I have heard so many Brits saying they do not like American accents lately. First, I heard that Paul McCartney didn’t want his crazy ex-wife raising their daughter in America because he didn’t want his daughter speaking with an American accent. At the time I thought that maybe McCartney was as crazy as the gold digger he married. He doesn’t seem worried about this insane woman raising his daughter, he just doesn’t want her speaking like an American. It seems the priorities are a little out of whack there.
Then a couple of nights ago I heard some British actor on Leno saying that he liked working in America because of the money and opportunity but he hated hearing himself on television because he’s sounding like an American. He said something to the effect that he’s anxious to get back to England so he could get his own accent back and not feel like a traitor for leaving their to come here to make money.
Again I thought the dude might be a little crazy. I wondered why he didn’t just go on back to Britain and make his money there. Oh. Wait. That’s why he’s here. To make money off us. We are good enough for giving him tons of money but not good enough for him to have to live among us. They certainly don’t want to BE like us or SOUNDING like us!
What is an American accent anyway? When I go to different parts of the country I hear a lot of different accents. As a Southerner I know that there are a lot of different Southern accents. Many people think we all sound the same, but I can tell a difference between a Georgia, Tennessean, Carolinian, Alabamian, etc. accent. They are very different. When I lived in Michigan there were a couple of distinct accents I noticed there. The people in Ann Arbor spoke very differently than the people in Lansing. In my experience, that is true throughout the country.
For that matter, the same thing is true in England as well. I’ve noticed different accents from the English. For instance, the royal family speak differently than the every day people of England. The English speak differently than the Scottish or the Welsh.
I was more than a little insulted on hearing all these comments about American accents being dull. So naturally I thought about that when I was reading an article earlier about Prince Charles and his wife Camilla traveling in the Caribbean. I started wondering if I moved to Britain would I be required to take on that snooty facial expression they seem to have permanently chiseled onto their faces? Do they practice that or is it something they are born with?
They are pictured here visiting the Bob Marley Reggae Museum. I thought, ‘Who’s dull?’. Look at their faces in the picture above and tell me WHO ARE THE DULL ONES! Pluuuueeezzzeeee. Even Bob Marley’s widow, Rita Marley, looks like she’s bored out of her mind.
These two look like the life of the party. :rolleyes:
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Trackposted to Outside the Beltway, Debbie Lee on A NEWT ONE!, Rosemary’s Thoughts, A NEWT ONE-LIVE COVERAGE FROM EAGLE’S MUSTER, Right Truth, Big Dog’s Weblog, Cao’s Blog, Leaning Straight Up, Conservative Cat, Adeline and Hazel, Chuck’s Place, Faultline USA, Allie is Wired, Nuke Gingrich, DragonLady’s World, The World According to Carl, Pirate’s Cove, Celebrity Smack, The Pink Flamingo, , Dumb Ox Daily News, Tilting At Windmill Farms, Stageleft, Right Voices, and The Yankee Sailor, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.
March 12th, 2008 at 8:03 pm
Well, let me just say this as an American who lived in England for 5 years. England is the speech impediment capital of the world. For instance, take the island Ibiza. How do they pronounce it? Ibeetha. Excuse me? How do you get a th sound from a z (which they call zed)?
Now, that said, the normal English, which I consider the ones who do not live in London and are not a Royal or otherwise famous, are more like the ordinary folks here in the U.S. The Welsh are great. Absolutely wonderfully nice people in Wales, who, I might add, never gave up their native language. They all speak English, but they all speak Welsh too.
March 12th, 2008 at 11:39 pm
Pfft! They can bite the hind end off a skunk for lunch!
March 13th, 2008 at 12:03 am
I heard that!!! They don’t even talk right as far as I’m concerned. I bet they don’t even know what the hind end of a skunk for lunch is! pfff.
March 13th, 2008 at 3:20 am
Come, come dear. You must remember Heidi. What a troublemaker was she! (
)
March 13th, 2008 at 3:23 am
Is Europe awakening to al Qaida threat?…
Word has it that al Qaida has its grimy eyes set on Europe as a target for its terrorist activities. This may be just speculation, or it may be real. Would you like to be the one in charge that has to make decision? What would you do? ……
March 16th, 2008 at 5:44 pm
It’s absurd to make a generalization like “The British don’t like American accents” from two rather ambiguous examples.
