Re: Of accents & dialects

> [mailto:CONLANG@listserv.brown.edu] On Behalf Of Chris Peters
> Don't know of a direct answer to this question.  But I recall
> listening to an audiobook recently (I received it as a
> promotional copy from the publisher -- the title escapes me
> right now.)  The story took place in San Diego, and most of
> the characters were male.  Yet, the voice-actor was a British
> female.  For the most part, she didn't even *try* to imitate
> an American accent when speaking the dialogue.  And when she
> did, what came through sounded like an attempt to fake a
> Southern drawl, which is out of place for California.
I'm still wondering why foreigners tend to sound like Texans when
they try to imitate an American accent.  I'm from California myself,
and remember once a Swedish girls trying to imitate my speech only
to sound more like something from the South, which is about as far
removed from Californian as it gets.