Amy Walker's "21 Accents" video
I enjoyed this YouTube of Amy Walker saying basically the same sentence in 21 different accents. (Via Very Short List)
I enjoyed this YouTube of Amy Walker saying basically the same sentence in 21 different accents. (Via Very Short List)
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I thought the Texas and Brooklyn accents were not very authentic but many of them were very good. But where was Minnesota, eh?
Totally made watching the rest of it worth while.
Still trying to hear the difference between the Los Angeles and Seattle accents.
It's there PFFFT - and I was born in LA and grew up in Seattle (and live in between in Portland now) - funny how when I hear the Seattle accent I think "That's no accent at all - it's perfectly neutral!"
She could have been a great dialectitian, but then she got hooked on the Supercool...
this woman is pure beauty and talent.
Sure, everyone's going to hear problems with imitations of their own accent, but the subtle difference between LA and Seattle sold it for me. I'm from Seattle, and so is she, evidently. Excellent ear. Very impressive.
The difference between California (Los Angeles) and Seattle is that the California accent sounds like she is asking a question... typical of the San Fernando valley. Often referred to as "valspeak". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valspeak
California: Hello, I'm Amy Walker? I'm 25? and I was born in California. LA.
Seattle: Hello, I'm Amy Walker. I'm 25 and I was born in Seattle, Washington.
Ecurtz, thank you for making my day. Before the supercool, she was a certified Grand Master.
Having lived in Texas most of my life and now living in Seattle, I too felt the Texan accent was a little weak. Then again, you could probably have a similar clip about Texas accents alone. I'd have loved to hear her Martian dialect.
absolutely wonderful... i love the shift in time to the transatlantic.
I must say though, growing up in Texas, she didnt get it right, I think she was replicating more of a South Carolina/Georgia/Mississippi kind of general southern Bell kind of sound, Texas has more drawl but it's also a little more "Western" but also highly influenced by the abundant metropolises.
I'd love to hear Chicago, Milwaukee, and Minnesota. Also like London, NYC has many (a dozen?) very distinct accents, it'd be cool tohear their differences.
Also Cajun!
Ok consider me an official fan, I find it fascinating.
At first, I thought she was going to be doing 25 differant english accents. England has too many accents.
I found the difference between California and Seattle (according to Amy) to be:
- More question intonation in Californian (I'm Amy Walker? I'm twenty-five?)
- 'Crackly' voice at the end of the sentence in Californian
- Saying twenty as /twenty/, not /tweny/, in Seattleite (though I think that's a bit affected - I notice it more in Canadians).
It was strange for me too, hearing it right after she did California, like "whoa- that's familiar." (I'm a Seattle native living in California.)
Even though I'm from Seattle I think she stopped "doing" accents for that one; it sounded more relaxed and natural.
I agree with the comments about Texas accents, but overall they are terrific (I work as a international travel agent and get to talk with people of every accent).
But I have not seen a comment about the most important issue: Who is she, where can I see more of her? SHES HOT!
That Belfast accent is TERRIBLE. Although in fairness she's not alone there, even actors from Belfast seem to have difficulty doing a Belfast accent.
Several of the others are varying degrees of bad, but that one in particular stands out as an absolute shocker.
In the LA accent she is using the "creaky" voice. In Seattle she stopped using the creaky voice. Oddly enough the creaky thing is supposed to part of the Seattle accent: http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/225139_nwspeak20.html
I like the faces that go along with each accent as though she's taking on her perception of the persona that goes with each voice. I have to say, though, being a native from the L.A. area of California, she says five oddly, as though all the accents were starting to get mushed up. I think what I like best about her Californian accent is that she took on the speech pattern into the word order and didn't simply leave it with the intonation of the words.
Needs Klingon.
I'm not from Toronto, but I am from near it. The 2nd "t" in Toronto is usually dropped so it sounds more like Torono. She also sounds like she's trying to do the "oot and aboot" thing.
That's a spicy meatball!
