Why are so many young Americans adopting fake British accents?

For the record, "188,000 views on TikTok" is not that many for a single video to reach, let alone an entire search term's worth of videos.

As a zoomer reading this article I can tell you this very literally boils down to "funny voice = funny joke" and you could just as easily swap out the british accent for a Kermit impression. The popularity of british reality TV has exposed the young americans that watch it to funny sounding british slang (e.g. "fanny flutters") and now those sayings are making their way into jokes.

I promise you no one except for the Miami content creators and former reality TV cast members quoted in the article are slipping into British accents at Burger King.

British accents are heavily localized and class-based. I don't even know what a fake British accent means honestly. People in GB can spot an accent and a fake localized accent quite easily, and act accordingly.

I think Americans are just parroting pop culture from GB, and doing their best to sound, I dunno: posh or proper or whatever. It would be like someone in Kent trying to sound like a Wyoming cowboy. As the kids say: cringe.

I think this is everywhere where English is more common. I live in an Indian city with many Indians (and others, including ex-pats) from all over. So, the kids default to English as the common language. Their exposure to TV/Movies of both the US and the UK influences how they speak - not just the accent but the words they use, which are, at times, not how a “common English-speaking-Indian” speaks.

And yes, my daughter grew up on Peppa Pig and had a British-ish accent. She has since mellowed and now has a more neutral accent. Her best friend is an American, but she didn’t pick up on that one.

Our family is from a remote corner of India, and we always had an accent. I grew up in a school run by a British soldier and his wife (he stayed in India after the war). In the last 20 years, I have worked primarily with American and British clients, which influenced how I talk, and I also learned a lot along the way. However, I find it hard to converse with the Scots; I am OK if I pay attention to the Australians and am highly comfortable with Jap-lish.

I now believe that there is nothing called a “fake accent.” All the third-culture kids pick up talks from all over the world, and they know the Internet colloquial more than their immediate geographical and cultural norms.

I speak three languages fluently, and I modify how I talk to make the listener understand better. The way I talk Hindi to an Indian from the north or west is different from how I speak to a South Indian. With English, not necessarily the accent, my muscle memory kicks in, which picks up and uses different ways of saying specific words and expressions depending on the listener.

It is OK to have any accent - play with it - there is nothing fake about it. :-)

> affecting an accent has become a Gen Z verbal tic

Also other generations. For instance:

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valley_girl#Valleyspeak

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-Atlantic_accent

Novel sociolects aren't something that gen z has just invented; they show up from time to time.

Because they only know English. Let me explain a bit. I’m a bilingual person, since I’m not living in a English speaking country and I’m 21. They’re saying that switching accents are their defend mechanism or coping mechanism with serious situations. Well, when I say this i think I’m talking for most of the bilingual people, our defend mechanism or us “being playful” is adding some English words into the sentence or switching to English. So it is not something to be shocked

This seems dumb but harmless unless they're also saying "maths". Then it's a sign of the apocalypse.

I’m from New Zealand. It’s staggering how many people in the US will repeat what I say back to me in a British accent. It’s hard to be annoyed because they’re “just having fun” but my god does it get old.

Fortunately I can do a bit of California surfer dude right back and that usually gets the message across

Hilariously the view from the UK side of the pond is that all our young people now have these terrible manufactured US accents...

Without actual evidence of a significant increase in adoption of the accents (its all anecdotal here) this seems like a bit of a fluff article that is designed to reassure Brits we are still relevant and cool and influencing other cultures in a harmless way that Guardian readers can get behind.

I thought this was going to be another article about kids watching Peppa Pig. My three year old has a sort of mixed vocabulary, but mostly from watching Matilda, the Musical on repeat.

It's interesting that there are a variety of English accents, with differing connotations for Americans.

YouTube channels that make informative, content-driven videos tend to demand English accents from their voice talent. For videos about nature, history, technology, geography, any content where a viewer's enjoyment and engagement will be improved by trusting the video's sincerity and veracity, (certain) English accents rule.

But the article mentions young Americans adopting (presumably different) English accents when they are aware of being insincere or demanding.

To some extent this must be down to Americans receiving English class stereotypes and internalizing them as different roles they can play.

I adjust my speech patterns based on the audience. I've done it since I was a kid. Different groups of friends speak differently and convergence ensured I wouldn't stick out as weird. It wasn't an entirely conscious decision but I've always been fully aware of it. This seems similar although more pronounced and I didn't use accents.

Yet another article talking about trends based on questionable or cherry picked anecdotes.

So this article claims "so many ..." and cites 6 examples (I'm not counting Madonna). And maybe statistically they represent more, but I feel like this article is just someone looking to write something about nothing. I'm not on TikTok and Twitter much (just instagram), so it could be a trend and I'm just not seeing it.

Speaking of the Madonna example, I'm not sure it's fair to lump her into this because this article seems to be focusing on people who have never lived anywhere in the UK, they are just mimicking what they've heard on TV/Film. A lot of people made fun of Madonna when she started speaking with a British accent but she at least _lived_ there for a long time, and doing so can definitely affect your accent. I've known it to happen the other way around. I've had British friends who lived in the US tell me that their friends back home would make fun of them for their new Americanized accent.

I am Gen Z and pretty tuned into the cultural milieu.

This is not a thing, this is just a clickbait article. You can also tell by the fact that they are only interviewing reality show people & vloggers.

My dad has been doing this since the 1950s, and I'm willing to bet his dad was since the 1910s. We're from Ireland though, is putting on a funny accent really a new thing in the us?

I was on public transportation this morning, about to reach my stop, and I needed to ask a woman who was blocking my way to the doors to please excuse me. The train was quiet, I was right behind her, and I had the feeling that I'd startle her.

