American kids watched so much Peppa Pig during the pandemic they now have British accents

If this happens the creators of Peppa should get a knighthood or a years supply of pot noodles or something.

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And for me, after a couple of beers a little bit of Aussie starts sneaking through.

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Welcome to life in every other English speaking country force fed American content.

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Shouldn’t the main worry be that apparently kids hear TV characters more often than their actual family members?

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Interesting perspective from a linguist specialising in US/UK issues

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I think this is the flip side of Baby Einstein not really making babies smarter.

Uh oh, for real?

Not to worry - just snarking about YouTube

In choral singing, directors really don’t like the very rhotic Midwestern “r” and go for softening it, though not quite to a New (or Old) England degree. Exception: when singing folk music from the region, in which case it would be expected. My singing accent is not my speaking accent.

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Christ (what an asshole), give me strength :roll_eyes:

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Or even better, wanker. Although Spike in Buffy used the term a few times.

IIRC at the time of the American War of Independence there wasn’t much difference between the English spoken in England and in the North American colonies (bearing in mind that England had strong regional accents). Accent and pronunciation on both sides were closer to modern American English than modern British English, which only began to emerge in the early nineteenth century,

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In a similar vein, the “Southern accent” didn’t appear until well after the Civil war.

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One of my favorite bits of lingual trivia is that (supposedly) the closest you’ll get to hearing Shakespeare’s accent would be to get so deep into Appalachia that you can no longer understand the locals talking to each other in a diner.

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IIRC that’s a myth, but American English preserves words that have disappeared from British English, e.g. fall meaning autumn, which Shakespeare used.

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Island populations along the Outer Banks and up into the Chesapeake in particular can still speak with an Elizabethan flavor, though mass communication has softened it. See e.g. “The Ocracoke Brogue”:

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I recall seeing a video that argued how reading Shakespeare with modern English accents can subtract layers of context and meaning from his works that were more obvious in the Original Pronunciation:

(It may be a little too risqué for some workplaces.)

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Yeah, as far as I know that factoid is based on the fact that American English has a rhotic r. But so does the West Country accent, which is another one that gets trotted out as “Shakespeare’s language”.

So maybe imagine more Phil Harding than the Clampetts.

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The “Original Pronunciation” in the video posted by @Nightflyer is a West Country accent, with some words pronounced very differently from modern English.

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Some North-East English dialects have a Rhotic r, but they are dying out. It’s mostly remote Northumbrian villages that still use it, and elderly Geordies and Mackems. Pitmatic is almost dead, replaced by modern forms of Mackem and Smoggie.

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