Friday 22 February 2019

British Regional Accents: A Guide for American DMs

So, I sat down and tried to watch the first episode of the first Critical Role campaign. I gave up a few minutes in. I had half an idea to write a series of blog posts critiquing it, but, on reflection, what would be the point? I'm not the target audience, and if some people enjoy it, good for them. (I write this through teeth that are slightly less gritted than they would once have been; I've mellowed over the years.) 

But the post did get me thinking about the topic of British regional accents and American cultural products, particularly in Fantasy & SF, mainly because the first PC to get introduced in that Critical Role campaign is described by an actor straight from the Dick Van Dyke School of Linguistics, and it got me thinking about how Americans make use of such a limited palette of British accents when going for some sort of specific effect. 

The general rule for Americans when it comes to British accents seems to be: British people are either very posh or cockneys, and if they're not, they're either the Beatles or Scottish. The Welsh and Northern Irish certainly don't exist, and nor does any English person outside a kind of mythical idealised London roughly between the years 1850-1945, or Liverpool between the years 1962-1970.

This is reflected in the way British regional accents are used in American Fantasy & SF: villains speak in RP, unless they are mook and/or comedy villains, in which case they're cockneys; dwarves are Scottish, and now and again somebody from Somerset appears, usually to represent a yokel (viz: Sam in the The Lord of the Rings films). 

This won't do. You guys need to expand your range a little bit. 

The best way to do this is by watching videos of interviews with football fans on YouTube - an unintentionally hilarious genre of programming which never fails to combine vitriolic anger, self-entitled outrage, politically incorrect asides, and logical incoherence - all presented in the funny voices of grown men who should really know better. 

Here are some examples. First, Estuary English. How about the guy on the right for a hobgoblin?




Second, how about this Mancunian kobold?



Third, a couple of Liverpudlian gnolls complaining about modern football.



Fourth, some slightly downtrodden Geordie orcs dissecting the result of a recent battle.



Fifth, check out this Boro fan (that's Middlesborough) - a goblin for definite (although he is right about Leeds).



Sixth, a clan of Brummie bullywugs? 



And finally - Welsh wererat?


30 comments:

  1. This is fantastically helpful! I thank you on behalf of all Americans!

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  2. Speaking as a Yank long embedded in England, a much needed service!

    RP = received pronunciation = "posh" English accent (but not so posh as to approach the marble-mouthed mumble of actual members of the aristocracy -- see the film Brief Encounter for perfect "cut-glass" examples of RP)

    Don't forget the very low bandwidth take on the Cornish (aka Talk Like a Pirate) accent.

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  3. As much as I personally love listening to different region accent (and I do) most of my players couldn't tell the differences between these, or the difference between these and Australian most of the time (also the differences in Australian accents either). Mind you, they can't reliably tell the difference between Bostonian and New York accents, or Georgian and Louisianan. Also I cannot be relied upon to keep them consistent anyway.

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    1. Australians stomp hard on their vowels, to my midwestern US grown ears, and maybe grind the heel in a bit. Vis: Head = "hid" or No = "naowuh".

      Although those may come from very different parts of a very large continent, so you raise a very good point. Most Americans of my generation are working from Paul Hogan & Steve Irwin

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  4. You can lay the blame squarely on Dick Van Dyke for the Cockney (with maybe an assist from Audrey Hepburn) and you don't need a lot of Help figuring out where the Liverpudlian comes from, even if you're having a Hard Day's Night.

    I'd blame United Artists and Hammer for the preponderance of RP. Grand Moff Tarkin has a lot more to answer for than just blowing up Alderan. I also think many of us nerds on this side of the pond picked up our British from Monty Python (as well as all the other Britcoms that came over to us on Public Broadcasting) If you watch enough of the show, there are other regional dialects snuck in here and there depending on the skit, but you get mostly RP 'cos aside from a random Minnesotan who somehow got in there they're mostly Oxford & Cambridge lads.

    And not to be that guy, but there are also more American accents then the US version of RP, a non-specific Southern drawl, Brooklyn/New Jersey, California Valley speak circa the mid 80's, or Wisconsinite. (Although I'd love to use the latter for voicing dwarves.) Yinz guys maybe wanna try Pittsburgese n'at? Or pahk ye cah in Bahstin?

