Chris Blattman

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The British: Good from afar but far from good?

Apologies in advance to the bulldogs in the audience.

The main significant effect found in this study was that people who’d lived at least three months outside the US rated the English accent significantly lower than people who’d only lived in the US. In fact, Americans who had not lived abroad considered the English-accented person to be much more intelligent than themselves, but the people who had lived abroad rated the standard American accent more intelligent than the standard English one.

Source.

I think, specifically, it was my first five minutes of watching British television in Britain that burst the bubble. Turns out, there is so much stuff PBS does not re-broadcast.

h/t MR

13 Responses

  1. Living in the UK since 2009, I am still amazed by the number of dialiects here and how different they are. Once you have mastered the local language, if you move 25 miles, you won’t understand anyone again.
    In the US which is much larger and people live much farther away, a Texan and a New Yorker may speak differently, but they wouldn’t have a problem understainding each other.

  2. Whenever I listen to the British Foreign Secretary William Hague, I have to laugh because of his in-to!-naaation.

    I find English cuter, usually a bit more sophisticated, but I can’t get rid of my slightly Americanized accent. In any case, I am just happy not to have a German accent!

  3. Having lived in both the US and the UK I can say that I much prefer UK television. In response to the above comment, SKY TV is a commercial channel not available without a subscription in the UK. BBC, ITV, and Channel 4 are the main “terrestrial” (but soon to be digital channel). They all broadcast a great deal of decent movies and crimes series (many of which find their way to PBS).

  4. Is this about the English or British? I’d think you’d struggle to tell a Scot he’s got an English accent.

    Sure, we may have a lot of crap (reality TV, grim soaps, property shows), but some of the programmes we produce are the best in the world (thinking natural history for example).

    America produces some fantastic content and I’d pay for HBO if I could get it. Sadly there’s huge amounts of crap on US channels and it’s constantly interrupted by commercials.

    European TV is mostly trash. Swiss is predictably dull and not to point fingers but…Italian TV. Has anyone actually watched it? These are places that watch Eurovision without a hint of irony.

  5. I live in Germany with Sky TV (so a British channel set, a German one, a Polish one, etc), so I only can make comparisons on Canadian vs. German vs. British tv, not American (and canada does stand on its own via canadian content laws). I stand by my own comment about British television, from this perspective. It’s pretty bad. And I’m not talking about the imported stuff.

    Katie Price aka Jordan.

    I think I made my point.

  6. Sorry, but if you were watching British television in Britain, you must have been watching American television (I see that Rahul makes the same point.) We thank the non-Brit, non-Yank Rupert for that.

  7. Kate – Britain is importing all the trash US shows. Jersey Shore has it’s ‘much loved’ local equivalent Geordie Shore.

  8. Quite the opposite for me. I have no illusions about English PEOPLE but after two years here, American accents are starting to sound overly brash and obnoxious (to the point where I’d reflexively rate an American accented speaker as more stupid regardless of what they’re saying). Also, British TV is *incredible* — there are a lot of crap shows, but so many good things that never make out of the country as well. Try to find me a decent, real documentary about anything at all anywhere on American cable, I dare you! The History Channel is basically just “Hitler’s Velociraptors vs. Nostradamus” at this point… I am going to be so upset when iplayer.com starts screening me out based on my IP address!

  9. i remember when I started my PhD in Germany and we had a meeting (german research groups LOVE having these kinds of meetings) that went on for 3 hours to decide which english we would use as a group when doing presentations outside of Germany. i fought the good fight, arguing for British but was surprisingly and woefully outnumbered by my german colleaques who opted for American. No biggie, I have the US accent myself, but it does make a difference esp in Water Resources (groundwater vs. ground water, modeling vs modelling). Obviously thats not the same topic as accents, but I remember being surprised at the preference, given the amount of otherwise anti-american sentiments I hear from academic Germans.

    British television is pretty bad, though. My husband (a Swiss) comments ‘I can’t understand a freaking word’.

  10. “My preferred way of interpreting this (a bit tongue-in-cheek) is that Americans are happy to rate the English as more intelligent than themselves up until they actually start meeting and talking to the English.”

    Yep. Figures.

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