Re:Ask HN: Is there a pan-English accent?
by notahacker on Monday September 28, 2015 @07:02AM
(#10289783)
As a Brit, I'd say "General American" would be regarded by most English speakers as the most neutral accent, being the most widely spoken and most influential in media.
Us Brits might have conceived the idea of "received pronunciation" as a location-free English accent and exported it via international schools (though South Africa is the only place I can think of with non-trivial numbers of people whose accent is defined more by RP-norms than local norms), but in practice, very few people speak anything resembling the traditional RP, an accent most Britons would see as glaringly indicative of some combination of the speaker's private-schooling, age and pretentiousness. The southern (or subtly southern-ised) English accents that are most predominant in British run media are quite starkly different from traditional "RP" or "Oxford English" in terms of pronunciation and perceived social prestige.
Us Brits might have conceived the idea of "received pronunciation" as a location-free English accent and exported it via international schools (though South Africa is the only place I can think of with non-trivial numbers of people whose accent is defined more by RP-norms than local norms), but in practice, very few people speak anything resembling the traditional RP, an accent most Britons would see as glaringly indicative of some combination of the speaker's private-schooling, age and pretentiousness. The southern (or subtly southern-ised) English accents that are most predominant in British run media are quite starkly different from traditional "RP" or "Oxford English" in terms of pronunciation and perceived social prestige.