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    1. And there are tons more than that too! Upper class, Savannah Southern is one of my favorites. "Ah do decleah(r), Mistah Beauregahd!"

      I was amazed when I went to Santa Cruz for the first time and the first guy I spoke with legit sounded like Bill and Ted.

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    2. Really more of a Scranton PA accent then a Savannah GA one

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    3. As you mentioned, Hollywood is responsible for this mess, and it goes much deeper than RPGs. The whole trope of "homo sapiens prior to 1900 == British accents" is truly bizarre and arbitrary, especially when it expands beyond historical settings (medieval Europe, ancient Rome, ancient Greece) to purely fictional settings (Westeros, Star Wars). I assume that this weird convention predates Hammer Films, and probably even Hollywood: the American theatre scene was dominated by travelling British troupes for a very long time, and when native troupes got onto the same footing they did so by slavishly imitating the conventions of the Brits. The typical theatre season was a selection of Elizabethan and Restoration and other British plays, with some classical stuff thrown in that had been translated and produced in the UK a thousand times before and so had the arbitrary stamp of British culture on it.

      So you have an American theatre tradition (plus the Canadians, who were still actually British subjects for most of the period I'm talking about and even today retain an annoying nostalgia for the empire in Anglophone Canada) that is built entirely out of British conventions, with every American actor brought up on the RSC standard of British accents for every production of Shakespeare, Shaw, or Aeschylus, even if they're playing Egyptians or Italians or demons from the underworld. And this tradition continues into the early days of Hollywood, where every "serious" film actor has to meet this same standard, so you get Biblical epics with British accents attached to every Roman soldier and Palestinian prophet, etc etc.

      Fortunately the American theatre community has largely (not entirely) clawed its way out of this pit and now it's considered pretty hokey for American actors to put on a UK accent when doing Shakespeare, so it's the sort of thing you're more likely to see in a community theatre production or an expensive-pop-theatre-festival-for-old-folks production, and less likely in a professional theatre company. The RPG crowd and the community theatre crowd are, of course, much the same sorts of people, overlapping on the Venn diagram with the Ren Faire people and so on. (I say this with love for all communities mentioned, I should say.)

      tl;dr It's okay and dare I say even recommended use your actual native accent when playing RPGs. JRR Tolkien was a professor at Oxford in the 1930s; this is not a good reason for making the characters in your elf games talk and/or look and/or dress and/or eat the way JRR Tolkien did.

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    4. Also, a kind of Mid-Atlantic elocution was considered desirable in the early 20th Century among the American upper classes (especially women), and this transferred to a lot of Hollywood films.

      Explainer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gpv_IkO_ZBU

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    5. I dunno - is it not just that to Americans, Englishness in general represents old-fashionedness (for obvious reason) and hence historical figures = English accent?

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    6. There's an element of that for sure. But it's certainly not "just" that. The RP English accent also connotes authority, economic power, refinedness, social status, education. There's not really an American equivalent. Perhaps above all there really is a sort of meta-sense (well explained by Picador above) that a person speaking with an English accent is a better actor for that reason alone.

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  5. This is cool and interesting -- but come on man! I'm not sure how many regional accents of a distant country you can reasonably expect Americans to have a handle on!

    Posh, imaginary cockney, Scottish, Beatle--and as another poster added Cornish/pirate! I feel like that's pretty good! We've got our own regional accents to keep track of too you know!

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    1. It's more that if you're going to steal our accents at least do us the favour of using some more interesting ones!

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  6. Also, for anyone interested in the development of English as a language and the many dialects it's manifested, see if you can dig up a wonderful documentary series from the mid-80's titled "The Story of English". It was co-produced by the BBC and PBS. I think you can dig up the whole thing on YouTube.

    Well worth a watch, it's utterly fascinating.

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  7. That last one is Wales via Salford. You're better off with something like this: https://youtu.be/O_2UW8v3Q80

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  8. Stateside, you can't forget the Delco accent either (Northeastern Delaware and Pennsylvania up to/including Philadelphia): Youse guys wanna grab some wooder ice near the Ac-a-me?"

