American perceptions of British accents

[Aurora Rossa]

I must confess that I find it really hard to reliably distinguish various British accents from each other. Even distinguishing the Australian accent from them does not come easily to me. I still cannot decide whether that Geico gecko has an Australian or English accent, or even a South African or New Zealand accent for that matter.

[Melteor]

The Geico Gecko speaks with a faux mixed accent though. Also is lizard mascot, not one person.

[Dewrad]

I have a student who, throughout the whole of the last term, I thought was from South Africa. Turns out he's from Australia. Boy did I feel foolish.

(It didn't help that he's got a really Dutch-sounding surname.)

[Imralu]

I doubt most Americans would confuse Aussies for Brits, or New Zealanders if they can place the accent.

Every time I speak English with Americans and ask them to guess where I'm from, they guess England. I've had people flat out tell me I don't have an Australian accent which is always hilarious to me. I always find it funny when people try to inform me of something that I bloody well know to be bullshit because it's about me. I don't know how the fuck my accent could be anything other than Australian considering I've spent my entire life in Australia bar the last five months in Germany and one week in New Zealand a few years ago.

Anyway, I think it's because a lot of Americans are expecting some koind of Crocodoil Dundee business, which is only exacerbated by Australian characters on US TV shows often being played by Americans who suck at it and are only familiar Crocodile Dundee or the really broad end of the Australian accent spectrum. I have a typical city accent which can be heard in every Australian city (although people from Adelaide tend to sound a bit different ... but not reliably so). Here's an example of a girl's version of my accent. Actually, my accent's probably about half way towards this guy's accent (that guy's from my city, not that that really makes any difference in Australia) but it depends who I'm talking to. When I'm talking to non-Australians (ie. pretty much always now) it gets more like the first one.

[gmalivuk]

if they approximate RP with General American, that is to say a pan-British accent that only breaks into regional accents among ethnic minorities, dwellers in large cities, and hicks at the margins of Great Britain.

I really don't think that's how most Americans perceive our own variety of accents, though.

Educated Americans in this thread have already admitted that they never hear British accents in context, and its a well known fact that most of them are under the impression that there is such a thing as a 'British accent'. So I don't know why they should make the leap in logic that the British accent system is different to their own when they can barely tell the difference between English people and Australians.

While that may all be true, it has nothing to do with what I said, which was that Americans don't see General American as a pan-American accent that only breaks into regional accents among ethnic minorities, dwellers in large cities, and hicks at the margins of the United States.

[Melteor]

I doubt most Americans would confuse Aussies for Brits, or New Zealanders if they can place the accent.

(snip) Here's an example of a girl's version of my accent. Actually, my accent's probably about half way towards this guy's accent.

Well yeah. It doesn't help that most of your Aussie actors are so good at American accents that they don't have them over here and people don't realize they're even Australian.

I find the NZ accent pretty surprising and I've only just heard it recently, e.g. Lourd, Kimbra. I never heard it before Youtube.

Some of my countrymen also suck at guessing or hearing I guess. Though to back up a little, I'm still not sure i could pick out a South African accent from a British one, and I actually know an expat. More like, I bet there's a dialect in England that sounds almost identical to SAs'.

[KathTheDragon]

I once thought a pair of Americans were Scottish, the summer before last.

[Astraios]

South African is totally distinctive and different from Australian to me, mostly because I've watched enough nature documentaries set there and in Namibia to notice it.

[Rui]

South African is totally distinctive and different from Australian to me, mostly because I've watched enough nature documentaries set there and in Namibia to notice it.

I lived in South Africa for 6 months and I sometimes have trouble distinguishing @.@ But there are some ways to tell, most notably /ɪ/ > [ə] (or something very similar, maybe a bit higher than [ə], as well as the monophthonization of /aɪ/. It doesn't surprise me that many people, incl. myself, have trouble distinguishing though, I mean look at the vowel chart, many of the vowels match in Aus vs. SA, but are different for the others

[finlay]

I mix up SA and NZ more because of the ɪ→ə thing. SA tends to have more ɑː or even ɒː for their BATH vowel, compared to AU/NZ, and they tend to have more "clipped" or shorter vowels or a tapped r – although the other thing is that accents in SA apparently vary a lot based on what your native language is, so there are a few possibilities.

[Salmoneus]

and they tend to have more "clipped" or shorter vowels or a tapped r

That's what i'd consider the stereotypical difference between Australia and SA - that Australia has a reputation for a more drawled vowel pronunciation, whereas SA is meant to be more clipped, tight, precise.

Don't know whether that really is true in practice, though, or what the underlying realisation of that vague impression might be.

[Imralu]

Well yeah. It doesn't help that most of your Aussie actors are so good at American accents that they don't have them over here and people don't realize they're even Australian.

It's easy for us to do a passable American accent because we get so much exposure to it through media. I don't think my American accent is always terribly accurate but it's fooled Americans before. I doubt I could talk for long without giving it away though.

I find the NZ accent pretty surprising and I've only just heard it recently, e.g. Lourd, Kimbra. I never heard it before Youtube.

A mild NZ accent sounds very similar to a mild Australian accent. When I was in NZ, I stopped hearing it completely and couldn't even tell if someone was from Au or NZ (unliss they hed a really strong eccent).

Some of my countrymen also suck at guessing or hearing I guess. Though to back up a little, I'm still not sure i could pick out a South African accent from a British one, and I actually know an expat. More like, I bet there's a dialect in England that sounds almost identical to SAs'.

