and now I can't recall any details!

I do resurrect a New Yawk accent when I'm with New Yawkas, as I was born there!

then you can tell me about it. LOL.

IF I watched it!

and although I have lived in California for 53 years, to this day if I visit my old home town I have the old Bawlamore accent about ten minutes after I get off the plane.

as I haven't lived in NY for a LONG TIME!

She was a waitress in a bar in my small hometown. I was just out of college so I was not too much older than she was. I also knew her mother who worked at my bank. The mother and daughter had recently relocated to my hometown from North Dakota. I guess this girl decided to make a change in her life and pretend to be someone else. I joked with her when she took our drink orders. I asked her how she liked the winters in Fargo. She pretended to not understand what I was talking about. I decided to just let it go, but it sure was strange. (I had met her once in the bank and she did not have a British accent.)

Was that Lawrence Welk's *real* accent?

immigrants. He learned English when he went to school. His parents spoke Germqn at home. Welk could speak without a German accent, but his fans expected it, so he kept it.

My fatber was a first generation American and did not speak much English before he started kindergarten. He and his older siblings made their parents speak in English so their vocabulary would imporove.

I just visited an elderly relative who once spoke 5 languages. She learned German while shexwas working in a forced labor camp in NE Germany during WWII.

I used to think that Mr. Welk was foreign-born, until I read in an almanac that he was born in North Dakota. North Dakota didn't strike me as quite the place to cultivate such an accent, but your explanation puts things into perspective.

He was born on a farm near New Ulm and didn't speak English until he was fourteen. He actually remembers seeing Lawrence Welk before he hit it "big"

I swear that one time, when out with friends and pretty intoxicated, I started talking with a Jamaican accent! I'd probably be embarrassed to play that scene back, maaahn...

When I was watching Hustle, I though no one does that shit! And then I remembered the weird girl.
I bet there are a few hundred people right now in NYC faking accents. I would be amused to see more of this!

I would take the mickey out of me mum's accent

straight face and straight stories for months on end? But I have done it a night, LOL.

sociopath to try to pull off shit like a fake accent, a fake life too in some cases. But really fake, like that 30 year old who pretended to be a HS student, or people who secretly have two families. I cannot understand the motivation for it, it's just so preposterous!

She sounded like a New Yorker trying to sound British. It was awful

I lived in the UK and in India in my early years, and in Kiev in my twenties, and all over the damn place in between. My accent is whatever is being spoken around me (though I cannot mimic the pacing and the flat /a/'s of the Midwest, nor the intrusive /r/ of Northern England and the Yorkshire descendants in Appalachia). If I'm around someone with a commonwealth or Slavic accent, mine shifts towards it. It's unconscious if I don't actively control it.

I can see why the adoption of one would appeal to certain people -- it gives an element of intrigue and control, while allowing for reinvention and setting up all people to be held at a distance.

I revert to Bronx sometimes, when I am pissed off, lol. It just happens.

for the City of Oakland Public Works when I was a teen. One of my co-workers named Kenny had made fun of one of our supervisors, who happened to be a middle-aged Indian guy. When he told Kenny to pick up some pieces of paper, Kenny imitated him in a pseudo-Indian accent "pick up every little piece of paper."
Aside from that, I can't think of anything else. However, I have had people sometimes tell me that I sound like I'm from Texas, even though I'm East Bay born-and-raised.

Most southern women tend to talk fast and high-pitched. Truman Capote originally observed this, but I know it's true. I'm from the south and seen & heard it enough to attest. We may slow down and talk a little slower if we've had a couple of drinkie-poos, yet for the most part, we chatter. I do find an intelligent southern gentleman's drawl quite attractive. Love me some Papantonio!

It might be dependent on what part of the South you're in. In Central Alabama, I know lots of women that drawl worse than I do, and mine is really, really, really bad.

It's why I dodged the threads when people were talking about voice chat of some sort for DU. I didn't want to have the rest of y'all wandering around unable to get "Dueling Banjos" out of your heads for the rest of the day.

I have met a lot of people whose accents have changed over the years - people from Scotland, Jamaica, the UK, etc - whose accents have been toned down/Americanized because they've lived in the US for a number of years. But, they seem to be able to switch back when they're around people from their homeland. I don't know if that's faking, though.

I left Glasgow in 1961 (10 Pound Pom - that's what it cost to emigrate to Australia in those days). Once in Australia, I found that nobody understood a word I said so I quickly developed an Australian accent. But at home we still talked Glaswegian.

A friend once accused me of faking it. I pointed out that she in no way found it strange that (say) Italian immigrants reverted to Italian when speaking to their parents and she would not for a second suggest they were "faking" it. She saw the point of my argument. No, we're not faking it.

