Roedy Green said:
That reminds me when we were kids we had a Scottish relative come for
a visit. She tried to explain to us we had a Canadian accent. We were
skeptical. We asked her to talk in a Canadian accent. She did. We all
burst out laughing -- you're just talking "normally" we claimed
triumphantly, surprised she could do it when she put her mind to it.
Hugh Laurie, the actor who plays House, the diagnostic puzzle TV Show,
is a Brit who affects an American accent for the role.
He's far from the only actor to do that! Just think about Meryl Streep, who
seems to be able to do just about any accent she wants, often without even
knowing the language whose accent she is imitating! For instance, in
Sophie's Choice (or one of the other Holocaust-themed films she did, I can't
recall for sure) she was speaking German. I asked a native German speaker
how good her German was and was told it was "absolutely perfect". Yet, as
far as I know, Streep never spoke German before doing that film.
Other examples like Hugh Laurie are Anthony LaPaglia, who did an
excellent-sounding British lower class accent in Frasier - is actually
Australian, as is his current costar Poppy Montgomery, while the black woman
who is their other costar (her name escapes me) is British, yet all three
sound entirely American in the show.
I love asking people about their accents which I find endlessly
fascinating. So often when I ask "What other languages do you speak
besides English" the answer is "none". Accents are not always caused
by learning some other language first.
Of course not! Unilingual people all have accents too. Basically, they sound
like the other people around them when they were growing up. More narrowly,
it's probably the predominant way of speaking they heard when they were
learning to speak themselves.
I was once introduced to a guy in his thirties who had recently emigrated to
Canada from England. I took a wild guess that he was from Liverpool; his
speech reminded me very much of the old Beatles cartoons. It turned out that
he'd lived all over England, never staying in one place for more than a year
or so. He had, however, lived in Liverpool for about a year when he was
three. He remarked that anyone who ever met him always assumed he was a
lifelong Liverpudlian; I'm not sure if that "everyone" included Brits and
Canadians or just Canadians.
It is fun to be able to place people right to the city or to tell a
person what countries they have lived in. One of the fun ones its to
tell a Chinese person whose second language is English the nationality
of his original English teacher. It seems like some sort of ESP. I
went nuts on my visit to England asking people about their accents.
All the regional accents are so distinctive. There it is no great
skill to tell exactly where someone is from.
Another interesting phenomenon is the double accent. For instance, I once
met a met who had grown up in Italy, as an Italian-speaker, then moved to
Australia and lived there for 20 or more years. His speech was a very
curious blend of English with large amounts of both Italian and Australian
influence. It's very hard to write this down or imagine it in your mind but
you might come close if you say something like "Whatsa-the-matta-fo-you,
mate?" (Forgive the stereotypes!)
Rhino
All but the last one are serious.