Oh Bloody Hell, Yo, 'Sup; America love a british accent

Oh Bloody Hell, Yo, 'Sup
Mark Morford 10/2/03

America loves a British accent. Brits like American accents. Both tend
to mangle the hell out of the other.
(Associated Press)
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2003/09/30/financial1015EDT0055.DTL&nl=fix

LONDON -- For years, Loyd Grossman appeared on a popular TV game show with Sir David Frost. He married the daughter of "Chariots of Fire" film producer Lord David Puttnam. And as a celebrity chef, he has a big-selling line of spaghetti sauces.

Mr. Grossman, undeniably, is a British success story. Except when he opens his mouth.

"It's like, 'Hi, my accent is really mangled and I don't know where I am, it's like I'm in the middle of the Atlantic,' " says Suzanne Levy, a British TV producer. Adds Paul Foulkes, a professor of linguistics at University of York, "Oh, God yes. Horrendous."

Mr. Grossman, an American who grew up in Massachusetts, has, to many British ears, a fake British accent. He's not the only one, either. After buying a home in London and marrying British film director Guy Ritchie, Madonna went British, too, at least over here. So have many less-notable Americans. Some attempt a complete linguistic makeover. Others merely start saying "bloody," "cheers" and "indeed" a lot --often to the amusement of Britons. "Sometimes an American will be speaking completely in an American accent and they'll say 'when I went and had a bahth,' " says Ms. Levy. "What?"

The irony, says Khalid Aziz, a British communications specialist, is that "the British actually quite like American accents and find it quite highly associated with success in business." His company, Aziz Corp., recently completed a survey that found that 47 percent of British business directors interviewed considered executives with an American accent more successful than those from many British regions.

"What we advise Americans to do is not try to give up their American
accent, but stick with it," he says.

The trouble for adult Americans in Britain, language experts say, is that because of changes in the brain, only young children can fully master a new accent. "If a kid moves to a new area after 14, that kid will never sound like he or she belongs to that area," says Jack Chambers, a professor of linguistics at the University of Toronto who for two years studied the accents of English-speaking Canadians who had moved to southern England.

Experts call the phenomenon of adjusting one's accent to new surroundings "linguistic accommodation." Some of it occurs subconsciously, with people "just responding to what they hear around them," says Dr. Foulkes, who notes that vocabulary usually is the first to change since that's easier to do. Whether one goes further, and begins to change the pronunciation of words, depends on a variety of hard-to-measure factors, especially attitude.

Many Americans view British accents -- at least the ones they hear on television, in films and on the radio -- as more sophisticated, cultured and prestigious than theirs. That may be because, even though there actually are a multitude of different British accents, Americans are most familiar with "proper" accents such as the so-called Oxbridge variety, associated with Oxford and Cambridge universities and uttered by people such as actor Hugh Grant.

Upon moving to Britain, some Americans can't seem to resist the temptation to adopt a British accent, even if they're doomed to failure. "They're sending out a signal of some kind," says Dr. Chambers. "It may be insecurity -- they want to fit in, they want to be part of the scene. It may be alienation from the homeland -- they're feeling a little down on the politics at home. It may be as simple as they want to sound like they're hosting 'Masterpiece Theater.' "

Still, there's also a whole camp of Americans here who do resist, some actively. Unlike Madonna, actress Gwyneth Paltrow, who spends a lot of time in London, so far hasn't been overheard mimicking her boyfriend, singer Chris Martin, of the British rock band Coldplay. Brian Henderson, an American investment banker who has lived in London for three years, says he wouldn't think of switching. "The last thing you want to do is try to be pretentious and pick up a British accent," he says. "It's so obvious."

On the other extreme, there's writer and National Book Award winner Andrew Solomon, a native New Yorker. He confesses that he attempted to mimic a British accent even before he moved to Britain in the 1980s to
go to Cambridge. "I find that it's very useful to have lived in Britain because it gives me a good excuse to have the same affected accent I had in the first place," he says, adding, "I think I had some notion that it was grand and aristocratic and since I was not going to distinguish myself athletically, I thought I would distinguish myself with my enunciation."

Mr. Solomon doesn't even purport to sound like a true Brit. "What I have really is a mid-Atlantic accent. I would say it hovers above Greenland, and so people in the U.S. always say, 'Oh, you're British,' and people in Britain say, 'Oh, you're American.' Nobody claims me as their own."

But he says there's no going back. Even though at times he has thought to himself, "This really is silly. I should really sound more American," he says, "it would take such an enormous self-conscious effort to sound profoundly American again, then that seems affected." Besides, he adds, his speech isn't nearly as affected as Mr. Grossman's. Says Mr. Solomon: "His accent is so ridiculous, it makes me sound like a hardy stalwart from Brooklyn."

Mr. Grossman declined to comment for this article. Madonna -- who drew snickers two years ago when she announced the winners of the Turner Prize art competition in a distinct British accent -- also declined to comment. But her spokeswoman, Liz Rosenberg, wrote in an e-mail, "She does naturally pick up on languages and sounds of people around her or a country she may be residing in for awhile. It's certainly not meant as an affect ... . When she's back in New York for awhile, she gets right into the New Yawk sound."

What about Britons who move to America? Do they want to sound merican?

"When I open my mouth, people say, 'Oh, my gosh. You're English. That's
so nice,' " says Julie Kleyn, a Briton who lives in Concord, Mass. "So why should I change my accent?"

Her three sons, on the other hand, quickly adopted American accents when they moved to the U.S. three years ago, but only when speaking among their friends. "My parents said the same thing of me," says Mrs. Kleyn. "When I was in second grade in Florida, I would speak English at home and walk into the next room where there were friends and speak American to them." This is typical of children because they "don't want to be different," says Dr. Foulkes.

Ms. Levy, who recently moved from London to New York, says she has begun adopting some American expressions "because, frankly, I can't take that look of total incomprehension when I know that I speak the language better than anyone in this country."

She says "one of the biggest changes is if I'm in London and I'm trying to hail a taxi, I say, 'Excuse me! Excuse me!' Whereas here I have to say the really embarrassing, 'Yo!' "