has been the primarily used language 99% of the time for the past 15 years), I definitely get the occasional slips of pronunciation if I watch a lot of british english media. That is entirely unintentional on my part though, and I correct rather quickly and return back to the baseline in a couple of days.
With this in mind, I wonder if there is data available that plots these incidences of "fake british accents" against worldwide consumption rates of british-english-heavy media. I suspect there would be a statistically-significant correlation.
I moved to Finland, from the UK, and I can identify many of the local people as having grown up listening to American TV.
It's a little disconcerting to hear American words ("fall", not "autumn"), and New York accents from people who've spent their lives in Helsinki.
Still I come from the UK, and for me it's easy to place which part of the country people spent their formative years - sometimes even which half of a city somebody has grown up in, let alone the changes you hear across 20-25 miles.
> It's a little disconcerting to hear American words ("fall", not "autumn"), and New York accents from people who've spent their lives in Helsinki.
Why is it disconcerting? Should people adopt a British accent simply because it’s closer geographically even if most English media they consume is American?
I can recognize my bias, but I grew up in the UK and so to me English is British-English.
Words like "fall" are something I've only heard on TV until moving here. (Or when visiting America.)
I appreciate American media is global these days, so people will pick up on the dialect, but it's still a little alien to me. I could hear "fall" a hundred times in films, but if everybody I ever spoke to about autumn holidays said "autumn" that's the one that feels more natural to hear.
One child in a family of my acquaintance uses Americanisms, despite heavy correction from their siblings. I think it's a 'Netflix Effect', it's cheaper to buy USA programming than make British-English voiced programmes.
Aside, try "Scotland the What" if you're interested in some different Scottish accents (I think they're mainly Highland, Doric Scots).
Every culture that has ever existed is more nuanced than outsiders think.
I grew up in Texas and I’m a liberal who’s lived all over the country. I meet lots of people in California who’ve never left home and think people from X are like A and from Y are like B.
But put four people from any location into the same room and you’ll find plenty of differences between them.
On the one hand they do, as they certainly don't mean Cockney or Essex or Manchester.
But on the other hand they don't, because true RP is generally far too pretentious. Even in movies/TV, you see it mainly only in villains and historical dramas, or for comedic effect.
Most people are generally referring to a kind of middle-class London accent. Like Jude Law for example. Neither "posh" nor "regional" nor "lower class" nor "multicultural" (quotes for irony where necessary, obviously London is a region). I'm not sure what the name for that is though?
Estuary English [1] -- the English spoken around the Thames estuary. It has, arguably, been the "standard" non-posh British dialect for a while.
As a North American, I find it one of the harder accents to understand. It has undergone a lot of interesting sound changes in recent decades, not shared by many other dialects. Likely a result of dialect flattening from 20th century population movements. "Football" -> [ˈfʊʔbɔo] (sounds like "fuh-baoh" to me) or "bottle" -> ['bɒʔo] {"bah-oh"?) or "Tuesday" -> [tʃuːz.deɪ] ("choose day").
The Surrey accent is close what most people most people consider middle class / standard English which is close to received pronunciation, but more natural sounding. In other areas other the country it's considered posh!?
I think the average American doesn't / can't distinguish Michael Caine's Cockney accent and David Attenborough's RP. Caine's working class accent is perceived to be just as posh and sophisticated as RP, so he gets cast in the role of butlers for bat-themed billionaires, etc.
> I think the average American doesn't / can't distinguish Michael Caine's Cockney accent and David Attenborough's RP.
You really think so? Maybe it's just me, but I can't imagine how anyone could mistake the two. (Possibly different people have different ears for accents.)
I can hear them and tell that they're different accents, but I don't really distinguish them, I would call them both "British" and I wouldn't know which one's more posh.
