seem to have even more extreme accents when a group of them are together in the presence of non Britons?
I tell ya it's almost hysterical backstage and in production at the big rock festivals where you have Americans(East, West and South), Aussies and Kiwis (sorry they sound the same to me, I know they are not), a couple of cats from London, and the usual assortment of Glasgow/Edinburgh lads (there are a lot of Scottish roadies who all seem to make Groundskeeper Willie a model not a stereotype, just like there are a lot of Good-Old Boy Southerner roadies, I'm not sure why - work ethic???) all trying to communicate while obstinately speaking the same language. Hilarity ensues! And the combined force of what your saying - that just having one other Glaswegain there makes them both thicker, and a couple of good old boys reinforce that for each other and so it's all working at cross purposes to get worse, not better. What did Churchill say? Two countries divided by a common language. Its very much that. Except its more like 4 countries divided by a common language.
I think it's all people everywhere. Same deal over here, you get one Southerner - not too bad - you get three and all of sudden you think you're trapped in Gone With the Wind. Four or more Native New Yorkers in a room and it's like being in Yankee Stadium. Add to that the people who are natural mimics (many of whom have a great gift for learning languages because of it). My ex was like that. Take any two or three people speaking in a natural accent, like someone from "'Lanta" or "N'awlins" (the way natives somewhere speak it, differentiated from the way people speak English if its not their first or primary language) and come back 20 minutes later and you can't tell that she wasn't born and raised there. And it wasn't like she was putting on airs or affectations, she did it quite naturally.
Now I can't do it at all. (Can't tune a guitar w/o an oscilloscope either and those two things do go together) Spent decades trying to get that rolled 'r' sound down the way Mexicans and Cholos speak Spanish and Spanglish here before I could do it right.* And I could never get that guttural 'back of the throat' 'ch' sound from Yiddish no matter how much I tried. Too goy. My French (which I know well, fluent in reading) is so bad that French people plead with me to stop trying and really they'd rather speak English if that's what I'm going to do to their mother tongue. I'm a virtual Portsmouth Symphonia of languages. I do the same thing to German in reverse. And I'd get killed in someplace like China because meaning in Chinese is connected with pitch even more than the consonant/vowel sounds, so the same word on the page has radically different meanings in conversation depending on how it is pitched. (In fact since traditional written Chinese is an idiomatic language it didn't even have a consonant/vowel notion until it was superimposed on top of it fairly recently.)
--Actually to the point, somewhat--
And I was wondering if you have a gender deal tied into the class/geography deal with the accents. Like in the US it seems that the lovely lilt and draw that is the deep Southern accent is thought to be very sexy when a female is using it. All soft and slow and sweet y'all. But if a male talks like that it's instant Goober/Gomer Pyle drop the IQ 30 points time. I've always loved women speaking in the heavy Irish accent (I used to go pick my kid up from Montessori way early so I could sit in on story time because one of his teachers was from Dublin and I just loved to hear her read stuff like The Velveteen Rabbit - I'm not even going to tell you what she did to me when she read Winnie the Pooh) but don't care much for how men sound with it - do a lot of men work to change that (like they do in the US, professional males are highly encouraged to drop the heavier parts of the Southern accent - (also the Boston thing and the several New York/Jersey accents - because they are all associated in some way with lower class - even though, of course, we have no classes in America, LOL) in favor of a plain Midwest pronunciation, where girls never do that. Do aspiring young Scotsmen and Irish men try to get rid of that kind of accent when the women do not?
* - It's a very strange thing that's gone down in California during my life. Of course - since they were the original settlers - everything in California (including the world 'California') has Spanish place names, Sierra Nevada, San Jose, Santa Rosa - but when I was growing up they were all pronounced with a very flat Western American English accent, but now I mostly hear them in a Mexican pronunciation/accent - the rolled 'r', Santa as one syllable not two, (ie. not like Santa in Santa Claus) and the very soft Mexican pronunciation of the "J" as more of an English 'H'. In part I think it was because all the home-boys and girls were forever riding our gringo ass about it and correcting our pronunciation going back in the early days of Latino Pride and La Raza in the '60s. And I think there was an effort to do it out of a notion of embracing diversity and our shared heritage and history, a way of emphisising that unlike the East and South, that we are not an Anglo culture out here on the Left Coast, but a Hispanic one. We are most decidedly not NEW England, we are not any sort of England at all. This is Aztlan. And part of that whole Aztlan/Western coming-of-age deal worked to dump the Anglicized version of the place names and replace it with the truer and original Hispanic pronunciations. Still I find it funny from time to time listening to some top-of-the-line highly educated executive or lawyer drop those barrio pronunciations into their sentences like they were low-riding Chicano home-boys straight outta the Mission.