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  9. Pop culture has a bad habit of making people think that countries have a single accent. For example, people love to joke with the 'aboot' in Canada but from experience that's more of an Ontario or Vancouver area thing and the middle provinces (like Alberta) and the maritime province (like Nova Scotia) sound utterly different from this half-joke Canadian accent and that's not even getting into the french dialects and the french-english-hybrid clusterfuck local languages. And then there is the Québec french which sound more like garbled drunk french cockney (hey I know what I'm talking about, its my language!).

    Of course, French *itself* has its own version of the RP English, with rural and urban French sounding very different from each others. Accents are a fascinating thing.

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  10. While I'm guessing Jim Broadbent's Frank Butterman is a little overdone for comedy's sake, Hot Fuzz was a landmark in helping me broaden my range in my attempt to Liven Things Up at the table with Vocal Chameleonism. If you're going to do it (and perhaps not everyone should) the best way is to imitate particular people--so my swaggering bailiff is my best Timothy Dalton and my overeducated village notary is Hugo Weaving in V for Vendetta and etc etc. Practicing is easier when you have one person's lines to go by rote.

    To give the guy from Critical Role some credit I can barely find the sand to do this limited bit of 'acting' in my own house in front of my own friends. On a youtube channel with thousands of people watching I think the only impression I'd be doing is a strangled goose.

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  11. Oh, this is fantastic. Even as a Brit I've never been able to find a good source of people talking in strong regional accents. It never occurred to me that I can just narrow it down by looking for specific football clubs.

    And boy, that scouse lad has some serious voiceless velar fricatives.

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    1. I'm just surprised they managed to find some Liverpool fans who'd been to the game and weren't from Norway.

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  12. smh these guys can't talk English properly like we do in the states

    bookmarked

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  13. I've always been fascinated with accents having moved to the greater Boston area with english taught to me by parents with an old long island accent and a brooklyn accent in the early 70's. I failed my first spelling test because when my teacher said "hot" I didn't realize she was saying "heart" among a host of regionalisms. Over time I'd master the Boston and area accents so well I could tell what part of a city people were from. Alas decades later people have moved around so much and had tv soften accents so much a lot of the old accents are blurred together or gone.

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  14. I just lament that I can't pull off a proper Down East Maine accent. Take Boston and draw out all the vowels and speak it from waaaay in the back of your throat.

    The I pakd my cah in Havad yad equivalent is "yaa caan't git theayaah fom heeyaa, aayuh."

    From living abroad a long time and living in the NE I've had English people thinking I have some weird regional English accent. Usually drunk English people, but still.

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  15. I LOVE the accents from the north of England, no doubt because I don't hear them every day, but as someone who likes to read Gawain, Langland (Piers Plowman), Chaucer and Shakespeare I prefer to pronounce dialogue (in my head) with character than with the antiseptic tones of the grunts of the BBC, who as wannabees mangle colourful tones into grey. There is an elusive mythical crystal beauty to the rare pure aristocratic female accent, but this is extremely rare. I have had women tell me they had a posh accent which I have declined to admire, but if you combine the inimitable English wit with a brainy northern lass now that is irresistible.

    I like some of the Irish, Welsh and Scottish accents too as being musical and soft but outside the 20th century Irish the English have provided the literature and that literature should be read with a NORTHERN accent.

    Aside from looking like Aragorn, here is yorkshireman Ted Hughes reading Crow,

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ml6UehFhG0

    If I could choice my accent this would be it.

    Gimli in Bakshi's LotR has a beautiful northern accent. Bakshi's LotR remains one of the best films ever made - 10/10 - by comparison the Jackson films are 3-4/10.

    Here is Liverpudlian talking about his favourite SF Films. I would EVERYDAY prefer to hear the opinions of Northern English MEN about films as opposed to US West/East Coast Boys/Gays.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWviNXW4wEU

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    1. I'd near to made it to the end of this interesting comments box only to have my Kent sense suddenly tingle.

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  16. My wife suggested this would make a great "Creature Comforts" a la Aardman. Clay Liverpudlian gnolls in some filthy bone strewn cave talking about the poor state of the sport as the kids chew on the legs of some captured adventurer.

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