How to Fake a British Accent

Being hard of hearing, I missed some great British television before the advent of closed captioning. As Ms. Wollan says, the Brits don't open their mouths as widely and it's hard for an American to read their lips. I know quite a few people who aren't hard of hearing who use captions when they watch British programs. Do the Brits need captions to watch our programs?

I enjoyed this piece a lot, as it explains why British actors have less trouble adopting American accents than American actors have adopting British ones.

Big flaw with this plan. Say you do nail this Queen's English accent. You may encounter someone who is from Great Britain and/or has connections. Chances are, you are not going to convince that person you are the Earl of Scunthorpe.

http://thisbritishamericanlife.com/

Actually, it's the Brits who have the lazy tongues. Even with the rare Received Pronunciation accent (surely less than 10% of the population) "water" becomes "watta" and "mother" is "mutha". Brits only do Rs under protest. Some throw them in where they don't belong - "Oh, you're from Canader?" - just like a New Englander.

Hearing a Brit say "burgler" (buhglah" is amusing, but one calling out for another named Mark even more hilarious. "Mock! Mock!" The pronunciation of the short "a" is quite flexible. Posher people say "domp" for damp while lamp becomes "lahmp" but bank or tank is pronounced as Americans do.

For many years, the Circle line on the London Tube had a rather posh voice announce the stations. They changed it eventually as so many tourists were mystified to hear the next station was "Mawble Awch" (Marble Arch) with puzzled map consultations as a result.

But as Tony Blair famously said - "I ain't bovvahed"

And remember that "forehead" rhymes with "horrid". :-)

Ha, now there's a funny thing....
When I first moved to PA from London I used to listen to NPR in the morning, and this announcer would always say "and first snooze" and wondered why she was talking about sleep? Then I realized, she was saying "and first News". OMG... and I'm sorry, but I did laugh!
Also, instead of saying "it's futile" the words come out as "it's feudal"...seriously!

The main difference, to my mind, is that most Brits enunciate and most Americans don't. However, this writer seems to be describing an upper-class accent that most Brits don't have. I also wonder why anyone would want to fake any kind of accent. Isn't their own good enough?

QUESTION: WHY would anyone but ESPECIALLY a New Yorker want to "fake a British accent"? What could be more pretentious and utterly ridiculous than that? PS - we WON the Revolutionary War so let THEM fake OUR accent if they so choose.

Fun article -- except who would ever want to convert to a fake British accent except an actor or a truly pompous twit?

Well, at least Malia mentions "Received Pronunciation" in the body of the article, if not the headline-- most of the English do not practice received pronunciation, and even the BBC has a variety of accents these days, so it might have been better to have the headline, "How to fake a proper British Accent" (put quotes around proper, if you like). I would have had more confidence in this article had it been written by a linguist. The folks who coach actors often have little knowledge of the REAL regional accents they are supposedly teaching their charges (I read a wonderful article by a linguist-- in the New York Times, I believe-- on how the southern accent shown in most Hollywood movies has very little to do with how southerners actually speak nowadays). As for lazy tongues, it is the British accent that drops the "R", and Americans who tend to retain it (outside of Boston and New York, anyway).

The main differences between American English and British, generally speaking, are the following: depending on whether you'd like to sound "RP" - i.e. Southern British Received Pronunciation - then try to pronounce all the words that in US are pronounced with a "front a" (that is words like bath, path, pass, can't, mast, last, cast for instance) like bahth, pahth, pahss, cahn't, mahst, cahst with a "slightly rounded back a" closer to the US "o" in got, lot, mock; try not to pronounce the "r" in words like part, start, cart, work, pork, dart, first.
Regarding the "t" issue, British - even the best speakers - tend to use the glottal stop ever so often in lieu of the mute consonants "t", "p", "k"; that is "butter" sounds more like "bu'ah". Use the "schwa" (the unaccented vowel) sound generously and cram the consonants as freely as you can, drawling the vowels and exert less effort with your tongue.
If you wish to sound precise like the BBC RP the "t" tends to be closer to an "s" sound in “Ten tiny typists tripped through the tunnel”; the "a" in words like "cat" "mat" or "can" sounds less "open e" and more "low a".
All that is less pronounced if you wish to sound more "Northerner": Irish and Scottish appear to sound very close to American - that is the "r" is pronounced for example - and sound like "Northerners with a Southern drawl".

I used to to this accent with ease, and when I was a teenager, I'd near-perfected my Cockney. Long lost now, this article has me practicing in my store and will use it on all customers who don't know I'm from NYC.

Thank you for the great reminders and tips. If you do say "swan" as instructed, it sounds absolutely as it should -- the Queen's English. received pronunciation.

loverly.

Absolutely not! Under no circumstances should Americans learn to speak with a British accent.

It's the only thing that makes us Brits living over here sound interesting. If everyone could do it then we might have to think of something actually to say.

How to raise an eyebrow in Britain, fake a British accent. I know I am married to one ;-)

Some of the remarks don't make sense. British English is spoken faster than most American English dialects, for example.

My wife and I are bilingual (she with Russian & American English, I with American English & German), and we are constantly watching British detective shows on Netflix and Amazon streaming services. It's clear that British actors and actresses are much more adept at speaking like an American, than Americans are speaking with a credible British or Irish accent (remember Julia Roberts in "Michael Collins"?). The reason may be that American English has an easier, flatter pronunciation, given all the immigration that helped form it.

I don’t get it. Why would the writer want people to fake a British accent, especially one that appears to reproduce the clipped speech of the aristocracy? Nowadays, top people in Britain like Cameron go to some lengths to adopt ordinary people’s way of speaking. It’s a con game, of course, akin to wealthy American politicians faking biographies to sound like the common people.

As a former Brit, I can assure Americans that not all Brits sound alike. If they haven’t been “educated” to be embarrassed by regional accents, their speech reveals what region they are from and sometimes even what part of a particular city.

If the writer wants to coach Americans to speak English that’s a sheer pleasure to listen to, I would suggest using models from India and Ireland - Jawaharlal Nehru and George Bernard Shaw.

Ah yes, Britain, the land where they always exactingly pronounce every one of their consonants...

Is this a joke? Eliza Doolittle wasn't American. The average British person doesn't talk like David Cameron or Lady Mary from Downton Abbey, any more than the degrees of refinement in American accents are exhaustively displayed by George Bush or Ira Glass.