There has been a question in my mind for a while that I want to ask now plus one that I thought of yesterday.
1. In film reviews, I've heard they say, that a character might have a British accent, in an American movie, to sound classy or knowledgeable or sth. Is it really so? Do Americans, I mean, have such an attitude in real life?(Is my use of 'I mean' in commas correct?:-))
2. I've also heard that the British are so biased about their accent, so far as to not accept American as one. So, those who have British spouse, etc, haven't they ever been despised, not necessarily by their spouse, or...?(Especially that people from different counties in the same country usually do have such reactions.)
(I would always appreciate being told of my mistakes in sentence making, word usage especially, etc.) Â
I used to date an English woman, and she never gave me any kind of hard time about my American accent.
The thing that bothers me most is when people in one country assume that everyone in the other has the same accent. An acquaintance of mine had a list of 85 different American accents and could define the distinctive characteristics of each; I'm told there are more than that in the UK.
Even people in the same country can underestimate the amount of variation. Stan Freberg, in his autobiography, tells about a time he asked Daws Butler for a "southern" accent for some character, and Butler asked him which kind of southern accent he wanted. Freberg said the character was from North Carolina, whereupon Butler rattled off samples of about half a dozen different ones and asked him to pick one.
Here is a map with lots of discussion and links, giving details of American dialects.
Emmett
To question 1- Except for the artist Madonna, who does many other peculiar things anyway, I cannot name a single American who purposefully adopt an English accent. Where they use English accent in movies, I am sure it's because the story requires it for that character, not because they want to project some 'class' with it.
Heya there,
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Replying as a British person, here there is generally the attitude that if a British actor is cast with an English accent in America they'll be playing a bad guy. It's a bit of a running joke. Of course there are exceptions but, especially in the action genre, that is the perception.
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For the second, a large amount of the TV and nearly all the films we watch here are American (for myself it probably accounts for 80-90% of what I watch) so there's not a huge negativity about American accents. However there are some derogatory associations with America (the stereotypes of large food portions, extreme dumbing down and lack of wit and sarcasm) which the accent is the first clue of and so it can draw that mocking in comedy. I've never seen a serious derogatory comment about the accent(s). For people born in the UK after the 70s general American accents are probably more familiar and 'normal' to them than the more pronounced regional British accents.