Top that one, lady.
Her accent from ${MY_LOCALITY} was appalling - a foolish caricature of our noble accent. Her accent from ${YOUR_LOCALITY}, however, was absolutely spot on.
Wow, a lot of Seattlites here.
I've had this argument with friends before. There is no Seattle accent, I say. Which I know sounds arrogant. But, do people in the South deny they have an accent? They do have one, everyone agrees. Is it possible that Seattlites have a very slight accent? If so that mean there must be someone with no accent. Which would be Seattle since we have so few affectations. There is no "y'all" for Seattlites. We just talk.
I thought she did 'Seattle' quite realistically. It's been said -somewhere- maybe just by Seattle-ites themselves, that Seattle's accent is 'no accent'. I've lived in a few different places in the past five years - Portland, Kalamazoo, Michigan and now Chicago - and all of those places have accents. Compared to Seattle, they're all southern.
I love how folks from different sides of Chi-town say "Chicago", over der.
There are very few native Seattleites, so there's no recognizable Seattle accent. Seattle is a way station; everybody's just passing through on their way to somewhere else.
Brilliant, I'll be sure to refer this to anyone who tells me that they "hate the American accent".
I was born, raised, marinated and grilled in South East Texas. I'll dissent from the others up there and say that her Texas was pretty good. Plenty of folks in East Texas sound pretty close to that, but I'll admit it's probably a bit more Tennessee than anything else. It was damn near Partonesque.
But Texas is almost as bad as England when it comes to nailing down an accent. The only semi-famous actor I've ever seen who could notice and reproduce many of the various accents from this here bigass state is Tracey Ullman.
You can find a very, uh, "interesting" response by a pink straw wearing a tiny fur coat (seriously) at funnyordie.com. Maybe not as much talent, but quite a bit more funny.
http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/dc100d4dbc
She was awesome on the Today show a little while after this viral was making the rounds.
http://video.nbc5i.com/player/?id=228774#videoid=220983
@26:
Agreed. I grew up in Texas, and she nailed it better than I would. Being a TV baby, I sound like I'm from Peoria.
There were peculiarities throughout, notably with her overemphasized Russian accent, which one can easily forgive, since the accents themselves are caricatures for a reason.
I've lived all over the States, and have traveled throughout Europe, and I have to say that her versatility is stunning. Anyone who disagrees should try their hand at what she's done here. I'll bet not a single one of us could do better, even with all the acting lessons in the world.
Bravo, Amy! Now go cut a movie deal!
FERTBERT - It is a common misconception that "there is no x accent". Everyone who speaks has an accent. Period. Accents are relative. While other Americans may have trouble figuring out exactly which accent you have, a Brit, for example, would very much think that you have an American accent. Likewise, Americans would have no problem identifying you as an American. Why do you think that is? Because you have an American accent of some sort.
MAN ON PINK CORNER - I'll save you the lecture and let you read about it yourself:
http://www.linguistlist.org/ask-ling/accent.html
what accent would extraterrestrial aliens have if they had no audio samples?
I'm from Kentucky, and I'd have to say the "southern" accent varies so much just based upon the person themselves. Not everyone in the town I'm from has an accent and I'm close to the border of Tennessee, so it's the southern part. I actually don't have a southern accent, not sure what happened, ha ha. (Yes, I'm positive. My mother has a really beautiful one though.) But, I bet accents vary individually where ever your from. I'd love to see more videos like this, maybe someone can post a link. That would be great!
I'm from New York, and her "Seattle" accent sounded to me like the standard Midwestern American accent you hear national newscasters using on TV and radio. Maybe that's how Seattlites talk, I dunno; everyone I know who lives in Seattle comes from somewhere else.
with a wardrobe full of different costumes and wigs, she really would be the ideal girlfriend.
I have a weird talent for pinpointing most US accents when I hear people speak - even if they haven't lived where they're originally from for quite some time.
