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[b]Holly2003 wrote:[/b] Not everyone speaks like Fred and Brian. If you don't know who he is, look up ex-footballer (in the loosest sense of the term), now Hollywood actor, "Vinnie Jones" on Youtube :)[/QUOTE]
Yes, those Cockneys have the opposite problem. They say things like "Good morning" or "Have a lovely day" and people burst into tears. :)
Really though, the breadth and depth of the accent variants in Great Britain and the two Irelands is quite amazing. In Canada, there is a remarkable lack of virtually anything distinct in the speech patterns from the Ontario/Quebec border all the way to the west coast. That's nearly 5000 km of people (about 30 million of them) who sound virtually identical. There is Quebec, naturally, and some regional variation in the most eastern provinces, but nothing like even the United States and certainly nothing like the UK or Ireland. As an aside, I was watching Piers Morgan the other night and he had Rosie O'Donnell as a guest, and she did was he claimed was a horrible English accent, and responded with what I can only believe must have been a more horrible attempt at an American accent. When I hear average people trying to 'do' Canadian/American accents it's always rather grotesquely flattened and a bit of an exaggeratedly nasal mess. Hopefully we don't actually sound like that to the rest of the world!
GratefulFan