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Relaxing in British (thelemmy.club)
submitted 1 month ago by to c/memes@lemmy.world
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[–] 2 points 1 month ago (3 children)

I speak a couple of languages with enough fluency to spot accents (including English, having lived in Britain for more than a decade) and in my experience even small countries have lots of distinct regional accents.

That which you describe is pretty much true everywhere with all languages - people from abroad who don't speak the language can't really spot accents unless they're at the fluency level of speaking that language and even those from countries were the same language is spoken can't really tell apart most of the accents in that different country beyond rough categories (so for the British Isles that would be "English" accent, "Scottish" accent and "Irish" accent).

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  • [–] 3 points 1 month ago* (2 children)

    That makes sense. However, as we're exposed to American media arguably as much as our own—and it's the same language—my contention is that I can easily hear extremely distinct differences between, say, Birmingham, Glasgow, Newcastle, Liverpool, and Cornwall, so just calling it a "British accent" and attaching connotations of pretension and upper class to it makes no sense in my mind. For example, does the character Daphne in Frasier sound the same to an American as James Bond? Does Harry Potter's accent sound the same as Tommy Shelby's? To me absolutely not, but perhaps it is because im more attuned through living here.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago

    Oh yeah - as I said, I lived in Britain for over a decade and I totally get how one can hear people who have no familiarity with Britain talking about the "British accent" and mentaly comment "you have no clue what's you're talking about".

    It's just because I actually like learning languages, can notice accents in various languages and have thought about it, that I came up with an intellectual explanation of why that would be and that's what I put forward (well, only part of the explanation, the whole thing would end up talking about Eskimo familiarity with ice and snow and how they have far more words for variants of it in their laguage than everybody else).

    I was thinking that somebody from an English speaking country has to be exceptionally ignorant to think there is a "British accent" - even I as a Portuguese and well before going to live in Britain recognized "Scottish" accents from "Irish" accents from "English" accents, if only because in films you generally hear actors make those 3 highly distinctive kinds of accent. If I remember it correctly I could even spot scouse and cockney accents as different, even though I had no idea were they came from, but I'm thinking that I myself as a Portuguese can't really tell any of the Brasilian accents apart and it all sounds like a "Brasilian" accent to me, so maybe there's more it it than that - I could long tell apart multiple accents from Britain in a language that's not my native one but can't tell apart Brasilian accents in my own native language, so mere "ignorance" doesn't seem a good explanation.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago

    As an American I've seen enough brits speak to notice different accents, but I couldn't tell you where any of them go on a map. And I kinda have to stop and think to notice that there are different accents there because all of them just register as "English/Welsh" or "Scottish".

    I have a similar experience with Canadian accents but I can usually tell Ontario apart. And I can kinda tell the difference between a kiwi and and aussie accent, but I gotta think about which it is and I definitely couldn't tell Western Australia from Sydney from Queensland

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