Dick van Dyke ate my accent
Dick van Dyke ate my accent
Jens Peterson is concerned at the hegemony of riksveriga (BBC Swedish, as it were {is there an American equivalent?}) in Swedish film and TV dramas. I'm slightly surprised - Scandinavian countries have a good reputation (inside my head, at least) for tolerating dialect variation. In any case I consider Swedish, Norwegian and Danish to be essentially dialects of North Germanic - a lot of the reason I'm learning Swedish is that there isn't a local Norwegian course - so you'd think people would take a little Sk�ne dialect in their stride.
He then goes on to claim that Anglo-American actors routinely and successfully vary accents as appropriate, which shows that that he hasn't spent a lot of time listening to drama productions on BBC Radio 4, where the American accents are universally dreadful.
He also neglects to single out for the acclaim it so richly deserves the single most astonishing example of an American actor "doing" Cockney - Dick van Dyke in Mary Poppins.
UK film and TV is pretty good at including regional accents these days - a lot of the fun of Rab C Nesbitt is trying to decipher what on earth he's saying - I knew an American woman who could only watch it with subtitles.
Regional accents in authoritative roles - news readers and political commentary, for example - are another matter, but since I haven't really watched TV for five years I'm probably not a reliable source of information on that front.
Lately I've been occasionally listening to
Radio Sweden in the
evenings. It's on medium wave and the reception isn't great and I
barely understand a word, but it is Swedish and they still have those
terrific comedy sing-song accents so who cares? Except last night
when I couldn't understand it at all. Very dispiriting. It
sounded more like Russian than Swedish but with some Swedish
consonants thrown in every once in a while to stop me from giving up
altogether. It turns out, of course, that the station really does
broadcast in Russian, and I was hearing Russian with a strong Swedish
accent. Later they switched to English and I switched off - where's
the fun in that?