As an American, I find it most noticeable/funny in Helen Mirren's Fast & Furious franchise role. You can tell she's having a blast putting on the intentionally worst working class accent she can (in a way that it sometimes seems like she assumes Americans aren't in on the joke and it is mostly just for herself) to fit her role as Jason Statham's "mum", and there are definite fun moments of "Is she intentionally parodying Michael Caine here?" that do give me (as an American) silly, brief moments of "Americans still think that sounds posh", plus it does serve to more directly connect Statham's accent to Caine's. I don't think a lot of Americans notice how close they are and yet do notice that Statham and Caine have very different stereotypes in American cinema.
There are ample rea$on$ why non-American actor$ can do decent American accent$.
It opens up American roles for them. Nobody is going to cast Brad Pitt as a Brit, an Australian, or a Kiwi. He's a fantastic actor, but they're going to use the homegrown talent. So there's no incentive for American actors to really learn another accent. Instead, we get a mountain of non-American actors doing mostly-good-but-sometimes-awful accents because that's where the money is.
Since you mentioned Pitt, a funny anecdote: he wanted to be in Snitch because he was a fan of Lock Stock. But his London accent was so terrible that they went and made up the whole indecipherable gypsy thing just so he could have a role to play in the film.
Not only that, but a lot of British films will make british-only casting decisions, eg the Harry Potter series. I've never heard of a major American film making that choice, and it would probably be blasted as xenophobic if it did.
Er how many American movies have a single non-American? The only foreigners that consistently find employment in American cinema are Britishers, and that’s because the British English accent is perceived to have an at least equal prestige to the American one. You’re not going to find many main characters that are, say, Middle Eastern or South Asian or African.
This isn't what the article says, however: "Gen Z has embraced bad imitations of Cockney slang or a Yorkshire dialect" and then name-checks accents acquired from Love Island and The Only Way is Essex, neither of which are known for their RP!
If it's anything like the polish who have act like an american day where they shoot fireworks and wear flags, I'd welcome them with open arms. It cracks me up. I don't think it's cringe at all.
> People in GB can spot an accent and a fake localized accent quite easily, and act accordingly.
As a Brit the only convincing fake British accent I can remember in many years is James Marsters who played Spike in Buffy. I never once suspected he was American (in the pre-internet days).
Mid-Atlantic accents such as Loyd Grossman, are hard on the ears. "Soss", rather than "sauce" is particularly odd.
And then flip it - UK actors putting on US accents. Most of them sound to me like they're from the West Country such as Somerset, just rolling their Rs.
For US readers, the currently growing new London accent is awful and nothing like the 'Cockney' accent you might expect from watching older films. I've yet to see a US actor try that.
> For US readers, the currently growing new London accent is awful and nothing like the 'Cockney' accent you might expect from watching older films. I've yet to see a US actor try that.
Multicultural London English. It's not "awful", although you are entitled to your views. Personally, I think it's great for comedy, have you heard Big Shaq's Man's Not Hot ?
Wyoming cowboy is pretty easy -- not much of a strong accent there. More challenging would be a strong Boston accent, or somewhere from the deep south.
Disclosure: British person living close to Wyoming, in Montana, so I have a fake US accent.
English people are terrible at weak and standard American accents; they sound like they're head-injured, and put 'r's at the end of works that end with 'a's. The funniest examples are French & Saunders' bad American accents (but at least they're aware that they're terrible at it.)
English people vastly prefer trying to do a sterotypical New Yawk accent because they can hide their mistakes in the extremity.
Afaict, Scots are the best at doing an American accent, followed by the Irish, followed by the Australians and the Welsh, then you get to English people.
I know a number of people who moved from across the pond that actually do American phonemes fairly well. What gives them away are minor inflections and sentence cadences that sound a little off. Hard to describe, but it makes them sound like the are trying to speak to everything “as a matter of fact” and towards the very front of their mouth. For an example, listen to Freddie Highmore in season 1 of Bates Motel.
>But Gen Z has embraced bad imitations of Cockney slang or a Yorkshire dialect, using obviously fake, theatrical voices to make light of low-grade daily dramas.
I think Americans are just parroting pop culture from GB, and doing their best to sound, I dunno: posh or proper or whatever. It would be like someone in Kent trying to sound like a Wyoming cowboy. As the kids say: cringe.