Singers born and bread in London don't have British accents....... We save them for for those that choose to live outside of the City.......:)D
This post was edited by Nice Jugs at January 18, 2018 1:52 PM MST
Some do - The Beatles especially did not lose their Liverpudlian accent - but a lot labour under the strange illusion that because rock, pop and much popular music styles originated in America, the diction in such styles or when performing songs written by Americans, has to sound American too.
I don't know what some of them with this affectation sound like to American listeners - probably as gruesome as Dick van Dyke sounded to us Britons when he played a "Mockney" chimney-sweep in Disney's travesty of the Travers children's story, Mary Poppins!
Ahem.. WE don't have accents.. everyone else does.. :P But aside from that.. few people sound either American or British when they sing.... what gives people away are if they don't pronounce things properly or if they use words that are specific to one country.. like my repeated posts of Beautiful south vids lately ... they probably DO sound Brit as they use specific Brit terms.
They don't try to. They sing to the pronunciation, but that's probably true of all opera singers singing in languages not their own. I have a heard a lot of the broadcasts from the Metropolitan Opera House, New York*, and the cast for such events would be mainly American with some foreign signers. Among the credits at the end is always a voice-coach for the particular opera's one language, but the aim is to pronounce the lyrics properly within the limits set by the physical difficulty of doing so at the extremes of pitch, not to try to sound like a native Italian, French or German.
* (These performances are relayed in Britain by BBC Radio Three, via an arrangement with the European Broadcasting Union, an international exchange scheme instigated 50 years ago by the BBC.) X
There is no "British" sound. The British Isles are homes to dozens of accents and dialects, including one accent that is nobody's native speech, called "received pronunciation". That is the accent used by news readers. Here are samples of some (not all) of the accents:
The first bit is true, Jewels, but not the second. Not nowadays. British news readers, continuity-announcers, sports commentators and presenters generally have not used "Received Pronunciation" for decades. There may be the occasional one with a Home County accent, but otherwise the last announcer and news-reader I both recall and have heard in archive recordings using RP, was probably Alvar Liddel, who started his career in the 1930s and retired in the 1960s!
The modern ones speak clearly, which is what matters. Most would sound to a Northerner generically mid-Southern English, but that accent is not RP or its base accent, that of the Home Counties to the West of Greater London. Listen carefully and you often hear in some, at least traces of their native areas far away from London.
Actually you don't really notice your own accent in your home area where everyone else sounds the same as you. You only notice clearly that of others - at one time, in some regions, even if from only ten miles away! My own is Southern to anyone North as I am a South Coast native and resident, but I have generic accent and dialect influences from Midlands parentage and friends "Oop North", and some fellow Southerners notice it. It means for example I might visit the city of 'Bath' not 'Barth', or the local hill-fort of 'Maiden Castle', not "Maiden Carstle".
[Edited to correct a typo.]
This post was edited by Durdle at January 19, 2018 4:23 PM MST
No I didn't! I said you were right about the country's range of accents, but pointed out that BBC presenters no longer use the artifice of Received Pronunciation, that's all!
Much as you perceive it so... received pronounciation as you put is isn't an accent.. it's really not even a thing anymore.. A more realistic thing to say is that there is a form of standardised English... generally speaking middle England.. but yes there are accents within that - just as there are in pretty much every other country. News readers now no longer conform to exact pronounciation that you refer to.. that was always a rather artifical thing and was more to do with class than dialect.
WM BARR . =ABSOLUTE TRASH 