What is it with British accents?

[wooty]

If there was a "King of the North" I'm pretty sure it would be Peter Kay

Really? I'd still say it should be Sean Bean, the REAL warden of the North.

OT: Maybe its just easier to have actor speaking with their normal accents and focussing on acting, rather than having actors running around with piss poor imitations of accents. As much as I love Pacific Rim, Rob Kazinsky's "Australian" accent is still a little off putting.

I didn't have a problem with an American Claus Von Stauffenberg (Valkyrie), or a Kiwi Roman General (Gladiator). Let actors act, as long as the story gets across then they're doing their job.

 

[Xman490]

British, or at least certain English accents are seen as being upper class, so they get used.
...aliens just do talk like English people.

Britain was (and still largely is) the main centre of English-speaking classical theatre.
...the british accent has become a "standard dramatic voice".

Zinyak from Saints Row IV sums all that up. I guess he might even be a parody/satire of villains and classical literature/theater enthusiasts being English.

 

[Jamash]

If it enrages you so much, then you should watch The Musketeers, it's wonderful.

Nobody bothers to disguise their accent or attempt to mimic what passed for French during those times, so the British dialects are all over the place with non of the actors speaking in anything other than their normal voices.

Peter Capaldi as the Scottish Cardinal Richelieu taking (and almost going full on Malcolm Tucker) to Vinny Jones being Vinny Jones, but addressing each other by their French names was a particular highlight.

As funny as the eclectic mix of British dialects are in something that's supposed to be French, it's obvious why they do it. All the actors give a much better and more serious performance speaking in their own voices, rather than trying to affect a French accent and risk sounding like Inspector Clouseu or Office Crabtree from 'allo 'allo.

Personally, I find the anachronistic and eclectic range of British dialects in The Musketeer less off-putting and noticeable than the accents in the Peaky Blinders another BBC drama set in 1920's Birmingham which featured some questionable Brummie accents and Sam Neil trying to affect an Ulster accent which was all over the place.

Besides, it can't be any worse than Highlander in which you have a Frenchman proclaiming he's Scottish to a Scotsman who claims he's Egyptian. Would it have really been better if Christopher Lambert had tried to speak like Sean Connery who in turn tried to affect an Arabic/Middle Eastern accent?

On the other hand, maybe I'm biased to British dialects, as I'd still prefer to watch Star Wars with David Prowse voicing Darth Vader instead of James Earl Jones.

Spoiler

 

[JoJo]

For a start, there's no such thing as a British accent. The British isles are made of up England, Wales, Scotland and part of Ireland. Even at the very base, that's four different accents. In England, different towns have different accents. Stoke and Crewe have totally different accents and they're about 10 miles apart at most. The "British" accent is a cute fantasy created by the culturally ignorant.

Secondly, you've already answered your own gripes in the OP.

For someone being nitpicky you've made a glaring error of your own in this post, the British Isles consists not just of the United Kingdom but also the remaining part of Ireland and other nearby islands like the Isle of Man.

But anyhow, it could still be argued that there is such thing as a British accent, as a wider category containing all of the accents natively found in these isles. Think of it how we British might talk about a US citizen speaking in an 'American accent', while a US native might describe that same person as speaking specifically in a 'New York accent'. The OP simply means the actors are speaking in an accent from Britain, not that all British people speak with that exact same accent.

By 'the remaining part of Ireland', do you mean the Republic of Ireland? Because the republic is politically independant of Britain, and I've never heard anyone from the south regard themselves as being British in any way. Geographically, that may be true, but in the context of accents, I don't see why you'd regard a Cork or Dublin accent as being British the way you would with a Yorkshire or London accent.

Yes, I do mean the Republic of Ireland. The British Isles is a purely geographical term for the archipelago in North West Europe, it isn't intended to imply that all the people living on it are British. I was correcting Strumpets on using the term to mean solely the UK, I didn't say that accents in Ireland were British accents.

 

[Reiper]

The answer to your question is very simple. British English and British pronunciation is considered to be the purest form of English language, and American English and all the other variations and dialects are its degenerative cousins. So, since we can't recreate the tongue those ancient people spoke, we look to the thing closest to it on the lingustic timeline, and it just happens to be BE.

To put it another way, BE is the oldest form of English compared to all its other contemporary forms, and thus the most logical candidate for an Olden Tongue Substitute.

I don't know about purest, since Americans and Canadians actually pronounce our "R's" (as in HaRd, not Hahd), which is apparently what British English used to be like before it became non-rhotic for some reason. Also the spelling of many of words in American English is "purer" (IE the "honor" spelling I believe is older than "honour"

So really, we carry on the mantle of the purest English!

