I posted this over at the Session.org and thought I see what kind of response it gets here, if any.
Caveat = I’m not talking about cultural assimilation, people moving to another place and naturally taking on the local accent. I’m talking about posers and psychos.
“You run into this a lot, Americans sporting this quasi-brogue. I don’t think it’s anything but harmless/laughable/pathetic but a friend of mine just absolutely goes into palpitations when he encounters it. I’m more cynical I guess.
So what’s up with these cushla mahone farkers? Some of you I’m sure have phony accents, perhaps you can elucidate for the rest of us. Why are you doing that? Shame? Slumming? Posing? Blow to the head?
I heard about a certain Waterford musician sporting a Clare accent to get gigs. Really. Sort of the equivalent of those Vermonters whipping out the twang to sing George Jones songs. Also a local radio personality reportedly has devised a whole fantasy background, which has worked even with authentic Irish people.”
The Weekender never uses fake accents and has similar queasy feelings about those who do affect the brogue, whether Scots, Irish, Brit or whatever…except in humor.
That’s plain weird. I don’t run into it, but maybe I don’t hang with the Irish wannabes enough.
The only accent I can easily and authentically lapse into is the SW Virginian hillbilly of my forbears, but I try not to.
I remember the first time I noticed that I was. I was visiting a family of Italian Australians who lived in our street and suddenly I became aware that I was copying their accents. I was about 9 or 10 at the time, perhaps younger. I was really embarrassed; I was sure they must have noticed and thought I was taking the mickey. It transpired that they didn’t notice and I most certainly wasn’t taking the mickey.
I lived for 7 years in England and many Australians and English couldn’t pick me for Australian. They couldn’t pin me down clearly as English either; people tended to think I was from London but not from any part they new well. The funny thing was that New Zealanders and South Africans could pick me for Australian straight away and one Greek Australian heard me speaking in a taverna in Crete and narrowed me down (correctly) to the eastern suburbs of Melbourne. I used to be quite sharp with Brits who assumed falsely that I’d successfully eradicated my Australian accent; I had a middle class accent that didn’t fit their stereotype. Also, by this stage I’d lost any sense of how much my current accent was due to current mimicry and how much had been brought with me. This stuff isn’t affectation and maybe some of what you hear is similar.
Once I knew I could mimic I started doing it deliberately, but only as a party piece. When I lived in Oxford I could speak in three different Oxfordshire accents. But this ability was completely dependent on being able to hear the accents on a daily basis. About a year after I’d left England, I couldn’t do any Oxfordshire accents convincingly beyond the occasional sentence.
I put on a scottish accent when working renaissance faires (mostly because my irish accent sounds more like a scotsman that’s been kicked in the jimmies).
My scottish accent is pretty good when i keep it in practice. It goes all to hell when I don’t. So, usually when I’m working faires, I’ll keep on the accent nearly 24/7 until the faire is over. Drives my wife nuts.
I’m sure my tendency to that is less severe than yours, Wombat, but after a couple weeks in London, I do feel certain intonations creeping in. I think I’m fairly strongly affected by immersion in other speech patterns.
I tend to slip into a somewhat Kentucky hill accent the farther south I go from the Ohio River. It’s not anything purposeful - I grew up with a lot of people originally from the hills and just picked up some of the phrasing. After being in Bardstown last week, it took me a day or two to shorten my vowels back to normal.
I have no problem with people adapting an accent when telling a story or singing a particular song. It’s all part of “acting”. I probably would have a problem with someone intentionally affecting an accent 24/7 for no other purpose than to seem like they are from a certain area.
Some of this stuff is indeed due to heritage. Some aspects of ancestral locution get handed down thru the generations in some families, although I realise that this isn’t what you were addressing, Kevin. I happen to know a lovely young lady who studies Irish step dancing, is quite good at it, and let’s just say that from a mile away you’d never label her as possibly Irish. She came back from a trip across the pond with an accent. The cognitive dissonance almost made my head explode.
That’s exactly it, Em. I seem to throw myself into the situation and suddenly it’s just happening. People pick up vocabulary this way without trying. For others, it just goes a bit further. Let’s face it; learning to speak foreign languages involves consciously cultivating this very skill.
I think I’ve trained myself out of embarrassing lapses by now, I still have a keen ear for vocal nuances.
Same here. It’s almost a natural reflex. After a week in New Orleans a couple of locals were asking me what part of town I was from. Apparently I’d taken up some of the speech forms, just enough so that they couldn’t quite pin me down. Same thing in Kansas, and Boston. It’s a bit embarrassing. It’s one of the things that makes me dread going to Ireland.
I try to avoid “sounding” like someone I’m not. But I have found myself unconsciously copying people’s mannerisms and using phrases I find enchanting which are never used in my culture. I know how affected it must sound. Since coming to this forum I have found myself unable to resist using the words “laddie”, “at all”, and am struggling not to use the best of all---- “sort it”. I don’t think I can copy accents, it is more a matter of using language. I don’t think I am a poser or a psycho—well, maybe I’m a psycho. It’s just sort of accidental or a fondness for an apt and melodious word or phrase.
There’s a local musician here who affects a brogue whenever he’s talking to someone from Ireland. At first I thought he was just trying to be funny, but when I heard him address someone from Ireland in front of a large audience, speaking with the slight put-on brogue, I realized he was a “wannabe.” I find it sort of bizarre now.
I’m a native Texican, but have lived in West Ozarkia most of my life. I think what happens to the accents of people in my situation is that the differences cancel out, but the similarities become stronger.
I tend to drop trailing G’s, but not trailing R’s (Ware ya goin, Dawg?). I don’t, however, pronounce “Lorraine” like it’s the opposite of “High Rain”.
Reminds me of my favorite line by John Candy in that boat movie, I think it was “Out to Sea”: “I’m not a dumb Shwede, I’m a dumb Shcot!”
I just talk and I don’t really pick up accents but if I start mocking a British (for example) accent for a while I will start to actually be speaking that way. Once again I am a yank and I don’t care. I have a friend who picks up accents really quickly.
I know a lot of Irish guys who have been in England for over forty years and more.They all sound like they just stepped off the Boat.
On the other hand,I know a couple of English guys who have never crossed the Irish Sea but have these strange Hollywood/Irish accents that come out when they are talking to the Irish boys.
My own accent is instantly recogniseable as Dublin and I have given strict instructions that if I ever develop a local accent, I am to be executed on the spot.
Cynth,
It is about 06:00 in the Wombat cave as I write so on his behalf I send this..
take the mickey (out of someone) Vrb phrs. To tease, to ridicule. Also shortened to take the mick. An abbreviated form of the Cockney rhyming slang take the mickey bliss, meaning ‘take the piss’. E.g.“Stop taking the mickey out of Billy, he’s very sensitive and you’re upsetting him.” Cf. ‘take the Michael’ and ‘extract the Michael’. [1930s]
Micky is Micky Bliss. So it’s rhyming slang for ‘take the piss’ which in turn is non-rhyming slang for mock. Pretty obvious, eh? This stuff comes naturally to Cockneys and Aussies.
