VIGNETTE/POLEMIC: Accents
Ah, "The Voice From The Vault" quiz on my local ABC radio station's breakfast show. Every morning it's a reminder of how isolated from and ignorant of the wider world Australians are. I should maybe note that the ABC's listeners probably represent the upper middle-class in Sydney and hence, one would think, the "educated" slice of Sydney radio (I shudder to think how this quiz would pan out on one of the commercial radio stations catering to the working class...).
The quiz works like this: every morning, they play an interview snippet by someone famous, and you have to guess who it is. Now: the point is not that in 90% of the cases the first few callers get it wrong. Nobody's perfect, right? The point is how far off these people are, and this is where the wider world in the form of accents comes in.
This morning, the snippet was by Janis Joplin. Growing up in a non-English speaking country in the 70s and 80s, I'd never actually heard Janis Joplin speak, so I had no idea who it was. But I could tell that it was a person from the south of the USA, maybe Texas. First caller: "Joni Mitchell?". Joni Mitchell is Canadian. Canadians sound NOTHING LIKE the person in the interview. Second and third caller were way off the mark as well (I think one of them said Joan Baez, which at least is the right country, even though Joan I think is from New York and sounds nothing like a Texan).
This goes on every morning. I remember Mark Knopfler, whose accent is a slight Scottish burr mixed with maybe a bit of London - callers were guessing Bono from U2 (who's Irish) and some American from memory. Another good one was Dizzy Gillespie. Again, I didn't know who it was but the person speaking was obviously African-American. Yet the first five callers or so didn't even guess at a black person at all, and the first one to do so guessed, if I remember correctly, the South African Nelson Mandela. EVERY MORNING! Australians really cannot tell accents, largely, I would assume, because they are so isolated from the world. Shit, my first language isn't even English and I can mostly at least tell which country people are from, if not region in a specific country, so why can't they?
It wouldn't matter so much if Australians then didn't insist on doing accents all the time. These are the worst accent impressions you've ever heard, as every Scottish and Irish person in my acquaintance (OK, there's only 1 of each) knows - the Scottish guy keeps getting some half-arsed Oirish, and the Irish guy gets Och Aye repeatedly. Personally, in 6 years, people have assured me that I must be from Hong Kong, Ireland, South Africa, Scandinavia, even South America - all accents I do not remotely sound like. On the other hand, I still retain a slight Mancunian touch every now and then from living there once, as well as the odd New Zealand inflection but very few people pick up on these. When I then tell them where I'm from, I usually get "Oh, you sound nothing like that!" And it's a really big ask not to retort "Oh yea? And how would you know?" They really can't tell.
That's why it's so funny that Richard Glover, who's fast becoming my personal laughing stock, saw fit yesterday on his show to remark upon Danish that it "sounds like a throat infection" (I think he might've thought of Dutch, ah, who cares, they all sound the same to Australians), and one of his guests laughed that he doesn't deal with people who speak a language that's back to front.
Lord knows what they think of Chinese or Suaheli in this country. Man, these people are dumb.
The quiz works like this: every morning, they play an interview snippet by someone famous, and you have to guess who it is. Now: the point is not that in 90% of the cases the first few callers get it wrong. Nobody's perfect, right? The point is how far off these people are, and this is where the wider world in the form of accents comes in.
This morning, the snippet was by Janis Joplin. Growing up in a non-English speaking country in the 70s and 80s, I'd never actually heard Janis Joplin speak, so I had no idea who it was. But I could tell that it was a person from the south of the USA, maybe Texas. First caller: "Joni Mitchell?". Joni Mitchell is Canadian. Canadians sound NOTHING LIKE the person in the interview. Second and third caller were way off the mark as well (I think one of them said Joan Baez, which at least is the right country, even though Joan I think is from New York and sounds nothing like a Texan).
This goes on every morning. I remember Mark Knopfler, whose accent is a slight Scottish burr mixed with maybe a bit of London - callers were guessing Bono from U2 (who's Irish) and some American from memory. Another good one was Dizzy Gillespie. Again, I didn't know who it was but the person speaking was obviously African-American. Yet the first five callers or so didn't even guess at a black person at all, and the first one to do so guessed, if I remember correctly, the South African Nelson Mandela. EVERY MORNING! Australians really cannot tell accents, largely, I would assume, because they are so isolated from the world. Shit, my first language isn't even English and I can mostly at least tell which country people are from, if not region in a specific country, so why can't they?
It wouldn't matter so much if Australians then didn't insist on doing accents all the time. These are the worst accent impressions you've ever heard, as every Scottish and Irish person in my acquaintance (OK, there's only 1 of each) knows - the Scottish guy keeps getting some half-arsed Oirish, and the Irish guy gets Och Aye repeatedly. Personally, in 6 years, people have assured me that I must be from Hong Kong, Ireland, South Africa, Scandinavia, even South America - all accents I do not remotely sound like. On the other hand, I still retain a slight Mancunian touch every now and then from living there once, as well as the odd New Zealand inflection but very few people pick up on these. When I then tell them where I'm from, I usually get "Oh, you sound nothing like that!" And it's a really big ask not to retort "Oh yea? And how would you know?" They really can't tell.
That's why it's so funny that Richard Glover, who's fast becoming my personal laughing stock, saw fit yesterday on his show to remark upon Danish that it "sounds like a throat infection" (I think he might've thought of Dutch, ah, who cares, they all sound the same to Australians), and one of his guests laughed that he doesn't deal with people who speak a language that's back to front.
Lord knows what they think of Chinese or Suaheli in this country. Man, these people are dumb.
posted by edgarross at 11:32 AM
3 Comments:
You think Aussies are dumb? Try your test with Yanks! They're fucking clueless.
point taken - true, the septics take the cake any time. at least australians don't subtitle other english language programmes. yet. i saw mtv america do an interview with oasis once where they subtitled liam gallagher 'cos the poor darlings couldn't understand him ;-)
I agree with the general gist of what you're saying (ie. Australians are uninformed about issues outside (okay, and inside) Australia), but your examples are terrible. If anything, Australia is overinformed about the US. We are disgustingly UNDERinformed about countries that are not Western.
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