British Actors

Weirdly - and generally speaking - the Irish aren't great at doing English accents, and the English not great at doing Irish ...This is possibly because we both get quite worked up when it's done wrong. The Scots & Welsh though, usually get the estuary accent down to a tee...Sean Connery not permitting, who just clearly never bothered to do anything, even when playing roles that obviously called for it.

American is much easier for all Brits because it's a) something everyone has culturally grown up with, and b) there aren't as many specific dialects that get as scrutinised. General miscellaneous American will do fine. I've blagged it as an American in America and not got found out till I got really drunk by just saying I've moved around a bit (I've also done Irish in Ireland, and got clocked instantly, and then had to have a long, grovelling conversation where I had to reassure them I really, honestly, wasn't taking the piss)...Doing a specific New York or Boston accent will be much harder. But few really bother with it.


What sort of weirdo bowls around the US doing a yank accent? I purposefully retain my British accent because people think I'm dead clever and it gets the yank birds foaming at the gash.
 
For a laugh. I get drunk quite a lot.

Incidentally I did exaggerate my London accent when I lived in Leeds, possibly for similar reasons, or possibly to differentiate myself from all the people from Kent who pretended they were from London to seem cool & clever to northern girls.
 
Thankfully actors don't have to put on Northern Irish accents very often because as far as I can tell, everyone is piss poor at it.
 
I do a brillant Northen Irish accent.

I just say Nye instead of Now.

Haven't developed it any further than that yet.

I think only ruffians from Belfast say Nye but progress is progress. When I'm away at uni at least once a week someone tries to do my accent and every time without fail it just comes out as an angry leprochaun from County Cork.
 
I always thought this was brilliant...The taped audience didn't quite know what to do.



Silly comedy show of course, but to create such believable pathos in about 1.40 seconds, with virtually no coherent dialogue or greater context (apart from the punchline) and whilst your audience is in a happy, buoyant mood is a fantastic feat of acting. To be able to do that with no tools at your disposal bar a comedy wig and a stick on nose is genuinely wonderful acting.


Wow. Don't remember seeing that before. Strangely powerful stuff.
 
There's no such thing as a London accent.


Well actually, there is. In fact there are several. In keeping with most egregious accents though, they're working class in origin, and as such, I'm not surprised Brian has no clue of them (sorry again Brian, but you had an equestrian center in your school FFS!)

In fact modern East & South London accents are quite noticeably different a lot of the time, with much of South (and also North) evolving more from patois than the obviously recognisable (and much whiter) East End accent of yore (I just wanted to use the word Yore there) which is still heard in some areas...Once you hit the middle & upper classes of London, the accent fades into estuary England/Southern England + "isn't it cool to sound ghetto" amalgamations, but there are London accents, and many would be recognisable to many people in, and out of London as such.

Granted the mass of migration and moving around within the City has made a recognisable accent a la My Fair Lady far far less prominent, but the idea there is none is silly.
 
I would concur with that. There's no one London accent but there's a few very recognisable ones.

Well that was my point. There's several, not one all-encompassing London accent. Unless you're from the North in which case they're all 'cockney wankers'.
 
There's no such thing as a London accent.

What would you describe someone like Ray Winstone's accent as then?

Or are you referring to the fact that there's no cockneys left in London?

Apart from that there is a definite urban London accent that most young people speak nowadays. Different to anything else you hear in the rest of the country.
 
What would you describe someone like Ray Winstone's accent as then?

Or are you referring to the fact that there's no cockneys left in London?

Apart from that there is a definite urban London accent that most young people speak nowadays. Different to anything else you hear in the rest of the country.

see above.
 
I would concur with that. There's no one London accent but there's a few very recognisable ones.

I reckon a lot of the problem with "London accents", and particularly cockney, is that it's so recognisable, and in recent times fashionably chic, that it's adopted by the outer areas, and a lot of the time the London middle classes too (my accent for example, used to get cockneyer when I spoke to cockneys, or when I was a kid and was approached by muggers) that it's locality has become a bit muddled...Cockney is still a very recognisable and prominent London accent. Just as much as the London patois is, as it's taken facets of certain London accents with it. (for example, West Indian influenced patois accents in Nottingham or Leeds have noticeably different twangs than the South or North London ones do)

It's like saying there's no New York accent. If you spend some time in New York - one of the only cities with as much wealth disparity combined with immigration, foreign & domestic, as London - you'll meet loads of people with no specifically identifiably NY twang, but there are still also lots of them with it....Just not in School Equestrian centers.
 
