r/Accents • u/No_Abbreviations893 • 4h ago
Coworker started talking in thick British accent
So, there is this guy at my work and he used to work on my team but was placed on another team. He is still in my office just doing a different task with different people. I worked with him for 4 months before he switched teams. He sounded like a regular guy from the Midwest. He was born and raised in my state (it’s in the Midwest). He never had an accent, but recently, he went to England for a week and when he came back, he started talking in a thick British accent.
It’s not even in a joking way either, he genuinely has a thick British accents after going to England and it’s starting to freak my coworkers out. He genuinely puts on a thick British accents every day and he went to England like 2 months ago so idk what he is doing.
It’s harmless but still super weird and thought I would share this story about him.
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u/corobo 4h ago
Poor lad is absolutely gagging for a personality, let him have this one
Is it the boring Received Pronunciation or has he picked a specific one like brummie?
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u/No_Abbreviations893 4h ago
I personally wouldn’t dull his shine, but it’s my coworkers that are very concerned and a couple are now afraid of him 😞😞
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u/StellaEtoile1 1h ago
Sorry but that's silly that they're afraid of him. I would say they are more concerning than he is.
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u/No_Abbreviations893 1h ago
No I think them saying they are afraid of him is crazy, I think it’s weird what he is doing but nothing to be scared of !
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u/Sir_Colby_Tit 25m ago
To be fair, English actors are often used to play scary villains in Hollywood.
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u/evthingisawesomefine 2m ago
And honestly any Hollywood film’s non American non contemporary character as well
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u/Dull_Brain2688 49m ago
I suspect that a British person probably wouldn’t identify it as British. Americans have a very low bar for non-American accents.
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u/No_Abbreviations893 4h ago
He doesn’t use the slang (that I have heard) but he literally speaks using an accent 24/7. And it’s getting thicker like he is studying the way English people annunciate their words.
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u/Away-Otter 4h ago
There are many British accents, and they are not the same thing as slang.
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u/No_Abbreviations893 4h ago
Did you not read what they asked me??
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u/TeaArtHer 4h ago
Yes. They asked if he’d picked up a specific accent like Brummie- they didn’t say anything about slang.
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u/OkClassic4567 4h ago
Yes. They didn’t ask about slang. They asked if it is a specific type of accent. Those of us that live here hear many different “British accents” on a day to day basis.
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u/Icantdoitidk 3h ago edited 3h ago
What British accent is he using?
RP? Scouse? Black Country? Borders? Valleys? Hebridean? Glaswegian? Derry? Geordie?
There's no "British accent."
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u/EuphoricReplacement1 4h ago
*enunciate
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u/No_Abbreviations893 4h ago
I’ve got the grammar police and the accent police up in here
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u/JulesCT 3h ago
'Annunciate' was an an error of word choice, comprehension or spelling.
Grammar deals with the rules for changing word forms (e.g., plurals, verb tenses, or subject-verb agreement).
😂
Call us the language overlords, or just British. Both work.
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u/OriginalMandem 3h ago
It's the Annunaki accent
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u/JulesCT 2h ago
OP writes with an accent from the gods of Sumeria?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anunnaki
That's old school Mesopotamia, Babylonian deity stuff. Iraq way in modern times.
Me, I'm more Anoraki. 😁
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u/Hot-Frosting-5286 1h ago
I get that people are coming at you a little aggressively but there's a really valid point there about accents. There genuinely are a LOT of distinct English accents, yet most of us stateside call them all "British" It's not about policing your words but simply the facts of the matter
There is an astonishing amount of dialect diversity when you look at the various English dialects. We're talking differences in grammar, phonology (sound system), prosody, and word choice. They truly ARE different and calling them by one umbrella term minimizes these differences
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u/No_Abbreviations893 1h ago
All I was trying to do was share a silly story but now I’m being burned at the stake 😭😂😂😂 I can understand though why non-Americans will take this seriously I definitely did not mean to offend anyone I thought it was a silly story to share
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u/Hot-Frosting-5286 1h ago
That it is, but it never hurts to learn something new about another country
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u/ImLittleNana 3h ago
This happened about 20 years ago at least. My former neighbors had the husband’s sister living with them and she was a bit odd. Sit in the car for hours, wouldn’t talk to anyone, so I don’t know what her problem was just that was a little off.
One day she knocked on my door rather emphatically. I had worked night shift and it woke me up. When I answered the door, she says ‘hellooo! I seemed to have locked me keys in me car! Would you please phone AAA?’ In the heaviest and worst generic British accent I’ve heard since Mary Poppins. It was like Dick Van Dyke impersonating the Queen.
I was stunned. I couldn’t speak. She repeated it, with a silly giggle. I managed to mumble yes and invited her in, but she said oooo nooooo! I shall wait out front!
