What the Hell Is That Accent?: Difference between revisions

[[File:Accent 1795.gif|link=The Last Days of Foxhound|frame]]

{{quote|'''Venkman:''' ''"Where the '' hell ''are you from, Johnny?"''

 

This Trope often comes in two forms but leaves the audience asking one question: '''What the Hell Is That Accent?'''

 

Not to be confused with [[Not Even Bothering with the Accent]] where a character is supposed to be from Country Y but sounds just like the rest of the cast. May overlap with [[Just a Stupid Accent]] or [[As Long as It Sounds Foreign]]. If the accent ''starts'' recognizable but then inexplicably jumps on a cross-country road trip, then it's [[Ooh, Me Accent's Slipping]].

{{examples}}

== [[Advertising]] ==

* One GEICO commercial showed some people who were confused as to whether the Gecko's accent is British or Australian. The commercial cuts away just before he answers.

 

** Not to mention Chad/Yuuichirou's... surfer accent?

* The English dub for ''[[Yu Yu Hakusho]]'' has Jin, who speaks in [[So Bad It's Good|such a hilariously bad]] Irish accent, he's sometimes impossible to understand.

 

== [[Film]] ==

* [[Angelina Jolie]] as Olympias in [[Oliver Stone]]'s ''[[Film/Alexander|Alexander]]''. The intent was for her to have a vaguely foreign accent in order to accentuate her exotic "barbarian" nature. Historically, she came from Epirus, which is right near modern-day southern Albania, making this rather well-researched in terms of transferring accents.

* Poor [[Christian Bale]] in ''[[Newsies]]'' actually does a pretty decent New York accent. Only, New York has a lot of accents. Bale doesn't so much not pick one as pick all of them. Most of the other actors don't pick any of them at all.

* Ernest Stavro Blofeld when he was played by Donald Pleasance in ''[[You Only Live Twice]]''.

* [[Nicolas Cage]] in ''[[Vampire's Kiss]]'' appears to affecting [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfcJUl39iiA something between California surfer accent and that of an English gentleman] (when it's not [[Ooh, Me Accent's Slipping|slipping]]). What it ''actually'' is meant to be is hotly contested. Cage explained that the accent is supposed to be a nonsensical affectation that Loew uses to seem cultured and to impress others.

* Edna Mode from ''[[The Incredibles]]'' has a... German/Japanese accent, which forced Brad Bird to play the role himself, as no one else could do the accent properly.

* The title character in ''[[Coffy]]'' uses a rather strange accent when [[Dirty Harriet|posing as a prostitute]].

* [[Kiefer Sutherland]] may have found out what happened to his girlfriend in the remake of ''[[The Vanishing]]'', but no one has ever been to find out where the heck Jeff Bridges' character was supposed to be from. France? Belgium? Holland?

* [[Paul Rudd|Peter Klaven]] in ''[[I Love You, Man]]''. All of his accents have the same, vaguely leprechaunish quality, and other characters routinely call him out on it. [[Catch Phrase|Slappa da bass!]]

* Russell Crowe gives us a strange blend of Welsh, Irish and a bit of Scottish in the 2010 ''[[Robin Hood (2010 film)]]''. He's been known to stop interviews when asked about it.

* Kate Beckinsale and her apparently Transylvanian accent in ''[[Van Helsing]]''. Strangely we hear some American pronunciations in there when Beckinsale herself is British.

* ''[[Belizaire The Cajun]]'' (a 1986 low-budget film starring Armand Assante) has this problem for purely historical reasons. Most of the characters are Cajuns (Louisianans of French-Canadian descent) in 1850s Louisiana, but their accents evoke an unlikely mishmash of ethnicities from all over Europe and the Americas (one of the characters sounds almost Hispanic/Latino at one point, while Belizaire himself edges close to what sounds like a Scottish accent in one scene). This discrepancy can be attributed to two things: one, most North Americans have never heard an authentic Cajun accent and/or have a stereotyped idea of what it sounds like; and two, the Cajuns really ''were'' a multi-ethnic and even multi-racial people, despite primarily speaking French.

