So I was catching up on the BBC Sherlock, and was thinking to myself, why does Moriarty have an American accent? So I google it and someone online explained the actor is Irish and that is a specific Irish dialect. As proof, here’s a sample of someone from that region reading:
https://www.dialectsarchive.com/ireland-11
It doesn’t sound completely American, definitely has some of what I think of as Irish inflection, but it sounds surprisingly american to my ear. Of course there’s a lot of variation in American English. This sounds more like a northern US accent… maybe leaning Boston which makes sense… I’m kinda fascinated by stuff like this. I saw a thing a while back about some New England island where the accents sound almost British.
I’m not an expert in any way. Another commenter said Moriarty’s accent is purposely ambiguous on the show. I dunno. Ha.
Sounds very close to some Canadian accents I’ve heard.
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Oh yeah totally. Maybe I should say “North American”.
Another time I noticed this was when I heard a bit where someone was describing how Shakespeare’s dialect would have sounded in his time. That sounded odd but kinda like this, more American than British almost. Obviously this all has to do with how accents travelled abroad and then evolved in their home countries after the fact, as much as evolved in the new countries.
I’ve heard tell that there are some Appalachian hillbillie dialects that are so backward as to be frozen in time. A fossil of what the original colonists sounded like.
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In the John Adams HBO series the actor that played Franklin did an accent kinda like the above. Sort of a blend of Irish and American. I’m guessing they did some serious research about this stuff for that show.
When I moved to Yorkshire in the 80s, I had serious trouble understanding my neighbors. Everyone understood me perfectly, no doubt from watching US TV (Dynasty was big in those days), but if I asked a question at the greengrocers, parsing the answer was nearly impossible.
After a month or so I went on a car trip west, and at some point picked up a radio station that sounded just like home. It was an Irish station.
I’ve since lived in Scotland and Norway, but only in Yorkshire did I have real trouble understanding English through the accent.
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