First of all, I highly doubt Paul McCartney has a problem with American accents. He was married to an American, Linda Eastman, clearly the love of his life, for almost 30 years until her death in ‘98. There are all sorts of reasons why he wouldn’t want his child to have an American accent: she IS English, after all, and he might want her to speak like he and the rest of his family do. It’s a reasonable wish. He might want her to be proud of her English heritage, just as you might not want your children speaking in an accent OTHER than your own.
As for the nameless actor: let’s be honest. If you moved to England, Scotland or Australia and started to pick up the local accent, thereby partially losing your American one, wouldn’t you be a little bit sad about that? Again, I doubt he ‘hates’ American accents; he probably is justly proud of his own heritage and anxious to regain the most obvious mark thereof.
I don’t know how you extrapolate ‘Brits think American accents are dull’ from these two comments.
@Dragonlady: The English are not the only ones to pronounce Ibiza ‘Ibeetha.’ In Castilian Spanish (Spain’s Spanish), the letters ‘c’ and ‘z’ are pronounced in many cases with a soft ‘th’ sound (rather than the ’s’ sound of most Mexican and Latin/South American Spanish). Thus, ‘quince’ (five) would be pronounced ‘keen-say’ in, say, Mexico but ‘keen-thay’ in Spain. That’s why Ibiza is pronounced ‘Ibeetha.’ In most other languages, though the letters look like ours, the sounds can be completely different.
March 24th, 2008 at 9:46 am
An educated answer, Pinki :]
And to beth’s remark of how we (English people) don’t even speak proper…
WTF?!? We gave you the damn language and I agree with a quote from a very comical book:
“Then they took our language and started messing with it and look where that’s got them.”
And in relation to the article, yes, many English do not like American accents. Most make me want to slam my head into a wall. Though some are more widely accepted than others. The Boston accent, for example.
And, no, not everyone was born with that sucked-on-a-lemon face that Prince Charles and his hag bride Camilla are so fond of. No one in England even like them, many blame them for the Diana fiasco.
/rant but please get your facts straight before you jump into something and shove your foot in it. That’s what collectively gives America a bad name (jk, but I went there :])
March 24th, 2008 at 10:35 am
Jenny,
I’m sorry, but I didn’t understand a word you just wrote … can you speak more clearly??? (just kidding!! lol)
Boston????!!!??? You like Boston accents better than others??? OMG. This whole situation is worse than I thought. How can that be??
I was born, raised and have spent most of my life in the American South. We were taught in school that our accents were actually closer to the proper English accent than others in our country. I suspected they might just be telling us that since the rest of the country likes to feel superior to us and to make us feel better about it all. However, I have since thought that it does make sense - the English, Scottish and Irish came down here and the Germans stayed up North (more or less) - so maybe we do speak more properly. That’s a stretch isn’t it?? lol
BTW - you might have given us the language - but we perfected it! (ewg).
April 9th, 2008 at 4:03 am
Well hell-ooooh dahlings, would anyone care for a cup of tea?
April 22nd, 2008 at 6:51 pm
As a Londoner I would like to say that this article, and every comment I have read, is ludicrous. Firstly, we pronounce Ibiza “Ibeetha” because that is how it is pronounced in Spain.
“Excuse me? How do you get a th sound from a z ”
This I am not sure about, you will have to ask the nation of Spain, you ignorant bint.
The author of this article makes a valiant attempt at trying not to sound biased and sour, before breaking and writing this little gem- “Look at their faces in the picture above and tell me WHO ARE THE DULL ONES! Pluuuueeezzzeeee.”
Oh no. The future King and Queen of England don’t like reggae. I hope they’re not reading this, and hearing you judge them, because then they wouldn’t be able to reign for worrying.
“but I can tell a difference between a Georgia, Tennessean, Carolinian, Alabamian, etc. accent. They are very different.”
Congratulations. How is this relevant? I can tell ‘a’ difference between a vacuous moron and someone with something wothwhile to say. You are the former. Stop clogging up my broadband with your xenophobic idiocy, learn to write, and remove that pretentious latin absurdity from the top of this page. Boring, ill-written ‘blogs’ don’t get inspiring mottos.