accents innit

[????]

...yanks can't do Geordie

[katie1997]

I can't do English (so I'm told) :))

[mcdoto]

The vast majority of yanks can't do much other than yank. Steve Jones will be next boyo unless Catherine Zeta sorts him out with her voice coach. A very strange insular country for the most part (USA not Wales)

And of course the heart bleeds for Cheryl ............

[Laddy Muck]

Don't even try Lady Katharina - your accent is gorgeous (very sing-songy).

Awright me old china plate?

[Otta]

My favourite crap accent is the northern bloke in the film Green Street, trying to be the leader of West Ham's firm.

[Brendan]

DiCaprio in that Diamond thing, ?Ma brew!?

[mockney piers]

Ha ha, so true Otta, that makes an otherwise terrible film into a masterpiece, watching him struggle with that accent throughout has a sort of car-crash mesmerism about it.

He's actually a geordie too but he's lived in the states for so long that his natural accent is this weird garbled mish-mash that you can't even call mid-atlantic.

In fact if anyone says 'mid-atlantic' I always hear Lloyd Grossman in pre 'cooking doesnt get tougher than this' masterchef mode.

[Dullyy]

That?s a good one, had totally forgot about it. :) Totally one of my favourite crap-accents as well.

[Jah Lush]

I'm not surprised. It was never gonna last, not that I care. Talking of crap accents Brad Pitt in Snatch. I don't think I understood a word he said in the whole film.

[Dee Woffaz]

Are you saying that Dick Van-Dyke?s English accent as Bert in Mary Poppins didn?t have you fooled? Now he was a proper cheeky cockney chappy! :))

[mockney piers]

There's some voice coach here who does hollywood stars to do English Accents, and she seems to have gone for a slightly clipped nasal English which really winds me up.

See Sliding Doors, Bridget Jones films etc.

I'm pretty sure there have been good ones though, any nominations? Gillian Anderson is great, but then she spent her teenage years here, so maybe doesn't count.

[RosieH]

Actually, I was rather impressed with Gwynnie's pronunciation of 'tw@t' in Sliding Doors.

[mockney piers]

I'm not saying it's a bad accent, it just doesn't actually exist in reality, and it's a bit whiny and annoying.

Someone said the same thing of Hugh Grant's in House (minus the whiny bit, though he's actually a bloody whiny character thinking about it).

Nobody in the US speaks like that, but people are always surprised to find out he's English because it's plausible enough to come from somewhere else in the US.

[StraferJack]

cue several posters going "Hugh GRANT??"

[Brendan]

Hollywood stars aren?t taught an accent that actually sounds like an English person they are taught an accent which Americans will believe an English person should sound like.

Real English people are far less intelligible.

[Jah Lush]

Credit where it's due. Hugh Grant's impression of a plank of wood is spot on.

[Atticus]

Them lots up norf don't even knows ah to speak propa, norvern monkeys!

[Dee Woffaz]

I can see where you are coming from Atticus, but always wondered where there was an 'r' in bath & path etc.

[mockney piers]

Whoops, yeah yeah, Laurie.

[mockney piers]

The south adopted those long vowels in a specific bid to stop sounding like norvern mankees innit.

Same thing happened in Madrid with all that lisping. In fact my relatives in Almeria don't seem to pronounce any letters at all, making spoken communication something of an issue, well for me at any rate.

It happens everywhere. See also Mrs Mangle in Neighbours with her high falutin' tones.

[Brendan]

It?s called the trap-bath vowel split and is the subject of much disagreement in my household. According to wikipedia it, ??began in the 17th century but was stigmatised as a Cockneyism until well into the 19th century"

[Brendan]

One of my biggest disappointments with the North is that I never see any actual monkeys.

Well that and the fact that it is generally a similar experience to emptying your dustbin into the shower, getting in fully clothed and turning on the cold tap.

(I?m sure I stole that metaphor but I can?t remember where from)

[Otta]

Isn't the Spanish lisp something to do with the fact that King Philip had a lisp, so everyone started talking that way. Hence the fact that people in South America don't have the lisp...

Or is that just a load of bollocks?

[Otta]

Is the Northern Monkey thing born out of the Hartlepool Monkey Hanging legend? That story always made me laugh.

[Brendan]

It?s a load of bollocks apparently. Well at least that?s what Stephen Fry said on Have I Got an IQ.

And I don?t think he can be wrong about anything what with that accent.