I am english, I can understand americans fine in movies, tv and on social media but some reason Irl the accent is so much harder to understand, sometimes ive not even recognised the speaker was american?

35 comments

  1. We have a lot of regional dialects just like the UK. TV tends to use a particular one, but not all of us sound like that.

  2. Probably because there is more than just one dialect we speak here, and normal people aren’t actors who are trained to speak clearly.

  3. >sometimes ive not even recognised the speaker was american?

    just curious, where did you guess the accents were from if not the US?

  6. On the contrary, I can’t reiterate how disappointing it was to discover that brits are more likely to sound like Ali G than Harry Potter.

  7. I’m curious what movies you understand but can’t get the regional pronunciation from locals with the accent portrayed. Like what IRL Americans do you have trouble with?

    I’m tempted to get on vocaroo and show you how stupidly understandable my flat Midwest accent is.

  9. In either news or fictional media, you have people trained in clear speech and to speak in a way that is considered “neutral” and easily understood by the most people possible. Most regular people are not trained beyond some basic presentation training in school and at work, but default to a more casual style in day to day life. The same thing is pretty universally true; I definitely have experienced that in the UK but also in basically every other place. If you’re not used to hearing the day to day speech of people from a given place, and are mainly hearing media designed to communicate something or entertain, it takes time to adjust.

  10. Actors have a level of diction that most Americans do not. This is pushed in acting classes and schools because speaking clearly is a huge part of the craft

  11. Hmm, can you give me an example of some shows/actors/characters etc you like and find understandable (especially with like a variety of accents) to give me a better idea of what you’re talking about?

  12. Adapting to the cadence of a different accent is often harder than dealing with the difference in sounds. Our brains are wired to expect a certain pattern and emphasis and when that is thrown off we get jumbled up

  13. Lots of regional accents that aren’t shown as much on TV, not to mention people on TV tend to talk more clearly specifically to be understood

  14. Actors don’t get very far if they can’t speak clearly. Successful actors are unusually good at enunciating compared to the general population. The same is true in Britain.

  15. This goes both ways. And to be fair there are some accents here in the US that if you’ve never heard are extremely difficult to understand. I was on a road trip up the East Coast from Florida to Maine, some of the people from Maine had the strangest accent. I overheard some guys in a little coffee shop talking with each other and for a while I thought they were possibly speaking Dutch

  16. This goes both ways. And to be fair there are some accents here in the US that if you’ve never heard are extremely difficult to understand. I was on a road trip up the East Coast from Florida to Maine, some of the people from Maine had the strangest accent. I overheard some guys in a little coffee shop talking with each other and for a while I thought they were possibly speaking Dutch

  17. Regional Dialects is the reason why. For example in the south, a party is called a “hootnanny” and You all is “Y’all!” I actually say Y’all a lot.

  18. We have many regional accents that are nearly as distinct as the Midwest accent vs British accent. I am an American and do find some people from different regions to be hard to understand sometimes. Research has been done on this topic and the accent found in the Upper-Midwest region of the US has been rated by non-native English speakers as being the most easy to understand and the most pleasant sounding variation of spoken English amongst all the major global variations.

    I once told a fellow beachgoer that I only speak English when he was apparently asking me about the weather in English but with an Australian accent. Lol. Felt like a fool after that one.

  19. Actors typically use a more generic accent, unless their character is supposed to be from an accent-heavy location.

  20. NGL I’m an American citizen and I’ve heard some folks from Appalachia, Louisiana, and off the coast of Maryland and couldn’t understand a damn word.

    First time in the midwest I had a cashier ask me if I’d like my “pop in a sack.”

    One of my girlfriends from back in the day had an accent where LADDER and LIGHTER were indistinguishable.

  22. Just regional accents I guess. I had some beers with guys from some northeastern area of England and I struggled to understand a bit of what they said even though I can understand perfectly what they’re saying on BBC.

  23. You know it’s funny we do have a manner of speaking. When I came to this country at ten years old from Ireland I was sort of flummoxed sometimes by what my classmates were saying. A decade later tho when I was studying in Russia my fellow American students and I realized that if we used enough American slang even Russians who spoke English wouldn’t know what we were saying.

  24. This reminds me of the Hell’s Kitchen episode when the maitre d was struggling to understand one of the contestants and Ramsey confronted him and said “What do you mean there’s a language barrier? He’s speaking English!” And the maitre d says “Yeah, but he’s from Texas.” And Ramsey just walks away laughing.