 

[Albino Boo]

I don't know about purest, since Americans and Canadians actually pronounce our "R's" (as in HaRd, not Hahd), which is apparently what British English used to be like before it became non-rhotic for some reason. Also the spelling of many of words in American English is "purer" (IE the "honor" spelling I believe is older than "honour"

So really, we carry on the mantle of the purest English!

There is no such thing as single British accent or usage. The accents change every 50 miles or so and in the most extreme cases even areas of the same city have different accents. The Canadian pronunciation of scout, house and about have come from Scottish dialects, which has little influence on the RP accent. American accents have their roots in the Norfolk and Somerset accents, which again is not the root of the RP accent.

 

[Rellik San]

I'd say it's more to do with a combination of annunciation and easily identifiable class association.

Let me put it this way if you hire Italian actors to play Romans, sure it sounds authentic, but most audiences... and I don't want to generalise here... but specifically American, audiences would find it difficult to understand, not because of some level of stupidity or anything of the sort, but because of how rarely most of you are exposed to continental European accents. Comparatively the (BBC) British accent is much more universal and easy to understand, It's effectively what you'd call a radio voice or unaccented, it's associative with Europe, has a high classical sound and is good for conveying such classic languages.

As for easily identifiable class association; See Game of Thrones, LotR and the Hobbit, Dawn of War games and other such examples, notice how those from the "poorer" or more "brutal" lands have a strong yorkshire/scots accent ("ay' up lad, better dress proper, Winter is Coming.") It gives a sense of a hard working and hardy peoples. Compared to the same accent from say the richer lands how they enunciate properly which gives them a sense of class, they are spoiled, cultured and consider many things uncouth or below them ("Oh now, is that really appropriate dress? You should prepare yourself properly for Winter is Coming.")

As for why American/Australian/Canadian/Other dialects don't work, well, other than a Chicago mobster, a working class New Yorker and Movie Bob, many international audiences, couldn't tell you audibly what class that accent is meant to represent, sure there are identifiers, but it doesn't seem to have the same universal understanding as the British accents. A prime example is Bill Murray; would you say his voice has an easily identifiable class feature?

 

[K12]

First of all I (and every other British person especially everyone from Britain who doesn't live in the suburban south) get really annoyed by the concept of a "British accent". Accents in Britain are extremely diverse and no particular accent is quintessentially British. At least use English to not annoy the Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish.

(as an aside I hate having this discussion with people face to face because my accent is exactly the kind of thing that people mean when they say "British accent")

The simple answer is because Americans have a tendency to see every conflict through the lens of the American revolutionary war. The bad guys in the establishment are uptight, prissy and have upper-middle class English Accents and the good guys are scrappy, down-to-earth simple living folks with American accents.

This is even true for something like Robin Hood when every character is English and from the same 100 mile radius.

 

[GonzoGamer]

Yes I think I posted this same rant here years ago after seeing Prince of Persia. If they were going to have bad fake accents why didn't they just go with fake persian accents than fake british accents?

 

[Augustine]

Her Majesty's "Empire where sun never set" must have its due, good sir.
This lends our tongue subtle associations with ideas of "imperial splendor" and "refined power". The Empire may not be, but its traces in the collective psyche will linger for generations.

 

[Saint of M]

British Accents sound refined, specifically English. I haven't heard enough of welsh to really tell the difference, and Irish and Scottish go back and forth between funny, baddass, and refined (see Jerald Butler and Sean Connery for details).


Case in point:

An American actor who is black will generaly fall into one of two roles: Scary Black Man or Funny Black Man. Slap a Brit accent and now he is refined as hell. See Underworld or the live action G.I.JOE film for details.

Other times its because they are good actors but can't hide their accent for the life of them, or do a bad job of it, which isn't limited to them (Kevin Costner in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Val Kilmer in The Ghost and the Darkness, Tom Cruise in Valkyrie; Nicolas Cage in Con Air, and I'm sure other tropers can think of others).

 

[Evonisia]

I'm guessing because American and British (in massive quotation marks for both) accents are considered blue collar and upper class respectively. Any other accent just sounds weird and makes the character seem off.

 

[IamLEAM1983]

It's all been said before, honestly. Received Pronounciation or the Buckingham Standard are both English dialects that tend to evoke high breeding or at least some sort of fairly posh education. The popular consensus on Romans as Pop Culture figures is that they're supposedly classy, so there you go.

Every mainstream dialect comes with its own set of preconceptions, but nothing's set in stone. For instance, nobody seems to mind how Clive Owen seems to speak Estuary, even if he tends to play guys with some amount of education. Stick an extremely thick Cockney on the character of a celebrated university professor, and there might be some dissonance for some viewers or listeners. Cockney is stuck with thugs or harbor-town lowlives. Consider how David Tennant didn't use his native accent during his turn as the Doctor, while you're at it. He has a rather solid Scots and while I wouldn't have minded a more dialectal take on the Doc, I'm sure a lot of fans *would* have.