I think it's possibly because the South African you know has a rather British-like South African accent. I know one of those too. I would have guessed she's from England if I didn't know she was from SA before I met her. She sometimes says things like 'Howzit?' or contracts words a bit oddly, which gives it away. A strong SA accent is something that I can't imagine fitting anywhere in England.

South African is totally distinctive and different from Australian to me, mostly because I've watched enough nature documentaries set there and in Namibia to notice it.

Yeah. Here's an example of someone trying to do an Australian accent but failing terribly. It sounds like a mix of a Southern US accent and a South African accent to me and it gets more South African the more he continues. The thing he's really fucking up on is doing an unaspirated /t/ in time. We don't do that. We have as much aspiration as most dialects.

I mix up SA and NZ more because of the ɪ→ə thing.

I occasionally mix them up too. In South African accents with ɪ→ə, ɪ is generally retained before all velars whereas it's only retained before /ŋ/ in NZ. So South Africans generally say fəfth and sɪxth, whereas it's fəfth and səxth in NZ. The realisations of /aɪ/ and /ɑː/ in South African are something like [aː] and [ɑː] whereas in NZ it's [ɑe] and [ɐː]. SA accents also tend to have less aspiration of /p t k/ and also a flapped /r/ (which is allegedly present in some South Island NZ accents around Dunedin because of Scottish influence but I've never heard it - the only Scottish influence I've heard is that they say 'wee' for small). My brother had a teacher from South Africa once, and one time he told the class "Your assignments are due on the eighteenth of March" and the whole class erupted in hysterics. From the imitations I've heard from my brother and his friends it was [jʊɾ əˈsaːnmənts ə ˈdjʉu ɒn ði ˈeːˌtinθ əv ˈmɒːtʃ] ... and it was funny because we had a comedy series on TV at the time with this guy.

[Copperknickers]

There are definitely certain forms of accents that sound like other accents which confuse things a lot.

A native English speaking South African generally has a pretty English sounding accent, its only the Afrikaaners that have the really strong accents, which is fair enough seeing as they speak Afrikaans natively.

A very strong New Zealand accent can sound South African.

A posh Scottish accent can sound American.

[Zontas]

The Geico Gecko speaks with a faux mixed accent though. Also is lizard mascot, not one person.

Isn't he called Martin the Gecko? I wonder if his actor is British.

[gmalivuk]

Yes.

[ol bofosh]

There are definitely certain forms of accents that sound like other accents which confuse things a lot.

A native English speaking South African generally has a pretty English sounding accent, its only the Afrikaaners that have the really strong accents, which is fair enough seeing as they speak Afrikaans natively.

A very strong New Zealand accent can sound South African.

A posh Scottish accent can sound American.

I met a South African woman once whose accent was close to RP, but there was something there that was "not English". At first I thought she was a New Zealander.

[Imralu]

After I wrote my last post, I went out that night and met a friend of a friend of mine for the first time. He's American. After talking to him for half an hour, he said something like "For a Brit you're quite ..." (I don't remember what he said.) I just laughed and told him I'm not British. I refused to tell him where I was from because I wanted to hear all of his guesses. I heard a long list including just about all of Northern Europe. He said New Zealand and South Africa before he said Australia and he only got it because he put two and two together and realised I must be the "cool, gay Australian guy" he'd heard about ...

I'm glad that cool made it to my three-adjective summary.

[Rhetorica]

I met a South African woman once whose accent was close to RP, but there was something there that was "not English". At first I thought she was a New Zealander.

The trick to recognizing a South African accent is that while Australian chucks all of the vowels into a stew and mixes them around, and Kiwi adds a hint of lemon, Afrikaners just add a ton of salt. You would sound like that too if you ate Dutch candy growing up.

[clawgrip]

I've met a fair number of Australians in the past several years, and I would say that among them there were only two people who had accents that I could have mistaken as being British. I thought it was kind of amusing that one of those two was incapable of doing a plausible Crocodile Dundee kind of accent...I could have done a better one.

[Imralu]

I've met a fair number of Australians in the past several years, and I would say that among them there were only two people who had accents that I could have mistaken as being British. I thought it was kind of amusing that one of those two was incapable of doing a plausible Crocodile Dundee kind of accent...I could have done a better one.

Yeah, there are some Australians who sound quite British. Here's an exa:mple of that. (Fucking hate this guy!) I would still recognise his accent as Australian. There are stronger examples of this. I definitely don't sound like that. I flap my intervocalic, non-pretonic /t d/.

Does /t/ (or /t d/) flapping occur in (m)any British accents?

[finlay]

I think it does, although people think it's an Americanism and it co-exists with t-glottalisation, which is more common.

I do it myself, but then again I haven't been living in the UK for a while and it's possible that I've just been influenced by/accommodating towards Americans.

[Drydic]

Next stage of English's evolution: glottal taps.

[ObsequiousNewt]

Next stage of English's evolution:

THIS IS MY TRUE FORM

[Particles the Greek]

I met a South African woman once whose accent was close to RP, but there was something there that was "not English". At first I thought she was a New Zealander.

The trick to recognizing a South African accent is that while Australian chucks all of the vowels into a stew and mixes them around, and Kiwi adds a hint of lemon, Afrikaners just add a ton of salt. You would sound like that too if you ate Dutch candy growing up.

You're not a synaesthete by any chance, are you?

[Astraios]

Accents are food? Never heard of that type of synesthesia...