fake dialects/accents

Joel S. Berson Berson at ATT.NET
Wed Jun 25 13:56:16 UTC 2008


At 6/25/2008 12:28 AM, Rebecca Shapiro wrote:
>An English friend tells me that there is an "award" there for Americans with
>the worst British accent named after Dick Van Dyke in "Mary Poppins". . .

I'd love to know how to find a list of winners!  Googling, all I find
quickly is a poll (actually, there seems to be more than one such
poll), for the best and worst American accents of British
actors:
http://www.radiotimes.com/content/features/us-accents-results/  (I
don't know whether these are all TV series, or some are movies.  But
PBS Mystery doesn't make either list.)

BTW, Hugh Laurie (House) is first on that best list and fourth on its
worst list.  Probably meaningless, if respondents were asked to name
only a single person, and simply shows that House is much watched and
draws strong feelings.  But it would be interesting to know what
percentage of the voters for him in each list were transplanted
Americans, who, one might presume, would know best.

Joel

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org



More information about the Ads-l mailing list