LL-L 'Names' 2006.12.30 (012) [E]

[Sandy Fleming]

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> From: Paul Finlow-Bates <wolf_thunder51 at yahoo.co.uk>
> Subject: LL-L 'Names' 2006.12.29 (02) [E/German]
> 
> Yes, the position in the UK is certainly to promote regional accents.
> On the BBC, many TV presenters have quite strong regional speech - 

Still one of my favourite exchanges from the BBC in the past couple of
years:

Rose Tyler: If you're an alien, how come you have a northern accent?
The Doctor: Lots of planets have a north!

In the past I think the norm would have been to get an actor with a
strong accent to neutralise it a bit unless they were playing some
decidedly provincial part.

> Popular culture helps; it often amuses me when a member of a Girl- or
> Boy-band (who all sing in pseudo-American) speaks in for example a
> Scouse or Geordie accent that probably needs subtitles for any non-UK
> English speakers.

We Scots were very disappointed in Lulu taking on a strong English
accent. This was long, long ago, of course - the early 1960's, when
viewers would actually complain about not being able to understand
regional accents and everybody going on TV with a strong accent would
give a lot of thought to how they could change it.

Around the same time the Beatles were insisting on sticking to their
Liverpool accents, even when singing, and a certain aspiring prime
minister shot himself in the foot when the group were to be awarded MBEs
by the queen:

TV Interviewer: Ted Heath says you won't be able to speak like that at
the palace, John.
John Lennon: We're not voting for Ted Heath.

> That said, I recently had a book out of the local library called
> "Using German".  I don't have it at the moment so I can't tell you the
> author.  But in one section it details the differences in High German
> throughout the country, broadly dividing into North, central and
> South.  I was quite surprised at how marked some were - even different
> genders for some words.  The book also discusses major differences
> between "correct" German (such as I am learning), and typical
> day-to-day speech.

I'd be circumspect with those sort of books, Paul. I used various such
books as my French was getting more advanced, but nothing any of them
said seemed to hold any water, not even in Paris. I think that for a
non-native, the path to becoming 'typical' in a language is to learn the
straightforward stuff at home, anything fancy really has to be picked up
'in the field'. There's a huge danger of just sounding daft to everybody
- like someone from Germany with an underdeveloped English accent
arriving in London and trying to speak like Eastenders. Everybody would
_much_ rather a foreigner speak a fairly standard form of the language,
at least until he's lived long enough somewhere to sound like he's from
there!

Sandy
http://scotstext.org/

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