I've been back to Glasgow many times. I've actually been complimented on retaining my accent by some of the natives when I tell them I left in 1961. There are a few giveaways. I use the word "cawr" ("aw" as in "awe&quot for "car" which was current then. Modern usage is "motor". But other than that...

My aunt was a keen Scottish country dancer and she once to visit some fellow-dancer friends who had emigrated to Canada. The friends made some cassettes with messages for my mother who they also knew. When we heard them, we said "They sound so Canadian". My aunt said "They thought I sounded Australian".

I work with a guy from Scotland and he was in a Scottish or Irish bar (a lot more Irish pubs in this part of the US than Scottish ones) a few weeks ago, and ran into two guys that grew up a block or two away from him in Glasgow. They didn't know each other, but they had some acquaintances in common.

married to my aunt. Yeah, it's a small country!

could reinvent herself and no one would know. It was back before cell phones, and her job was to answer phones, so of course her friends would find out. No one called her on it directly though, so I guess in a sense it worked. We were all pretty uncomfortable around her after that though.

my best friend and I both got fired from our jobs on the same friday. So we're sitting in our apartment weighing our options and realized we had about 400 bucks saved up for rent. We had to choose between paying rent and having a place to live for the next 4 weeks so we could look for new jobs or blowing it all on a party.


PARTY! We hopped a plane from Dallas to San Antonio (early 80s - it was like 40 bucks each round-trip) and then wandered around the Riverwalk area where I pretended to be a British musician and he was my American manager and tried to pick up girls. Problem was that, while I could mimic British things I'd memorized pretty well (I could run through dozens of Monty Python skits) the minute I had to start carrying on a real conversation for more than a sentence or two I just sounded like an idiot. I couldn't translate on the fly and there just aren't that many conversational opportunities to work in buying cheese and complaining about dead parrots that would appeal to a young lady one is trying to woo.

The young ladies of San Antonio remained un-wooed. But all was not lost - we went back to the hotel and smoked a bunch of weed and went and ate some awesome Mexican food and spent every last dime on food and drink and had a great weekend anyway.

Now that I think about it, if we had just told the women we had weed we probably would have done better in the hook-up department.

We forgot to hold back money for a cab ride to the airport but at least we had the forethought to buy round-trip tickets and the hitch-hike to the airport wasn't so bad.

nonsense. And definately by the weed, HA
Great story!

a typical Nebraskan when I talk, but sometimes other people remark that I have a slight British accent. I don't think I do. If anything, I think I must have a slight speech impediment.

A lifelong friend of mine who married a Brit and has lived in England for 51 years still sounds like a native Nebraskan when she speaks. She returns to the States once a year for a couple of weeks, but that's all. I think it's amazing she hasn't acquired an English accent.

accents. Just love em!

I've got a pretty neutral west-coast US accent, but I've been to a lot of places growing up and while in the Navy; sometimes I'll sound like I've got any number of generic regional US, UK or Central American accents depending on the above.

Now, there was a period of a year or so where I was constantly "on" faking an accent from Vancouver (British Colombia - which I knew well from going there regularly on summer weekend trips and soccer tournaments), but that was when I was my very early 20's, away from home for the first time, and not confident enough to be myself in public.

I'd tend to give young people a pass with the fake accents. They're still trying to find themselves. Older, middle aged professionals - not so much. Faking an accent when one isn't trying to be funny or joking around just makes one seem to be a tool.

Haele

I knew English. I hate meeting people on tours.

They are not "faking" anything; I'd say they like to be understood.

I'm certain they could develop their natural talents as actors (or for deception) but that's not what it's about.

Sadly, my accent seems to be set in concrete. It's not fluid at all.

I have been guilty of that. The faking thing I was thinking of was more along the lines or really faking your homeland, or at least trying to!

This is in the south but we have people from all over, with a huge diversity of accents. Anyway, there's this one outspoken RW jerk who was born and raised in a large northeastern city but speaks with a mild southern drawl, replete with all the isms: "y'all", "I'm fixin to do this....." etc. To my thinking, wishes to ingratiate himself with the racist/redneck/gun-nut crowd.

It's so silly and I break his balls about it from time to time and I know it irritates him that I know damned well his "accent" is an affectation.

... bless his heart.

The kind of fake cowboy who was scared of the sorts of horses my eight year old nieces would get bossy with.

(As young women my nieces are excellent cowboys and attending western ag universities.)

I used to do surveys over the phone and would do it when I was calling Texas to increase cooperation. It worked.

visiting her boyfriend there. It was a god-awful, Irish-Spring-meets-Lucky-Charms-commercial kind of accent, and she claimed "I just picked it up from being there a while."