* Peter MacNicol as Janosz Poha in ''[[Ghostbusters|Ghostbusters II]]'' provides the page quote. He's supposedly Hungarian, but his accent lurches all over Eastern Europe like a drunk in a Yugo. Since his name doesn't have any real country of origin, it's just a nonspecific wacky accent, which MacNicol developed by hanging out at the Romanian consulate in New York.

* When auditioning for his part in ''[[No Country for Old Men]]'', Javier Bardem attempted to downplay his Spanish accent, and ended up with a bizarre, mangled dialect that is thoroughly undefinable. The [[Coen Brothers]] [[Throw It In|liked this so much]] that they told him to keep doing it, as the accent heightened the unsettling otherworldliness of his character. He won an Oscar for his performance.

* In the 1999 [[Disney Channel]] movie ''[[PUNKS]]'', a young [[Jessica Alba]] played a streetwise tomboy with a Brooklyn accent. Except Alba's accent drifted all across the United States' eastern seaboard, and occasionally turned into what sounded like an [[British Accents|Estuary]] accent.

 

== Literature ==

* [[The Witches|The Grand High Witch]] is implied to be Norwegian. She [[Vampire Vords|replaces her Ts with Zs and Ws with Vs]]. It doesn't in any way resemble a Norwegian accent, which is recognizable by more pronounced Rs and replacing Zs with Ss. Her accent resembles German more than anything else.

* In ''[[Robots and Empire]]'', the protagonists visit a planet presumed abandoned. Upon encountering a robotic overseer, they address it... only to find, to their dismay, that while these robots are [["Three Laws"-Compliant]], their definition of human only extends to those with the local accent (very distinct). Oh, and everything that looks like a human but doesn't speak like one must be destroyed on the spot.

 

== [[Live Action TV]] ==

* ''[[Star Trek: The Original Series]]'':

** [[Craig Ferguson]] once commented that ''nobody'' in Scotland understood Scotty. "It was like an Arab had an epileptic seizure."

** [[Mauve Shirt]] Transporter Chief Kyle had a kinda-English accent (which makes sense as the actor who played him, John Winston, is British), but it was "off" enough that a DC Comics bio had him born in Australia.

* ''[[Star Trek: The Next Generation]]'': Troi. Marina Sirtis said that she purposefully tried to make an alien accent since she was [[Half-Human Hybrid|half-Human/half-Betazoid]], and especially in the earlier seasons you can almost see her struggling to keep it up. The fact that none of the Betazoid characters used anything even slightly similar also drew attention to it. That accent was replaced by something closer to a British accent (which is her native accent) in later seasons, and then dropped altogether in movie.

:Originally, Denise Crosby was chosen after reading the part of Troi, [[The Chick|the empath]], and Sirtis read for [[Commie Land]] descendant and security-focused Tasha Yar ([[What Could Have Been|... yiiiikes]]). By the time season one began, they had accents that might have made sense if their roles hadn't been swapped. Troi's mother was cast as if this change hadn't happened at all.

** Delenn might count too, but that's technically the actress' own Croatian accent.

** The Centauri and Minbari in particular seem to have a selection of accents. Turhan Bey used his native Austrian accent when portraying the Centauri Emperor, lending some credence to the quasi-Eastern European accent affected by Jurasik as Londo. Theodore Bikel used his native Yiddish accent when playing a Minbari, Reiner Schone as Dukhat used his native German accent, and John Vickery affected a pronounced upper class British purr as Neroon.

* ''[[Doctor Who]]'':

** In "Nightmare of Eden", the character Tryst has an utterly incredible accent, which the actor developed deliberately on the grounds that people on other planets in the future won't have the same accents as people on Earth in the present. It might have worked better if he hadn't been the only person in the story doing it. (And Tom Baker didn't keep visibly cracking up whenever Tryst spoke.)

** In the new-who episode "Day of the Moon" people were left trying to figure out where exactly {{spoiler|the orphanage owner}} is meant to be from. It's apparently southern US.

** Also invoked when Rose questioned the Ninth Doctor about his [[Oop North]] accent.

'''Doctor''': [[Hand Wave|Lots of planets have a North!]] }}

* ''[[Buffy the Vampire Slayer]]'' gives us two English potentials Molly and Annabelle who are cockney and RP respectively, and seem to have taken personal lessons from Dick Van Dyke. Annabelle pronounces because as "bee-cawwse" and Molly replaces wise with "woiz".

