TV Tuesday: Style of Gab

[yourlibrarian]

An article last month credited social media with exposing viewers to regional accents that may have been erased on TV. How do you feel about shows that feature accents/dialects different from your own?

Do you sometimes find it difficult to follow the dialogue/story? Does it make a difference depending on the genre of the show?

Comments

[wendelah1]

I don't know about US regional dialects but I do have trouble with non-American English accents sometimes. They're talking, I'm getting most of it, and then suddenly it's... gibberish.


I should just put on captions like everyone else does.

[yourlibrarian]

Heh, yes, I can't do without captions these days, though largely for other reasons.

Perhaps because of that, I don't think accents are usually troublesome for me, but they are often a draw. We particularly enjoy Scottish accents. I wouldn't watch a show just for that, but it's a plus.

And we subscribed to Acorn just for Brokenwood. We like the show for various reasons, but find the Kiwi accent quite entertaining.

[alchemicink]

As a language/linguistics nerd, I love listening to different accents and dialects, and I'm thrilled when I watch a show with a good variety of them. I've really liked Netflix's live action One Piece series for letting the Mexican actor keep his accent in the show, for example. And I've been watching a lot of The Librarians lately, and I love that they randomly have an Australian character. He's fun to listen to.

I watch everything with subtitles anyway, so I don't usually have trouble understanding accents.

My only real annoyance with accents is when there are really bad Southern ones. I'm from North Carolina, so I can generally recognize when it's not good. (Even though an NC accent is different from, say, a Mississippi accent even though both are in the south.) Coincidentally, I was just listening to a podcast episode from my local NPR affiliate yesterday where they interviewed a professor who researches accents/dialects, and asked him about the characters from White Lotus season 3 played by Jason Isaacs and Parker Posey. (I haven't seen the show myself, but they are supposed to be from North Carolina, I believe.) The verdict was generally that Isaacs' accent is mostly bad but Posey's is a decent caricature, if a bit overdone. It was interesting to think about, and I think I would have been annoyed listening to them if I'd watched the show.

Anyway... all of this long rambly comment is just to say that I think more TV shows should include a variety of accents and dialects! 😁

[yourlibrarian]

An accent done poorly is definitely grating. I've run into that before in older British shows where someone is supposed to be American! These days a lot of them are either done by American actors or just quite well done by Brits.

What this reminded me of was a podcast conversation I heard recently regarding James Marsters' accent on Buffy. They were discussing his use of "squirrel" and how one can almost always tell if someone is putting on an English accent or not based on how they pronounce it.

[wendelah1]

My mother's from Reidsville, North Carolina. I remember visiting her family when I was around ten years old and not understanding a word they said. This would have been in the early sixties. But my cousins' accents have faded over time. Not sure why. Going to university, maybe.

Supposedly, there are more dialects in North Carolina than any state in the Union.

[yourlibrarian]

Interesting about NC. I still remember when I was a child, my Brazilian mother traveled to Portugal and really struggled with understanding people -- not just the accent but the speed of conversation.

[china_shop]

We usually manage pretty well, though I remember turning on subs for Sex Education (I think it was as much the sound mix as the accents, tbh).

[yourlibrarian]

That could definitely make things worse alright.