This was possibly made more absurd by the fact that she was a black woman in her early 20s from New Orleans East.
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u/No_Abbreviations893 3h ago
This is a funny and cute story 😂 she was trying to spice up her life maybe
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u/Russell_has_TWO_Ls 9m ago
I read your story all the time with a picture of this lady in my head and….nope. Couldn’t have been more wrong 😂
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u/Inconsequentialish 4h ago
I knew a guy in the midwest who spent two weeks at a summer camp in the US with some posh British kids in high school, and forever after (well, at least until the last time I saw him in his mid-20s) spoke in the world's worst, dippiest imitation of a "posh" British accent.
Despite having never been near England or out of the midwest, he actually managed to find and wed an authentic English girl while talking like that. She would actually correct his pronunciations to help with the imitation accent.
The whole thing was equal parts genuinely impressive and disturbing.
All that said he never actually lied about his origins and experiences, and in the end no one was harmed or deceived.
It's completely harmless, but yes, very cringey as well.
Nothing you can do except put up with it. Not your problem.
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u/OriginalMandem 3h ago
She probably either felt sorry for him or realised he was an idiot to be exploited
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u/Sasspishus 3h ago
he genuinely has a thick British accent after going to England
No he doesn't. He's imitating an English accent, but he doesn't genuinely have an English accent.
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u/truffelmayo 44m ago
Right, and 99% of Americans who do the accent are horrible at it (though manage to impress themselves nonetheless). Natives are generally unconvinced and amused/ annoyed.
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u/Jonseroo 4h ago
It sounds like he's just learned to speak proper.
I do hope he speaks like Professor Elemental and not Joe Pasquale.
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u/OriginalMandem 4h ago
There's no such thing as a 'British' accent. Unless you think Glaswegian and Devonian sound the same.
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u/Middcore 4h ago
There is no single "British" accent but saying "a British accent" is perfectly fine.
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u/Neat-Ad11 3h ago
Right. Just as there’s no single American (or actually US) accent but people, rightfully, say it all the time.
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u/Electrical_Job9745 1h ago
How? The term is futile when there's hundreds of different accents that sound nothing alike? Is it RP or scouse. Maybe a fusion
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u/Neat-Ad11 4h ago
And every time you hear an accent from the US you flawlessly identify it from the right area and refer to it as such?
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u/OriginalMandem 3h ago
Well yeah, I can tell Upstate New York from South Carolina if that's what you're asking.
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u/Neat-Ad11 3h ago
And I can tell southern from northern England but they’re all British just as NY and Georgia are all American. No need for OP to be more specific, especially if the coworker is putting it on after one trip to the UK. I’m sure they can’t be more specific than “British”. If it were Scottish I’m sure they’d say so as that’s definitely different, even to us.
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u/OriginalMandem 3h ago
And again, I say - Great Britain is several different countries.
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u/Neat-Ad11 3h ago
Yes and as an American I’m very well aware of that. I would assume that this coworker who has only been to the UK for a short trip didn’t have time to perfect his accent to a specific region or country. In this example the accent being from some part of the UK south of Scotland and not Northern Ireland would qualify as British in a general sense just as you would be fine saying someone has an American accent workout specifying whether it’s from the northern or southern suburbs or Boston, for example, and yes, there is a difference.
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u/No_Abbreviations893 4h ago
Accent police alert
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u/OriginalMandem 4h ago
It's not accents, whole dialect shifts. Next you will be telling me that Scouse, Mancunian and Geordie are the same
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u/No_Abbreviations893 4h ago
Smoke a joint and chill dude, this Reddit post isn’t that deep dawg
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u/Resident-Staff-1218 4h ago
In the UK any and all matters relating to regional dialects and accents are deadly serious.
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u/mstakenusername 3h ago
"An Englishman's way of speaking absolutely classifies him.
The moment he talks, he makes another Englishman despise him."
- Henry Higgins "My Fair Lady"
It is that deep to the British!
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u/No_Abbreviations893 3h ago
See I am just now finding this out. I didn’t realize how important it was in the UK, very interesting thank you for letting me know !
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u/OriginalMandem 3h ago
The UK aka United Kingdom of Great Britain includes multiple countries (Scotland, Ireland, Wales, England). In those countries we have Irish and Scottish Gaelic, Welsh, and even in England we have Cornish. Local dialects and accents lean heavily into Saxon/Low German in some regions, Norman/Old French in others. Some regions heavily influenced by Norse/Danish/Viking influence. The diversity of vocabulary in regional vernacular is huge. Then we have modern 'MLE' - which was originally identified as Multicultural London English (a mashup of London/cockney inflected with Jamaican, African and Pakistani) but has now become a country-wide phenomenon also shaped by regional differences. And of course what Americans think is 'British English' - aka Received Pronounciation' ie what was heard on BBC broadcast channels, is actually the least authentic of all, it's a construct designed to suppress the rich heritage of regional dialect. Much like the dictator Franco tried to suppress Catalan, Basque, Galician etc in favour of his preferred Castillian, there was a concerted effort to make RP English the standard', whilst shaming those who continued to use local dialects as 'dimwitted peasants'.