As the train rolled into the station, a thought popped into my head that I've had before - a friendly British accent would be disarming in a moment like this! It was a passing thought but an organic one, so it's funny to now read this.

Forced accents have been going on for a long time with kids. Just yesterday I was watching local news from the area where I grew up and a girl from my high school years was being interviewed. In her teens, she had a non-local accent that I always envisioned as california stoner. Well apparently she was working hard faking that thing because she has a full on upstate south carolina accent now.

I think NPR had something on this on "Wait, wait, don't tell me" a while ago. Some researchers were linking it to kids watching so much Peppa Pig that they developed at least a slight British accent

I'm British and this article still made a lot of sense. I probably have "exaggerated posh" and "exaggerated cockney" modes that I use for similar reasons.

Because so many British are picking up American accents. And so many other accents are being picked up by other people. It's a globalized world.

Guess it's the right time to smugly lean back as a continental European and point to your absolutely disgusting freeform mix of AE and BE terms, pronunciation and spelling, the only saving grace usually having decided to be consistent with o vs ou, at least in a single document or conversation :D

Also yes, I think we mostly learned Received Pronunciation in school but at least half of the people diverged towards American (in words like "can't") pretty soon and I honestly couldn't tell you if I'm still being consistent, 20 years after school and using English for a huge part of my working life, as a software developer.

This was an affectation that Bart Simpson used to use way back in golden-era Simpsons - in almost exactly this kind of ‘defense mechanism’ kind of way.

It’s been confusing people for years: https://movies.stackexchange.com/questions/114329/why-does-b...

For the same reason that children adopt virtually anything.

Within the context of their general development, children are undergoing a long process of constructing their social architecture.

Which often entails a long stint of unsophisticated and ruthless social climbing. Therefore, anything that is presented to them as being socially advantageous stands a chance of being adopted.

It isn't much different in nature from blue-blood adults consciously adopting the Mid Atlantic Accent.

I'd love to hear this. It's not something I've noticed in my plentiful YouTube watching, etc, but I think it'd be an interesting development. The English-inspired "posh" American accents of yesteryear are beautiful, I think.

The similar thing that stands out to me like a sore thumb (and I appreciate this is all on me and anyone can talk however they like!) is when British people keep their accent but drop their "t"s to "d"s when speaking in public/on YouTube/podcasts/etc. ("Bedder" instead of "better", for example.) It doesn't seem to be a youth only thing, a lot of British speakers at tech conferences seem to do it, but it's not how we'd talk amongst ourselves in the UK. I wonder if it's something to do with subconsciously reducing plosives which often come out bad on mic?

What’s fascinating to me is that an entire generation of Americans in the early/mid-20th century adopted a fake British accent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-Atlantic_accent.

Born and raised in Brooklyn, and old enough to remember when the Brooklyn accent was a detriment on job interviews, yet I've bumped into a bunch of people who sound almost like they're from Brooklyn, but they have only lived there for a few years from the midwest or other areas. Southerners tend to maintain their charming lilts. There are enough transplants, that it is not because they are being inundated with the accent, so I wonder what gives?

We used to mimic Monty Python episodes and movies when I grew up in 60s and 70s in Brooklyn. Hilarious stuff. Eerily relevant skit from The Life of Brian: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFBOQzSk14c

(American here) I knew a girl in college who was very sheltered: she was homeschooled in a rural setting by wealthy ultra-religious parents up until college. Her only outlet was british television. She's spoken with a badly formed british accent as long as I've known her.

I learned katakana as a middle schooler because I would wake up at 4am to watch anime on youtube on the family computer, so none of this surprises me.

Indoor kids can get weird :)

I didn't see any data in the article on this but I'm under the impression that we're making more indoor kids.

I heard a young woman chatting to her colleague yesterday and switching between American and British, maintaining an hyped ultra affected tik tok influencer tone all the time.

I try to have no judgement on that but I can’t help but feel twinges of concern at people embodying what’s good for the platform algorithm . Taught and moulded by the platform.

This is obviously reflected in people paying for their irl faces to look much more the digital filter. This seemed to be case for the person I described tbh

I haven't seen it mentioned here, but Drill Rap from the UK has had an explosion in popularity in recent years. Hip-hop has always been a huge trend setter in American culture, and for once, one of the strongest influences to the current sound is coming from Brittain. I've heard the "drill rapper" accent filtering in over the last year especially as a lot of local artists and fans jump on the trend.

Just an anecdotal observation.

Could be kids coming of age who had parents who were themselves raised on (in particular) British comedy. In my own case it would be the inestimable influence of Monty Python. Younger adult Americans's parents maybe quoted the Parrot Sketch, or offered to give their kid lupins when they were ill, or perhaps demanded a shrubbery if they don't want to do their chores.

Poor Dominic West, he'll never work again.

> “If you like to think of yourself as somebody who’s easygoing, you might adopt a certain voice to express frustration, because you don’t feel totally comfortable with that part of yourself that complains,” he said.

Fred Rogers was reported by his children to express frustration or annoyance in Lady Elaine Fairchilde's voice rather than his own.

Why? Probably for the same reason journalists love writing trend pieces about manufactured narratives, attention and clicks?

strange that so many british performers have put on american accents!

I can't speak for anyone else, but as a British male living in the USA I can testify that having my accent gets me a large amount of friendly attention from American women. I tell people all the time they should fake an accent for that reason alone.

Oddly, every American actually assumes I am Australian. Strewth!

How can someone fake an accent especially a UK one? you need to have lived in the UK to make it believable.

My sister married a guy from the UK. She lives there now and has mishmash of midwestern US / southern UK accent. It's the most ridiculous sounding thing ever. UK people can't figure out where she's from and US people can't either.