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Americans, what is your obsession with South UK accents?

Other than Scotch and Irish accents, I'd say the vast vast majority of Americans would have no idea where a UK accent would be from.

Would we know it's from the UK? Likely, but we're just as likely to be thrown off by South African and New Zealand accents as well.
 
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smithrh said:
Other than Scotch and Irish accents, I'd say the vast vast majority of Americans would have no idea where a UK accent would be from.

Would we know it's from the UK? Likely, but we're just as likely to be thrown off by South African and New Zealand accents as well.
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Yup. Every country has its own accents and subaccents that the vast majority of people simply won't know about unless they live there. Here in the US, we basically only know what we mostly see on TV: Southern UK (sometimes with some Received Pronunciation thrown in for good measure), Scottish, and Irish. It's rare for someone here to know about geordie accents, or any of the other roughly 50,000 accents you have surrounding the various parts of London.

On the flip side, people in the UK probably aren't aware that there are at least three distinct kinds of southern and midwestern accents, the New England accents, The various New York/New Jersey accents, and however many accents they speak out on the west coast.

It's not crass ignorance, it's just mostly what you hear on TV. Just about every time I see a UKer on Youtube trying to imitate an American accent, it's either them doing deep south, or broadcast American (which is kinda our version of Received Pronunciation, I guess).

And you're right, both of us would probably be thrown by all the various South African accents, of which there are a bunch. I personally knew some people from SA, so I can pick up on it pretty easily (theees khahhn, and theees khaan't, hrrright) . But if I never met them, I would've figured it was another UK accent.
 
This provides hours of sonic fun -- an interactive Accents and Dialects of the UK page that allows you to click on an area of a map and hear examples of speakers from different regions of the UK.

An American interactive accents and dialects map resides on this page. Not nearly as high-techy as the UK version above, but it'll also tickle your ears with hours of sonic pleasure.

And then there's the guy (in the video below), who shows up in several YouTube videos, demonstrating how to speak using many different accents.

 
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localoid said:
This provides hours of sonic fun -- an interactive Accents and Dialects of the UK page that allows you to click on an area of a map and hear examples of speakers from different regions of the UK.
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Holy smokes - I was going to ask such a thing existed in my post, but I thought "naahh, no one would know of such a thing..."

Never underestimate MacRumors!
 
localoid said:
I love that UK page. It's slick. I wish there was a US version of it that worked as well as it does.
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I'm struggling a bit with the audio files, they're in WMA, I suppose that was the rage when the site was created.
 
localoid said:
WMA can be a pain. I'm using VLC as the handler for WMA and it seems to work well, but don't think VLC works under Mavericks.
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I have VLC set up, but somehow a copy of Flip (which I swear I deleted) is trying to pop up, and failing.
 
In my last position, I had daily conference calls with our vendors throughout the U.K. I found that after about a month (and about 30-40 hours worth of phone calls) I got really good at discerning the differences between the regions. I knew that it had truly 'clicked' when I was on the phone with a vendor in the London area, and I had asked my contact about their origins; it sounded like they were from further up north. He got really pissy with me and said something about getting teased by his London coworkers and that he surely didn't need to hear it from an American. I was't even sure if there was some sort of thing where southern UK people thought poorly of northern UK people, but maybe there is.
 
Renzatic said:
It's not crass ignorance, it's just mostly what you hear on TV. Just about every time I see a UKer on Youtube trying to imitate an American accent, it's either them doing deep south, or broadcast American (which is kinda our version of Received Pronunciation, I guess).
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I'm sorry, but many Americans have confused Australian accents with UK accents. That is a big spoonful of ignorance right there.

Basically, if Americans hear an accent, and it's not an American accent, then it must be a UK accent of some sort.
 
Abstract said:
I'm sorry, but many Americans have confused Australian accents with UK accents. That is a big spoonful of ignorance right there.

Basically, if Americans hear an accent, and it's not an American accent, then it must be a UK accent of some sort.
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Give people some benefit of the doubt. Most of us USians are only used to hearing the generic and way overplayed "G'DAY MAYTE RIPPAH AHV AHN AHHHVO TOO ROIGHT" Aussie accent, and not the far more subtle normal one that most of the Aussies I've met speak with (barring a couple of exceptions). When they hear the latter, they automatically assume it's some UK accent because, well, it's the safe default.
 
Jschultz said:
I was't even sure if there was some sort of thing where southern UK people thought poorly of northern UK people, but maybe there is.
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Yes it is similar to the US in that regard, except the other way around as here the North of England (note England not UK) is the desolate wasteland and the South (particularly the South East) is the prosperous and sophisticated region. There is also the Scotland/England divide where we are the same country but mock each other. Plus everyone dislikes the Welsh, and Northern Ireland is largely forgotten.
 
iStudentUK said:
Yes it is similar to the US in that regard, except the other way around as here the North of England (note England not UK) is the desolate wasteland and the South (particularly the South East) is the prosperous and sophisticated region. There is also the Scotland/England divide where we are the same country but mock each other. Plus everyone dislikes the Welsh, and Northern Ireland is largely forgotten.
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You have all the wasteland like cornwall etc... We have Manchester, Liverpool, Sheffield etc... and you lot only have one decent city, London - and that's a right dump. So no, it's not the other way around, it's the same.

And it's you southerners who do all that medieval rubbish with lizzy windsor :p
 
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So basically an excuse for a north vs south p*****g contest thread. As someone from the midlands, all of you need to get over it.
 
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