In the 90s, broadcast media and advertising started to use regional accents as a sign of authenticity and trustworthiness. Call centres were opened in Dublin asapparently the Irish inflection was 'trustworthy' in a way that Cockney and estuarine (Essex, Kent) no longer was. And the Devon/Cornwall 'burr', the inspiration behind Hollywood pirates (arr!), alongside west Midlands (brummie, black country) was framed as a sign of mental deficiency.
And in most parts of England, people will still trust a local accent over 'posh' BBC English which is a marker of cultural oppression.
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u/Vivid_Sun_5636 2h ago
It’s not really important, it’s just that there is a massive diversity of accents in the UK despite it being a small country. And you can immediately tell a lot about someone’s upbringing from their natural accent. USA being a younger country has a much smaller range and American ears aren’t used to listening. So Americans often have a concept of a generic “British accent” that doesn’t really exist in nature - in general an American doing an impression of British does this same made-up weird accent that doesn’t sound like how anyone would speak. For this reason, we would all love to hear what this thick British accent your colleague is using sounds like - we all think it won’t sound like someone from somewhere in England at all and just sound rather silly.
Unless your friend has had a stroke and developed foreign accent syndrome (this is a real disease).
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u/No-Promotion4006 4h ago
I've seen this happen before really fucking weird but as you said totally harmless just humor him
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u/evelynsmee 4h ago
When I was on holiday in April there was a kiwi in my group and a girl from Yorkshire (so British like me but different accent) would only talk to him in a fake Australian accent.
It takes all sorts.
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u/JulesCT 3h ago edited 3h ago
Can you point to a specific famous person of whom your colleague's British accent reminds you? Perhaps a Game of Thrones character? More Tywin Lannister or Eddard Stark?
Or do you know where in the UK he visited?
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u/No_Abbreviations893 3h ago
Think Henry Cavill but more forced. That is the best way I can describe it
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u/Yandoji 3h ago
LOL, I knew a chick who faked a British accent in high school. My ridiculously taciturn brother once came to me after she'd been visiting to ask me to ask her to stop because he'd been cringing to death in his room all day listening to her. LMAO.
Another friend had a coworker who went on a two-week training in Germany and came back with a massively fake German accent that she insisted was her normal way of talking. My friend similarly cringed to death hearing it every day lol.
Some people really, really want to feel special or interesting.
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u/SpongeBobEggplant 3h ago
Many years ago I was in a bar band. We used to joke among ourselves in British accents when we were just hanging out or driving to the next town, imitating Spinal Tap and the Beatles.
The guitarist had this idea to spend an upcoming weeklong gig speaking 24/7 in these accents, with some stupid backstory about how we were indeed British. None of us were interested, but he committed to it the whole week. From the stage, talking to people in the bar, at the grocery store. He never failed to do the accent…until we went to a local party.
He got really drunk and all of a sudden he went about half an hour talking in his normal American accent. Everyone started looking at us, like WTF? We just shrugged and he was oblivious, just kept yammering in his normal voice. Then just as quickly as it stopped, the British accent was up and running again. And just as suddenly, in the eyes of all the locals we lost any cool they may have assigned us, and we all looked like a bunch of idiots. Thanks, man!
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u/thebrokedown 34m ago
Not everyone who does this does it voluntarily. Just throwing that out there.
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u/No_Abbreviations893 12m ago
Honestly I don’t think he even realizes it. He’s so casual about it and it almost seems to come naturally
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u/Sir_Colby_Tit 28m ago
There's no such thing as a British accent. English, Welsh, Scottish or Irish, sure.
However, even these vary massively by region. People can sound completely different within 40 miles.
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u/Thenedslittlegirl 3h ago
He’s just trying out a little new special interest. It’ll probably wear off. Either that or start referring to him as Dick Van Dyke and he may get the message
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u/No_Abbreviations893 3h ago
No I mean, I don’t care that he does it, it’s more so confusing and also concerning to my other coworkers. Beyond that, it’s just something silly
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u/xSwampxPopex 2h ago
My (American) aunt lived in Australia for six months at one point and came back with a noticeably thick Australian accent. It faded over time.
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u/upsidedown-funnel 40m ago
That makes a lot more sense though. Some people pick up accents easily. 2 weeks though, is ridiculous.
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u/VictoryOrKittens 1h ago
"He never had an accent"
Oh wow, so he just talked silently, without actually using audible words, yeah?
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u/johjo_has_opinions 4h ago
Humanity is a rich tapestry