Why are so many young Americans adopting fake British accents?

Re:Why are so many young Americans adopting fake British acc... by eth0up on Monday May 15, 2023 @07:04AM (#35946315)

Why have Americans always been unable to pronounce the intervocalic T?

Bread and budder? WTF?

I'm an author; I love horseback writing?

I'm tired of wading for the flood?

I want to ride my modercycle?

It's so pervasive that we really ought to update our dictionaries to replace these, now phantom, "t"s with proper "d"s. Think of it as antipsychotics for a batshit crazy language.

I'm American. But this has always been annoying, along with most of the eN language.

To cast a cynical eye on the bright side; it seems both the "t" and "d" will soon be obsolete as the entire eN language is refined to tonal variations of our most common word/punctuation/expression/noise, "like".

I may be mistaken, but I believe there's evidence that new humans are forming a "like-gland". The sound will become as natural and necessary as that of frogs bleating* after rain.

*Yes, bleating, not bleeding.

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Re:Why are so many young Americans adopting fake British acc... by ndsipa_pomu on Monday May 15, 2023 @07:40AM (#35946609)

Reminds me of going into a shop while visiting the U.S. and trying to buy some batteries. The employee struggled with my english accent, so I had to try to explain what batteries where. He eventually understood and exclaimed "oh, badderies!".

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Re:Why are so many young Americans adopting fake British acc... by t-3 on Monday May 15, 2023 @09:40AM (#35947986)

I highly doubt the t's were the issue. Different stress, more pronounced articulation/less syllable smoothing, and vowel pronunciation are more likely culprits. It's very hard for the speaker to hear, but very noticeable to everyone else (seen this many times trying to get people to pronounce Finnish words like sauna or Helsinki correctly, they can't hear the difference).

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Re:Why are so many young Americans adopting fake British acc... by yamtaddle on Monday May 15, 2023 @10:17AM (#35948527)

I've got a friend with a story from his high school job at a retail store, about his having to translate for the other workers so they could figure out WTF this British guy was asking for.

"Batcheries"

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Why are so many young Americans adopting fake British acc... by tgv on Monday May 15, 2023 @09:42AM (#35948018)

The t can also disappear. I've heard people say "twenny" instead of "twenty". Perhaps because "twendy" sounds more like Elmer Fudd giving Bugs Bunny decoration advice.

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Re:Why are so many young Americans adopting fake British acc... by qbrass on Monday May 15, 2023 @10:01AM (#35948256)

It's from Scandinavian immigrants influencing the accent. It's why Minnesota is pronounced with a "d" sound.

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Re:Why are so many young Americans adopting fake British acc... by danans on Monday May 15, 2023 @10:02AM (#35948281)

> Why have Americans always been unable to pronounce the intervocalic T?

> Bread and budder? WTF?

In this and most cases there isn't really another word that would fit in context. Also plenty of other dialects (i.e. Australian English) do exactly the same thing.

> I'm an author; I love horseback writing?

I'm this case, "riding" and "writing" have a marked difference in the length of the initial diphthong sound "ai".

I general American English is nowhere near the most ambiguous in this way. Many languages rely more heavily on context because they use ambiguous phonological and grammatical marking in common speech (i.e. spoken Japanese).

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