  25. It’s well known people on tv usually have a Midwest accent, unless they have the standard Country accent.

    Americans think of a Midwestern accent and being No Accent

  27. I’m not American but Australian. I’ve travelled to the US a lot. Been through California, Florida, Tennesee, Georgia and Louisiana mostly. I don’t find Americans hard to understand generally in any of their accents. The only time I has trouble is when some of them speak really fast. And I can’t tell when one word ends and the next begins.

    This has only been the case with about 20% of Americans I’ve spoken to. But the “speaking so fast that words all blur into one” thing isn’t something I’ve encountered as much back home in Aus.

    My partner is American and she’s shocking for it. Sometimes I need to actually ask her how many words she said or if she said multiple words or just one long one as it all just blurs together.

  28. I can understand a London accent in movies but then I went to Edinburgh Scotland and I could not understand my cab driver *at all.*

  29. Can’t speak for anyone else, but if someone can’t understand me, it’s prob cause I am mumbling or speaking too quietly. I don’t do it intentionally. I just don’t really feel comfortable talking most of the time.

  30. The accent you hear on television and in movies is typically a Midwestern one. I live in roughly the center of the country and we have a lot of customer support call centers here for that reason.

    Most of the folks who travel abroad are from the east coast, think New York and Boston. Or from the West Coast, LA, SF, etc.

    While I grew up in the Midwest, and my father did as well, my grandparents were hillbillies. Family reunions were tricky when it came to communication. But I could at least understand my grandparents enough that I could get by.

    https://youtu.be/03iwAY4KlIU?si=6DfeX8jikvVQjKEs

  31. > I can understand americans fine in movies, tv and on social media

    That’s because communication is the point in those media. Especially in a controlled environment like movies and TV filmed in-studio, it’s really easy to mic a guy up and do post-production work to make him sound clean

    There are some shows (mostly reality shows) where they may subtitle certain folks from the sticks if their accents are particularly difficult to understand

  32. Hollywood is going to prioritize speakers who sound neutral and the preference for a certain kind of accent in Hollywood has exposed you extensively to them, making it easier for you to understand the accents that Hollywood pushes forward.

    When you start encountering different accents that Hollywood hasn’t exposed you to, such as Southern accents (which are often used to portray stupid, ignorant or evil characters in movies).

    As an example, someone posted on a main sub a skit involving a Southern cop. The exchange begins with the cop asking why the person was speeding and then ends with the cop asking if the guy has any guns, when he says no the cop says to wait and he’ll go grab him one.

    I understood the entire skit. But many, many, many, many comments on that post were expressing confusion at what was being said.

    There are over 30 dialects of English spoken in the US. There is one, High Tide English, that sounds almost, as the BBC described it: “-like someone took Elizabethan English, sprinkled in some Irish tones and 1700s Scottish accents, then mixed it all up with pirate slang.”

    And that’s probably where your difficulty in understanding Americans IRL. Because Hollywood has exposed you to a certain type of dialect, you’ve learned to understand that specific way of speaking. And Hollywood prioritizes clear documents and “neutral” accents. If we were going to talk about it like food, Hollywood wants inoffensive food. There’s nothing special to write home about it, but there’s nothing wrong with it, either. It just exists.

    On top of that, actors have as many chances as they need to nail a line 100%. Natural speech is never going to be as clear as movie speech. No one is belting a perfect line of dialogue IRL. Any extended speaking is inevitably going to have some sort of filler in it as our brains try to organize what we think.

  33. Amusingly, the Boston accent was recently ranked [the most annoying accent](https://www.highlandtitles.com/blog/global-accent-battle/) to Americans lol.

    I’m from the west coast (where California/Hollywood is), and people out here are told by foreigners that we “sound like people on tv” when we travel. Lots of people who want to become “influencers” move to California in an effort to become famous, so that might account for a lot of people you see on youtube/tiktok – not just because they *are* here, but because they are trying to *mimic* people who are here.

    People with more “regional” (that is.. less familiar to outsiders) accents don’t have such a global presence. They can be hard to understand even to other Americans. I personally could barely understand (that is… i stared for a long while till they slowed down) some people in West Virginia and Louisiana. Around large cities and tourist-heavy areas it’s easy, but random gas stations and grocery stores? Lol good luck

  34. You see, we colluded with the Native Americans to make our place names as unpronounceable as possible for yall Brits, just try to say Chickamauga

  35. If you learn literally any language in the world, you’ll find that people in movies and podcasts and what-not are way easier to understand than in real life. I’m sure part of that is the standard accent, with standard pronunciation, by something intentionally enunciating, and I’m sure having the mic at the right spot and doing the audio mixing right helps, too.

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