Well that was my point. There's several, not one all-encompassing London accent. Unless you're from the North in which case they're all 'cockney wankers'.

But that's like saying there is no "American accent" when there clearly is. Someone who is from America has an American accent. Doesn't matter if there are many.

This is an extension of the whole, "there is no British accent" argument that I see popping up everywhere. The main reason people seem to give for this is that there are many, so you can't categorise one as "British". I agree with the initial statement but not for this reason. Instead I would argue that it's because the UK is comprised of multiple countries, and therefore saying someone has a British accent would be like saying someone has a European accent. It's technically true, but it's not very specific and can be quite insulting to certain people. Saying someone has an English accent (or Scottish, welsh, etc.) however is fine imo. Doesn't matter that there are many, it's still an English accent.
 
Every country in the World, bar probably the Principality of Sealand, has differing accents depending on their inner geography. Some are more obvious that others though.
 
Why so nervous?

Waiting for comment from our friends across the water.

Maybe they didn't notice....

Don't mention the war kind of thing. I think we got away with it...
 
James McAvoy is very good in most things I've seen him...in? Too many 'in's probably. I'm sure someone can clear that up for me.
 
Waiting for comment from our friends across the water.

Maybe they didn't notice....

Don't mention the war kind of thing. I think we got away with it...

Ah Liam Neeson's from Ballymena (just up the road from my mum's family), he's totally British.

Whether he likes it or not.
 
I think I'm with Grinner on this one

It's reasonable to class a multiplicity of accents into a group when they share particular features relative to other groups. This is the case with e.g. American accents, or English accents, which have very wide variety but also a set of common features, of which each accent will share most, though not all.

With London, I'm not sure this is the case. There are certainly features shared by, say, traditional Bow Bells Cockney and upper-class West London that exclude other English accents like Yorkshire. But I don't know if there are any that include those two but exclude, say, Oxfordshire. So I'm not sure London is the right geographic area to use.

Likewise, I don't think 'British accent' is a useful category, much used though it is by yanks. That is, I'm not sure the various North of Ireland accents, for instance, share more features with English accents than they do with American ones. (That's only as far as accent is concerned - regarding grammar there's certainly a broad British English dialect, which includes Australian and S. African English.)

I have a phonetics book from the 1920s that uses 'the London accent' specifically for something that is not Cockney (which the book hates) but is not RP either. I can't quite work out what accent it's talking about but I think it might be close to what we think of today as BBC.
 
big fan of Irish actors at the moment

Fassbender, Saoirse Ronan, Chris O'Dowd

when you throw in the amount of Australian actors working in Hollywood as well, its amazing to think how few Americans there are in big name roles recently!
 
Well actually, there is. In fact there are several. In keeping with most egregious accents though, they're working class in origin, and as such, I'm not surprised Brian has no clue of them (sorry again Brian, but you had an equestrian center in your school FFS!)

In fact modern East & South London accents are quite noticeably different a lot of the time, with much of South (and also North) evolving more from patois than the obviously recognisable (and much whiter) East End accent of yore (I just wanted to use the word Yore there) which is still heard in some areas...Once you hit the middle & upper classes of London, the accent fades into estuary England/Southern England + "isn't it cool to sound ghetto" amalgamations, but there are London accents, and many would be recognisable to many people in, and out of London as such.

Granted the mass of migration and moving around within the City has made a recognisable accent a la My Fair Lady far far less prominent, but the idea there is none is silly.

You have made my point, London has a multiplicity of different accents.
 
You have made my point, London has a multiplicity of different accents.

Yes, but so does Manchester. So does Leeds. So does Liverpool. So do most, if not all big cities. You don't say "there is no Mancunian accent"...cos there patently is. Ringo's scouse accent is different from Steven Gerrard's isn't it? However the disparity between them is harder to distinguish for those from outside of the area.....There was literally no point in saying "there is no London accent." if you were just trying to say there are several, because there are several in almost all places.
 
Ah Liam Neeson's from Ballymena (just up the road from my mum's family), he's totally British.

Whether he likes it or not.

Oh, apologies all round then. My mistake.

I always thought he was from the Republic. I'd have got that wrong in a pub quiz.
 
Ben Dover.

For Your Arse Only
Kick Ass Anal
Fancy an Indian

The mans a God.