Again, that's not set in stone. Consider Ecclestone's turn as the Doctor, too, or Peter Capaldi's, even if we haven't had the chance to hear much, as of now.

I'm from the south shore of Montreal. I speak French with Montreal's subset of the French-Canadian accent. Stereotypically, we're all fast-talkers and perennial busybodies, and my generation switches to "Frenglish" so often that a lot of the older types bemoan our habits as if we were Malcolm McDowell's Nadsat-speaking Droogs.

Move up north, and you'll hit the Saguenay region and Abitibi as a whole. "Frenglish" fades out, folkloric terms pop back into being, and the general speed of someone's delivery slows down. The associated stereotypes involve being excessively religious, uneducated and fairly bigoted.

None of that is permanent or unchangeable - or even true -, but people enjoy having these cues to consider, when they're watching movies or following a TV series. Speech cements a character's identity for the viewer. Since you can't ask your actors to speak Latin fluently, you default to what is the *current* evocation of high breeding and social status. That's Buckingham or Received. Fast-forward a couple decades and then maybe we'll end up with people speaking Estuary who pass for posh types.

 

[Spineyguy]

One of the reasons for this, I believe, is that it is much harder to write lines for an American accent that have real gravitas and impact. This is because the homogenised, nondescript pan-American accent that most Hollywood actors and actresses adopt is full of long vowel sounds and soft consonants, whereas the 'BBC' English accent, as it is known, is far better equipped in the way of sharp consonants and short vowel-sounds. This makes the English accent more phonetically suited to material rich in drama, nobility and threat. This is also why the English accent is so good for villains.

One need only look as far as Skyrim to see how strange a modern American accent sounds in a fantasy/medieval setting. Of course, in Skyrim, the horrible affected English accents sound just as out-of-place. Alternatively, listen to Sullivan Stapleton's accent in 300: Rise of an Empire. Obviously there's an element of expectation to it, where we as receivers have been driven into a position where we feel that an English accent is natural for Historical productions. That said, Gerard Butler's Scottish accent in 300 doesn't sound so odd.

I wouldn't be surprised to find that phonetics have a bigger part to play in this than nationality. There are certain ways of speaking that are more suited to particular kinds of roles. I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing, but it's certainly a thing worth studying.

 

[shootthebandit]

Being from the UK ive only met a few people with "british" accents. The UK is incredibly diverse in terms of accents and dialects and even languages to a lesser extent. Cornish, gaelic and welsh are some of the celtic languages which are still spoken (although completely useless)

There are hundreds of accents in the UK including various scottish, welsh and N.irish accents. Queens english is only one of those accents and its probably the most widely used in films. Other films like lock stock and snatch have cockney accents which use a lot of rhyming slang (e.g sky rocket = pocket)

 

[shootthebandit]

One of the reasons for this, I believe, is that it is much harder to write lines for an American accent that have real gravitas and impact. This is because the homogenised, nondescript pan-American accent that most Hollywood actors and actresses adopt is full of long vowel sounds and soft consonants, whereas the 'BBC' English accent, as it is known, is far better equipped in the way of sharp consonants and short vowel-sounds. This makes the English accent more phonetically suited to material rich in drama, nobility and threat. This is also why the English accent is so good for villains.

One need only look as far as Skyrim to see how strange a modern American accent sounds in a fantasy/medieval setting. Of course, in Skyrim, the horrible affected English accents sound just as out-of-place. Alternatively, listen to Sullivan Stapleton's accent in 300: Rise of an Empire. Obviously there's an element of expectation to it, where we as receivers have been driven into a position where we feel that an English accent is natural for Historical productions. That said, Gerard Butler's Scottish accent in 300 doesn't sound so odd.

I wouldn't be surprised to find that phonetics have a bigger part to play in this than nationality. There are certain ways of speaking that are more suited to particular kinds of roles. I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing, but it's certainly a thing worth studying.

This is a good point and probably explains why yorkshire and other northern accents are seen as comedic or oafish in the mainstream (e.g wallace and gromit etc)

Scottish accents tend to command a certain level of authourity (eg shrek)

The pan-american accent gives the impression of stupidity or unsubtlety. Wheres the british accent suggests a more intelligent subtle person. Kind of why american action movies tend to be big butch guys with tanks and flamethrowers whereas a british action movie tends to be more along the lines of espionage

 

[shootthebandit]

One of the reasons for this, I believe, is that it is much harder to write lines for an American accent that have real gravitas and impact. This is because the homogenised, nondescript pan-American accent that most Hollywood actors and actresses adopt is full of long vowel sounds and soft consonants, whereas the 'BBC' English accent, as it is known, is far better equipped in the way of sharp consonants and short vowel-sounds. This makes the English accent more phonetically suited to material rich in drama, nobility and threat. This is also why the English accent is so good for villains.

