The Queen’s English
Posted on | October 22, 2008 |
What is it about an English accent? During the past week or so I’ve experienced a spate of praise and expressions of cuteness regarding my BBC voice and English vocab: one time I was made to repeat the word ‘tattoo’ several times; another time great laughter ensued when I called a popsicle a lollypop. I guess such reactions are all complimentary, although they are subtly mixed: on the one hand, my voice seems to grant me automatic authority (particularly with undergrads); on the other, it makes people think of me as sweet and cutesy. This mixed response seems to reflect attitudes towards the British in general: authoritative yet also endearingly antiquated (one professor recently described how the generic Oxford scholar would apparently sit down and look at fragments of Simonides whilst delicately eating cucumber sandwiches and sipping tea. I let out a rather loud ‘ha!’ noise….). It’s also striking, for this is a state full of accents, particularly Asian and Hispanic - yet it’s the imperial sound of Queen’s English which retains some sort of ambivalent status more than almost any other.
On a different but related note, I find I’m constantly getting confused about how to express various basic words and phrases, as a result of differences in both vocab and stress between US and UK English. The word ‘garage’ is a case in point: pronounced in a UK English manner, with the stress on the first syllable, this seems to become incomprehensible to most people here. It will be interesting to see how my voice changes (or doesn’t) over the next five years….
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October 29th, 2008 @ 8:32 am
Sam has an interesting intonation to his American English now that he’s lived in England for so long. It’s still clear that he’s an American but he uses some English expressions and puts the emPHAsis on a different syLAble.
November 16th, 2008 @ 6:39 am
Sounds a lot like “Love Actually.”