About English, some accents are very awful (Australian, Texan), but some are very likable.
I've always wondered what the "hick" accents of other languages sound like. All peoples have their groups of backwoods bumpkins, and I'm sure they sound just as atrocious to the edumacated members of their own language.
I can't think of many examples at the moment (perhaps Marco Ramius's Lithuanian-accented Russian being a 'bit' Scottish, in The Hunt For Red October, and Donna Noble/The Doctor sounding Celtic (in universe!) when using Latin terms to Romans through the hand-wavy translation field thing that the TARDIS has[1]), but there's countless English-language-but-set-in-a-foreign-setting productions where regional British (or A.N.Other) accents have played their part in representing differently-accented locals.
[Just to say, I knew what the original question was, and has since been talked about, but I was just taking another path of tthought. Ignore this if you wish.
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Ah, just thought of another example. "The Little World Of Don Camillo", a radio comedy. But not sure if it properly represents things, by using a set of (related) Northern UK accents to represent the inhabitants of the ?Po Valley?, especially the communists.
Darnit, another (much better) example flitted across my mind, while writing the last para, and now it's gone.
But more than once I've heard as how (say) a West Country accent was chosen to represent the equivalent-to-West-Country character's speech. Or it could just be for comedy effect. Or, given most of the audience wouldn't really notice, just because the actor involved came along with that accent, and, hey... why not?
(Of course, it could be done with comedy stereotype accents of the local languages,
a la 'Allo 'Allo, but not quite the same thing. It's more or less assumed that (with the exception of the English, who only speak English, and those few (Michelle, Crabtree, and Geering[2]) when they
were speaking English) they're communicating in the (hand-wavily) most appropriate common language (presumably mostly French, when amongst the locals), regardless of whether they themselves are French, German or Italian. As perhaps confirmed when René had to impersonate a German and used a strained version of his voice as if now speaking in a language he obviously knew but did not speak much.)
Oh, and there's "British accents for the Empire, American accents for the Alliance" thing in Star Wars, but that's just a Trope thing, along with Die Hard villains (and many others) being Englishmen playing Germans, amongst the locals.
Ok, one more example... Not sure if it was done in the film, like this (not seen it) but in the book and a radio-play I heard of Captain Corelli's Mandolin there's an English 'spy' (or 'forward observer') whose initial knowledge of Greek is of the Ancient variety, having been chosen for this mission mainly due to his
academic knowledge in the language, and so the English audience to the story hear (or read) him addressing the locals in a Chaucerian-style. "Ye Olde Englishe". (Albeit that this style is only a fractional amount aged, compared with what it's representing!)
This is not to say that we
couldn't recognise a somewhat cosmopolitan-style of French/Italian/German accent from a more back-woods version, except that we're probably quite polluted by a mish-mash of
non-appropriate accents ("if it doesn't sound like Depardieu, it's not French", and of course all Germans are Bavarian!), for one reason or another, so it's not as reliable a clue for the general audience as it might otherwise be...
We already 'know' that some Americans
can be confuzzled by British accents (Cockney=>Australian), and found the Mancunian 'twang' of Daphne in Frasier quite novel. And of course most of us Brits might well not know a Louisiana accent from an Arkansas one, due to more local lazinesses of Hollywood in times past.
[1] And
possibly Christopher Eccleston's #9 Doctor being "Northern" (Lancastrian, actually), explained as,"Every planet has a north", but #10's quite genuine Scottish-accent-on-demand, even while Rose and Donna gave excruciating renditions ("Don't. Please don't.") might mean that he's just naturally able to work with accents after such a long set of lives (if not inherently), and just like his hair colour (even if he's never not been ginger yet!) and, in fact, whole body changes, what pops out after each regeneration is merely one possibility.
[2] Whom I pretty much think either suppressed his knowledge of English, or never had reason or cause to try to communicate with the Airmen, until he was 'rescued' back to Blighty.
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Topic: What do you think of the English language? (Read 22687 times)