I don’t know about that guy, but I used to have a speech impediment that meant I couldn’t pronounce the letter R. I went to several speech therapists, so I started to annunciate every other letter, but that made people think I had a British accent. Anyway, I eventually learned how to say R, so now I have a speech impediment that makes me sound like a British person doing a fake American accent.
Yup, really. Annoying when you see comments about how Americans don’t speak proper English. The Brits are the ones who changed how it was spoken the most!
Dialect coach Meier understands the appeal of the idea that 17th-Century speech patterns have been perfectly preserved an ocean away. “It is a delightful and attractive myth that Shakespeare’s language got fossilised” in parts of the US.
Not a great source honestly, was expecting more of a linguistic study rather than this. Even the article doesn’t entirely agree this is true.
English is a living language that has continued to evolve within its country of origin. Is your point that because the American dialect hasn’t evolved as much suddenly makes it better somehow?
Additionally, English is the most common language on the planet and there are many dialects, but no one outside of England can claim theirs is the “correct form of english” because it’s not their language.
British English is not some monolith and was less homogeneous than it even is now at the time many were coming to the Americas. If this were true it would only be true for a particular region. English outside of the UK also diverged as it no longer followed trends happening there, and regional variations went in sometimes different directions.
Even within the US, English isn't super homogeneous. Look at Appalachian compared to California or someplace. Parts of Louisiana have unique features from Accadian and influence from Spanish.
Best part is portuguese, it seems kids in Portugal are now speaking with a brazilian accent because most Portuguese videos on youtube/tiktok are made by brazilians lol get reverse colonized suckers
Not really (source: am a Portuguese currently living in Portugal).
Kids here can immitate a Brasilian accent, and so can many if not most adults, because maybe 4 decades ago Brasilian soap operas became all the rage in Portuguese TV, but they don’t go around normally speaking with a Brasilian accent.
Then again I can immitate a number of US regional accents (well enough to fool Brits) and a number of British regional accents (well enough to fool Americans) when speaking English, but that’s not at all the same as generally speaking with that accent (though, having lived over a decade in London, my English language accent tends towards RP English, also because I actually made an effort to make my speech easier for locals to understand, rather than the confusing Portuguese/Dutch/American/RP accent I tended to have when speaking English in lazy mode).
There are a lot of Brasilians in Portugal (about 3% of the population, not counting those who got Portuguese nationality which they can after 5 years without having to give up their Brasilian nationality) and that also includes a lot of kids, so of those kids the ones who came here when they were already 5 years old or older would speak with a Brasilian accent.
In my own experience living in several countries and learning their language, which included picking up their accent, you don’t get the accent of the speech you’re exposed to a small part of the time, you pick up the one you’re exposed to most of the time, so for example my Dutch has an Amsterdam accent and I didn’t at all try to pick it up, I just lived there and that’s what I heard most of the time from those I spoke with.
The article says they’re “speaking like brasilians” in the title and then in the text says that’s them using a few words from Brasilian Portuguese (giving examples), which is nothing new (my generation also picked up words from it because of soap operas and I’m in my 50s) and isn’t at all the same as “speaking with a Brasilian accent”, something which as I explained from my own experience has way higher criteria of exposure to actually happen.
It sounds a lot like a Pearl Clutching article from the original source of those “news”, the Diário De Noticias newspaper which is very old and conservative.
I’ve heard some little kids speaking in accents not from America, and it’s been attributed to kids shows being produced by Commonwealth countries (think Bluey, Peppa Pig). But it was clear that they thought the accent was just a “fun” way of talking, and would snap out of it when talking seriously.
My wife is a damn yankee, transplanted to the south.
Every family gathering she attends, she still sits next to me and ends up asking what someone said.
You want a real trip? There’s a show called Moonshiners, that features some people with southern accents, or Appalachian accents so deep that I have trouble getting everything they’re saying, and I’m from the same region. My wife has watched it with subtitles and will look at me and ask if that’s what they really said because it sounded nothing like what the subtitles said lol.
But, in general, accents are easier if you grow up with a wide array of them to learn from. You then get used to processing them and it stays as an ability, up to a point.
I’ve lived in a couple of countries abroad and can speak a number of languages and just love accents, can imitate several in my own language and can even immitated a few in some foreign languages (not to mention cross-languages accents, like English with a French or Italian accent).
It’s amazing how even small nations (like my native Portugal or The Netherlands were I also lived) have several accents and they seem to include one which is hard to understand for everybody else.
But, in general, accents are easier if you grow up with a wide array of them to learn from. You then get used to processing them and it stays as an ability, up to a point.
The comment got me thinking that I have no problem understanding the more common British accents and wondering why, then realizing that living in Germany for 10 years watching Sky Channel probably has something to do with it.
I looked it up and realized that calling it Sky Channel really dates me, since it stopped being called that after 1989.
Growing up in Portugal were TV has subtitles rather than dubbing I ended up picking a sort of generic American (TV series) accent in my English because that’s the most spoken English I was exposed to, though it was mixed with a Portuguese accent.
Mind you, as I later emigrated and lived for long periods in a couple other countries, I added more accents on top of it (first a Dutch Amsterdam accent, later an English RP accent - also known as the BBC accent) and eventually decided to make an effort and nowadays mostly speak English with an RP accent unless I’m feeling lazy and not even try, making it shifts partially back to the original American+Portuguese+Dutch+RP accent.
And then you go live the UK, realize that tv uses only a small subset of British accents, and sometimes find yourself wondering “Huh I wonder what language that is?” only to realize it was English 20 minutes after the fact
There’s the “standard” called RP (for Received Pronounciation) also known as the BBC English, there’s the rich people’s accent (yeah, rich people in Britain have their own accent) known as Posh English, then there is a poor/working class Londoner accent called Cockney Accent (which outside Britain you often hear in TV series taking place in working class London neighbourhoods or when showing poor people in 19th century London), then there are a number of regional ones just in England (though those are harder to explicitly recognize if you’re a foreigner, even if for example you can tell that somebody from Manchester has an accent different from somebody from Essex), then there are the other nations of Britain (Scotland, Wales, Northern-Ireland) which themselves have one or more accents each (I know for sure Scotland has more than one accent since I can notice the difference).
Mind you, I only know this because I lived there for over a decade.
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