The Accent's The Thing...

[Jayne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/22/theater/...tml?ref=theater

Be sure to read the 6+ pages of suggesting poor and good performances of American accents. Even some interesting suggestions (not footnoted so the no way to verify) the origins of accents, Shakespearian accents, etc).

Yes, I know, American performers butcher British / Australian / New Zealand / Irish / other accents all the time. One merely has to pay attention around St Patritck's Day to hear all the butchered Irish accents. However, rarely is the criticism directed in the reverse direction. I will note that often American actors get the regional accents wrong. Debra Winger had some sort of unplaceable southern accent in "An Officer and a Gentleman" when she portrayed a home town girl in Washington State. I found it distracting to the performance, and wondered why she did not have a west coast accent???

your thoughts?

[dirac]

Hi, Jayne. Thanks for starting the topic. The subject has come up before, I think, so if you're interested in what others have said in the past try a search with "accents," but there's always room for more discussion! Regarding the NYT article, I would say an American hearing British actors "doing" Americans is going to be more sensitive to imperfections, and vice versa.

Also, what bothers some people won't necessarily disturb others. I tend to remember the vividness and immediacy of Winger's acting in An Officer and a Gentleman and not her accent, for example, but that's me.

Probably the people who suffer most from having to listen to bad accents are audience members born south of the Mason-Dixon line, who have to listen to the all purpose "Southern" accents so often deployed by actors on both sides of the Atlantic.

[sidwich]

Yes, I know, American performers butcher British / Australian / New Zealand / Irish / other accents all the time. One merely has to pay attention around St Patritck's Day to hear all the butchered Irish accents. However, rarely is the criticism directed in the reverse direction.

I think the exporting of American movies and television has a lot to do with that. For good or ill, much of world is now growing up watching as much American TV as they do homegrown.

Being stuck in a Peruvian hospital bed last year in relatively remote Peru, over the course of 48 hours I remember watching Kyle XY, CSI, CSI: Miami, Numbers, Glee, Bones and various movies, and those are the ones that I can remember (painkillers, ya know...). Most were still in English with Spanish subtitles. To tell the truth, it probably wasn't that different from being stuck in a hospital bed watching television in Los Angeles...

But anyway, with so many people watching American television, their ears are becoming attuned to the accent and inflections. People reproduce what they hear, so of course, someone who grows up watching "Friends" is going to be able to reproduce something that sounds like someone speaking on the show. It's the same reason why more and more people in the UK are speaking "BBC English." I expect that with the growing prevalence of BBC America and DVDs of popular British shows like Doctor Who, there will probably be at least a little improvement in the reproduction of the British accent.