One need only look as far as Skyrim to see how strange a modern American accent sounds in a fantasy/medieval setting. Of course, in Skyrim, the horrible affected English accents sound just as out-of-place. Alternatively, listen to Sullivan Stapleton's accent in 300: Rise of an Empire. Obviously there's an element of expectation to it, where we as receivers have been driven into a position where we feel that an English accent is natural for Historical productions. That said, Gerard Butler's Scottish accent in 300 doesn't sound so odd.

I wouldn't be surprised to find that phonetics have a bigger part to play in this than nationality. There are certain ways of speaking that are more suited to particular kinds of roles. I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing, but it's certainly a thing worth studying.

This is a good point and probably explains why yorkshire and other northern accents are seen as comedic or oafish in the mainstream (e.g wallace and gromit etc)

Scottish accents tend to command a certain level of authourity (eg shrek)

The pan-american accent gives the impression of stupidity or unsubtlety. Wheres the british accent suggests a more intelligent subtle person. Kind of why american action movies tend to be big butch guys with tanks and flamethrowers whereas a british action movie tends to be more along the lines of espionage

 

[Mr. Eff_v1legacy]

My take on it is that it's simply an easy way for American filmmakers - who are making their films for a primarily American audience - to give it a foreign flare.
Consider that they can get American actors to fake an upper class accent, which is reasonably easy to do, or they could hire British actors, who are already fluent in English anyway.
The alternative is to have American actors fake other accents, which can have disastrous results, or hire actors from the language group, ethnicity, etc. in question, of which there would be undoubtedly fewer to choose from.

TL;DR it's an easy way to say "these people aren't like you."

 

[Jamash]

Besides, it can't be any worse than Highlander in which you have a Frenchman proclaiming he's Scottish to a Scotsman who claims he's Egyptian. Would it have really been better if Christopher Lambert had tried to speak like Sean Connery who in turn tried to affect an Arabic/Middle Eastern accent?[/spoiler]

but the line "I am Juan Sánchez Villalobos Ramírez, Chief metallurgist to King Charles V of Spain."...delivered by Sean Connery...in a broad Scots accent...is just...too awesome...

:->
...go on Sean...

...say "Juan Sánchez Villalobos Ramírez" again...

hehe

;P

i really like The Musketeers too. good stuff.
in the round i thought the whole series was very good.

Yes, that is too awesome to have a serious problem with, like his cameo at the end of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.

"I will not allow thish wedding to prosheed... unlesh... Lord Loxshley".

I suppose in a film with Kevin Costner, Christian Slater, and Mike McShane as the the main English leads without any attempt at not being American (and in Mike McShanes case, also a failed attempt at sounding British), then a Scottish King Richards is the least of your concerns.

Still, Brian Blessed Alan Rickman and Nick Brimble as Little John of Bristol helped redress the balance, and at least Morgan Freeman attempted to use cadence to speak in a more Middle Eastern manner for his character, even if he didn't try to disguise his accent or mimic another one (which could have been worse).

I suppose the more we think about it and the more we trawl our childhood memories or TV and film for examples, the more well remember examples of terribly misplaced and horribly hilarious accents in things we watched and accepted as normal when we were younger (I know when I first saw Highlander and Robin Hood Prince of Thieves, I just though they were awesome and didn't think anything was amiss).

I have to admit The Musketeers did grown on me. At first appearance, I dismissed it as some cheesy pretty boy shit that wouldn't be up to much, but then I gave it a go (mainly because of Peter Capaldi) and it grew on me, once I got over the initial shock of the accents and accepted it for what it was (a product of it's times, but not necessarily bad). It was certainly entertaining enough to keep me watching for 10 hours and still want more (although I'm happy to wait until the second series, I don't think I could handle any more of Constance and her accent for a while yet).

It's interesting how as English speakers, it's only really misplaced accents and dialects from within the English language that we'll pick up on and be critical of, but well give a free pass to actors affecting other accents from other languages which could sound terrible to native speakers of that language, like Arnie in Terminator, who to us sounds like a badass German killing machine, but to Austrians sounds like a dumb country bumpkin with the same kind of amusing accent as The Wurzles sound to us.

On a slight tangent, I see the terms "British accent" and "American accent" used a lot in this thread in a very general and almost meaningless manner, but have you ever heard a real "British-American" accent?


I have family Cornwall and Devon and have spent a lot of time there, so while it sounds like gibberish and full of the stereotypical Hillbilly twang, I can certainly recognise the West Country inflections and mannerisms in the speech and it almost sounds familiar, at least a lot more familiar that other, more normal "American accents".