there is no such thing as a British accent or pronounciation - discuss

Came here to say this

I remember in the museum of immigration in Melbourne they had this box where you could press buttons to hear different Australian accents. I genuinely couldn’t pick up on any notable consistent differences, so I’m gonna say Australia.

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Vatican City?

Actually I reckon it’s Tuvalu

Nah mate yeah but nah

It’s quite funny that it’s universally accepted that pirates had West Country accents.

Mainly because of an actor in a couple of films Arrr, Matey! The Origins of the Pirate Accent | Dialect Blog.

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yeah so when someone asks you to “do” a british accent, hypothetically, would you just speak normally, do an accent, or ask which one they mean?

I would just speak normally.

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I’d do a cockney

Full on radio four but using my normal vocabulary to freak them out a bit

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Eventually as the internet gets more popular people will speak less and there will be no more accents

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I don’t have a British accent. Just a welsh one. And mild at that.

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There’s a 3 part series on YT around a tour of America, exploring the differences in dialect and accents. Pt1 linked below

Is really good imo, goes into depth around different native and non native dialects too

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Oh not sure I’ve seen that series! I love all the other videos I’ve seen with that guy, Like his one on fictional languages/accents. So cheers for this

This is worth a watch

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There’s obviously not ONE British/English accent, but when we foreigners talk about «a British accent» it is to differentiate it from American accents etc.

Although of course some people will always think there is a «standard» that sounds something like a generic south-east accent I guess. Think most countries/languages get that though, that the accent or dialect spoken in/around the capital city is what is taken as the standard.

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I once got in an argument on the old boards with some guy who was in a huff because according to him, Norwegian singer Ida Maria didn’t sing in her «native accent» (!!!) in English, and he thought that would be much better than «trying to sound American». So many things wrong with that, and the fact that I, as a real life Norwegian, said that she definitely did sing with a Norwegian accent, did not have him convinced.

To your point though, as per my previous post, there is of course not ONE Scandi accent or ONE Norwegian accent when speaking English, but there are many different accents that will easily pass/come across as a Scandi etc accent.

To the rest of the world i reckon we all sound the same though. Remember chatting to some americans in a bar and in the US they loved my Hugh Grant english accent…i’ve lived in birmingham or manchester my whole life and do not sound like that at all :smiley: I did try explaining that bab was not a term ol’Hughie would use but i think i lost them at that point

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Sorry to break it to you but to anyone from outside the UK you definitely have a British accent.

Well as long as we’re saying A British accent instead of THE British accent that’s kind of what we’re doing??

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I think when speaking a foreign language there’s probably things that all speakers of another language will get wrong in the same way because they haven’t learned how to make certain sounds. That leads to an idea of a universal accent for speakers of that language even if they sound very different to each other in their own language

For example, English speakers have a lot of regional accents but none of them use the sound represented by the letter Γ in greek (afaik), so if they try to speak greek they’ll all pronounce it as G instead, regardless of which english speaking region they’re from. And I guess we think of the stereotypical french speaker as pronouncing “this” as “zis” because they must lack the th sound, wherever they’re from, same for germans pronouncing W as V maybe

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