On Tue, 28 Jun 2005 19:23:11 -0000, Grant Edwards <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> tapped the keyboard and brought forth:
>On 2005-06-28, muldoon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >> Americans consider having a "British accent" a sign of sophistication >> and high intelligence. > >That depends on the accent. I believe that's probably true for >the educated south of England, BBC, received pronunciation. I >don't think that's true for some of the other dialects from >northern areas (e.g. Liverpool) or the "cockney" accent. > >> Many companies hire salespersons from Britain to represent >> their products,etc. Question: When the British hear an >> "American accent," does it sound unsophisticated and dumb? > >I too have always wondered about this. Since you've acknowledged that it's only the RP accent which gets that respect in the US (and since I speak it, I rather enjoy my visits across the pond) and others are either cute or obvious hicks, it shouldn't be a surprise that the same applies to the wide range of accents used by Americans. The strong Appalachian accent of the guide who took us round some caves in WV last year was the epitome of unsophistication - although what he said was extremely informative and delved into some advanced science. My wife's an Okie, but she speaks the US equivalent of RP - the one used by newsreaders on the main terrestrial TV networks and which is commonly thought to be used mostly in Ohio and other places just south of the Great Lakes. If there's such a thing as a standard "American accent", that's it. It neither sounds dumb nor clever - just American. Some of those sonorous slow talkers from the South, and majestic bass African-Americans like James Earl Jones or Morgan Freeman, have far more gravitas than any English accent can: to us, such people sound monumental. But most of the obviously regional accents in the US sound cute or picturesque, while the ones Americans tend to regard as hick accents just sound comical. The problem which a lot of fairly-midstream American accent users face is that it's the same sort of thing which Brits try and imitate when they want to suggest a snake-oil salesman. At bottom, an American accent doesn't mark someone out to a Brit as dumb or unsophisticated, but the immediate suspicion generated is that they're a phony and likely to be saying stuff without much regard for its accuracy. Cheers, Mike -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