Two goddamned weeks. And she kept that shit up for at least two years.

going "Green hearts! Yellow Moons! Blue Diamonds! D'ye like dags?" under their breath.

ourselves before it got boring. It was awesome because she HAD to be nice, and not hang up.

Did you know that in the past, actors like Tony RANDELL from Oklahoma divested themselves of their regional accent.

But it's odd when minorities adopt White dialects. I can't explain this. Throwing this out there (probably much to my regret)

a different country or region 24/7 is just bizarre. Reminded me of that woman pretending to be a teenager.

Had this back story and all. He conned this chick into letting him live with her rent free. It was about 5 years before things came crashing down around her. She was supporting him the whole time, even had a child with him. He did go to jail but when he got out he took it up but this time he went to AA which is you know anything about AA is like a dating site. He found another chick to mooch off and he even upgraded, she was a nurse with a purse. She had a pool and all. But his problem there was she came home early one day to find him drunk. She dumped him right quick and put the word out. I actually saw him the other day in a town 10 miles East of here pulling the same shyte. LOL

Shyte is right. Thanks for this!

She'd show up at parties talking to her equally obnoxious, accent-faking friends in this weird pan-European accent of her own invention and go on and on about visiting Italy or Spain or wherever. It took everything I had not to walk up to her and remind her, "You. are. from. CLEVELAND!"

The funny thing is, a friend of mine knew I was a military brat growing up but don't talk about it much, so once, when they started going on and on and ON about having visited Italy for a week or so, asked me, "Hey, Rob, didn't you live in Italy when you were a kid?" I just said, "Yep. Two years in Naples, and when we moved from Naples to Rota, Spain, we drove and camped our way there and saw a lot of cool stuff on the way."

That took the wind out of their sails in a big, big hurry.

she is not English but she continues the accent. This has been going on for 15 years.

I'm not sure what else to say but, wow. I wonder if she's somehow convinced herself that no one knows.

She has this whole thing going like she's in Foyle's War or something. She dresses vintage and always talks about the war and rationing etc. Of course, she likes to imply she's from a certain class. Her family lives back East and from what I understand they ignore her.

I have known a few people with fanatasy personas, but not with an accent to boot. At least... not that I knew of.

just to play with people. I did it with a couple of my friends in high school when we were trying to pick up some girls at the lake. We knew we weren't going to see them again, so we decided to put on accents.

Sometimes I tone down my U.S. accent when I'm in the UK just to order pints, so I don't get the weird looks.

Could do Hampshire, Devon and Manchester.

There was also the Northern Irish Orangeman who put on received pronunciation when he lived in London and the Chinese girls who had to fake a Chinese accent when serving in their parent's take-away.

Because she went to France to learn French and English speakers from all over the world was there to learn French too. She does a convincing southern accent, and I'm from the south so...

As for me, it takes awhile to get my true southern accent back, but I usually speak in a Chicagoland accent well enough that no one can tell I'm from the south. I truly have two different accents...it just depends on which part in the U.S.A. I'm in.

My cousin Gary speaks fairly good Spanish and Euskera. When he went to Spain a few years ago, he tried to fake a Navarrese accent. He was always called 'Amerikanua' 'the American'. They could tell immediately.

Wolf

he developed a bostonian accent during the year and continued with it for many years thereafter.

Back in the '70s I was working in the bar of a large hotel in Virginia. I was walking through the dining room one evening and overheard one of my coworkers, who waited tables there, speaking with his customers. I chuckled, thinking he was sharing a joke with them. Then I heard him speaking the same way with people at another table. After the restaurant closed he came into the bar for a beer before heading home. We often chatted at that hour, so I asked what was up with the funny 'accent'. He gave a little laugh and said something like, "That's right, you're not from here." He then explained that, with many of the hotel customers, if he didn't use the 'accent' he was considered to be "uppity" and wouldn't get tipped. I about got sick. Here was a man with two graduate degrees, working three jobs to support his elderly parents, and he had to talk funny or not get paid.

he has never even been to england and i guess he never will, since he always has an excuse for not going when i mention my trips

at this point i don't think he's faking it so much as it is somehow his accent that he learned off the BBC or something

for the record, i don't see the big deal, why should a person only be allowed to have an accent because of an accident of birth?

if his dream is to be british or if you friend's dream is to be southern, why shouldn't they be able to do that?

To be fair I do see yer point and I mostly agree. Although in the two case I've mentioned here one was a scammer and I think the other has some sort of disorder. I think the scammer is the one that should be cause for concern.