Foreigners doing our accents!

See my post above.

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Yeah, but put the emphasis in the other direction for some of the Highlanders I’ve heard - they sound like they’re speaking Canadian with the odd word or phrase in Scots.

I have a friend, call him Dougie, who came over from the UK, born and raised in Leith, spent his young manhood in London (and has the Estuary accent to go with it). Back in the '90s, various members of his family came to visit. His brother and sister had the thick Scots accent you’d expect, but his mum (visiting North America for the first time), sounded as Canadian as you please - she only gave herself away with the odd word or expression. I don’t know where precisely in Scotland she was from, but I do have my suspicions.

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See also:

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Guess thats why you have nova scotia.

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And Newfoundland, and Saskatchewan, and Ontario… lots of Scots over here.

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Can I suggest next time round Armin Shimmerman gets the role. For obvious reasons.

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How do people find the accents Maggie Smith does? I always think she’s amazing, so I’m prejudiced.

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…and even Quebec.You know how Montreal has such French street names as McTavish, Mackay, McGregor, Redpath, Selkirk…

@Daveb, we have a Gàidhealtachd (Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia and Glengarry County in SE Ontario), and a distinct dialect of Scottish Gaelic, rather old-fashioned the way Quebec French is rather old-fashioned (due to isolation). Can’t say that I speak the language, though - the Scottish community in Montreal was/is pretty Anglophone.

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OK, so the way I heard it was that Nova Scotia=New Scotland, and generally speaking the Canadian East Coast has a huge Scots cultural influence/accent. Then Newfoundland is similar but for the Irish, and the people and accent are known as “Newfie.” I admit that I’m getting this all third-hand. A Quebecois accent is easy to detect even for a non-Francophone. And I’m not sure, but I think on the Pacific Coast, Canada also tends toward the same accent found in the US Pac Coast, or at least a Canadian-voweled version?

However, I may be wrong about this, but aside from those thicker accents, the rest of Canada seems to abide the type of North American non-regional diction that the US Midwest is known for (although there are pockets of thick Midwestern regional accents, too.) Which is why I hear a Canadian influence all through Hollywood. E.g. Dave Foley played a midwesterner on News Radio and sounded the part to a tee until he would say “sorry.” Nearly daily, I’ll watch a tv show or commercial made and set in the US and I’ll hear that vowel sound: Canadian actor!
Then I yell “Canadian! You tuk er jerbs!”
And I shake my fist.
It’s a fun game.

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About that: as an American, his accent seems fine to me—is it?

Oh my goodness. It took a few rounds of the chorus for me to understand what they were getting at. And those subtitles! :upside_down_face:

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Of course. We speak purty. :wink:

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Except for Chicago, St. Louis, almost all of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Minnesota, and… pretty much the rest of the Midwest.

The fake accent that news anchors use is exactly that: a fake accent. Nobody talks exactly like that anywhere, although I assume it’s supposed to be vaguely Midwestern-sounding (it really isn’t). I do notice that there seems to be less variation in accents and regional dialect than there used to be, probably because of overexposure to media.

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I believe Hugh Laurie, but Andrew Lincoln’s southern accent is off to me. He’s supposed to be from TN, which would put his accent more in line with what I grew up hearing (I’m from north west GA, not too far from the TN line). It’s a very generic southern accent, not a specific regional accent. Same with the guy who played Shane, though.

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Also, except for when Darth Vader’s helmet was taken off, the VOICE of Vader is James Earl Jones, so it’s kind of irrelevent where Prowse was from, since he didn’t do the voice except in a few scenes.

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His accent got better over the course of the show. It was kind of shaky first season, but he’s settled into it.

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That was the joke, except I got Prowse’s background wrong:

My friend was pretty adept at accents.

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D’oh! My bad!

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That’s true, but as @PatRx2 pointed out, the Scots kept heading west in Canada.

Every Canadian province and every territory but the most recently created one has its own tartan:

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I’d wear those.

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I’m surprised you get that much.

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