* For a while, after she married Guy Ritchie, Madonna seemed to adopt some bizarre, half-assed attempt at a British accent, most notably in the intro to "What It Feels Like For a Girl".

* During the first year after [[Lady Gaga]] released her first album, "The Fame," she began to use a weird off-kilter British accent, which even her fans commented on. She later admitted it had to do with her anxiety and dealing with her newfound fame, dropping the accent entirely.

 

== Radio ==

{{quote|'''David:''' Heyop! Any mick makes a wrong move and goodness gracious me, I shall shoot you! That goes for you too, fräulein-babydoll!

'''Cleese:''' What do you mean by this?!

'''David:''' I wish I knew. }}

 

== [[Stand Up Comedy]] ==

* [[Eddie Izzard]] [[Lampshade Hanging|lampshades]] this a couple of times; namely, in his impressions of a Bond villain and a push-me-pull-you carpet sweeper. The Bond villain's accent is explained as being the result of his losing the instructions to a synthetic voice box, which is consequently stuck in shop demonstration mode.

* [[Josh Thomas]]. He was born and raised in Australia, and yet has an inexplicable, vaguely-English accent.

 

== [[Theatre]] ==

* At one point in ''The Complete History of America (abridged)'', one of the actors is impersonating a Vietnamese girl, and another observes that he has "no idea how to do a Vietnamese accent."

* One of many [[Running Gag|running gags]] in the popular summer stock farce ''A Bedfull of Foreigners'' is the mystery accent of Karak, the valet. The script calls for a non-specific Slavic accent, but Karak himself claims to be from Bulgaria, Hungary, and even Mexico.

 

== [[Video Games]] ==

* ''[[Halo]]: Combat Evolved'': A random marine in the first level who gets in your way will say; "Sir, The Captain wants you on the bridge ASAP. Better follow me!", in an accent that sounds remarkably [[Buffy-Speak|Australianish]].

** That's because the marine is not random. The marine programmed to meet the Chief and take him to the captain will always be Chips Dubbo, who's voiced by Andrew McKaige, an Australian actor. Funny thing is, [[Irony|people complained to Bungie]] about [[Reality Is Unrealistic|Dubbo's poor imitation of an Australian accent]]...

* Sniper Wolf from ''[[Metal Gear Solid]]'' is apparently just supposed to sound generically Eastern-European (even though she identifies herself as hailing from Kurdistan)... but ''[[The Last Days of Foxhound]]'' massively mocked her accent as being 'all over the place', with even the otherwise-perfect [[Master of Disguise]], Decoy Octopus, entirely failing to sound like her.

** Naomi sounds posh-English with an American twang on her 'r' sounds, even though her character is Rhodesian and raised in America. The best guess is that it's the character's deliberate affectation. In ''The Twin Snakes'' and ''[[Metal Gear Solid]] 4'' her accent is almost completely gone, although she still has a few English-like affectations.

* Razer's accent in ''[[Jak and Daxter|Jak X]]'' is all over the place, sounding like either German or French, depending on who you ask. Others recognize Austrian or even Russian in it.

* [[Team Fortress 2]]: Invoked this trope for comedy, as all of the characters' "accents" are as how a typical American in [[The Sixties]] might have perceived it; the Spy's accent is the hardest to pin down, having mixed French, Italian, and Spanish pronunciations and words in his vocabulary.

 

== [[Web Original]] ==

'''Dartz:''' DUUUUUUEH! }}

* A common occurrence in the videos of ''[[Tobuscus]]''. During a playthrough of Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, he once attempted to imitate Ezio's Italian accent, only to end up with something vaguely Slavic.

 

== [[Western Animation]] ==

* [[Bugs Bunny]] talks in a mixture of Bronx and Brooklyn accents ([[Mel Blanc]] also said his inspiration was Frank McHugh, who spoke in a New York Irish accent).

* Sandi on ''[[Daria]]'s'' accent might be best be described as a bad imitation of a French one, except the character had no connection to France. It's not clear what it was supposed to be, besides vaguely upper class.

 

== [[Real Life]] ==

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Accent Tropes]]