Texas was off a bit - sounded a little forced or something. Texans seem to speak in a more relaxed way. California was pretty good except for the way she said 'twenty-five'. Something slipped a little there. But she got the way we speak with the back of our mouths (I'm from LA).
Brooklyn was also a little over-done. Seattle was spot-on. That one is similar to a lot of mid-west accents as well.
Overall, though - Very, very impressive. I like the three English ones. There are so many different English accents...
I think overall it was good. Most accents are very specific - narrowing it down to a city which is perfect. We even got 3 different classes of Londoners. Only a few of the other examples are huge regions, Texas, Australia, Italy. It may seem the same to an outsider, but for someone, not me, who knows these areas this is not specific enough.
The Brooklyn accent had the right belligerence but there was some Boston that snuck in there. Which is not quite right.
I also noticed we went from LA to Seattle, missing the Bay Area completely. Probably safer for everyone involved.
That was brilliant! The Toronto accent made me laugh hysterically.
As a Northern Californian, I can bear witness that our general intonation up here is closer to her Seattlite than her Valleygirl.
That was nice :)
Made my day, how sad is that.
If she's not careful she's going to be another cewebrity :P But there's nothing wrong with that.
The Toronto accent sounded way more like Newfoundland... but still that was pretty impressive.
@#20 - Bingo :)
The Seattle accent sounded neutral, which is what I grew up here thinking it was. My friends who have moved here from around the country have told me that I sound like combination of California, BC, and my Scandinavian family. The local accent has been buried under the number of people who have moved here.
Amy Walker was interviewed on NPR about this video back in March. Turn out she's from Seattle originally.
The 4-minute interview is online at http://www.npr.org/temp...=88045527. It's worth just listening to just for the part that makes fun of Kevin Costner in Robin Hood.
Texas accents vary wildly from region to region, and the one she used doesn't convince me. It is very vaguely East Texas.
I'm going to listen and judge how well this works without visuals.
The Seattle one has a slight air of passive-aggressiveness, i.e. it's perfect.
Ummm... The Toronto accent, though hillarious, was off. Maybe someday, you hosers in the rest of the world will understand that not everyone in Canada, Toronto especially, sounds like Bob and Doug Mackenzie. LOL!
That was not a Toronto accent! That was Newfoundland! We sound completely different! We have the kind of accent that people seem to think is 'no accent' - the midwestern American accent, though we tend to drop a few consonants (such as Toronto becoming Torono)and longer ou sounds (there is a distinct difference in the way we say about, I even notice it).
Her Sydney accent was spot on. In fact, that accent could represent most of the eastern states, as I'm a Brisbaner, and we sound a lot like that. I'm almost convinced this could be her real voice and all the others were staged.
Her non-specific "Australian" accent however, was way off. Sounded like an American actor taking the piss out of Australians. I have a lot of family out west in rural areas, and my work brings me close to a lot of graziers, but I've never heard anyone talk like that.
I hate to be negative but the Charleston accent was just awful. Only 90 year old women from south of Broad St. sound anything like that. Actually, no. No one sounds like that, or has sounded like that for a long, long time. Economic downfall, marriage into families from other regions, failure to get a job because they think you are mentally challenged hick and pop culture killed it.
> #48 posted by Bernbaum , May 19, 2008 9:16 PM
> Her Sydney accent was spot on. In fact, that accent could represent most of the eastern states, as I'm a Brisbaner, and we sound a lot like that.
Yeah - I don't really think there's much differentiation in Australian accents, except for rural ones being stronger. Only exception is that people from Adelaide sometimes sound a bit English to me.
> Her non-specific "Australian" accent however, was way off. Sounded like an American actor taking the piss out of Australians.
It was rubbish - surprising since here "Sydney" accent was ok.
I disagree with the poster up there who said the Texas accent sounded Georgian -- it doesn't (I'm from south Georgia). The South Carolina one's equally bad. Both passable for an improv show or something, but would need work to not be completely grating (a la Keanu in Devil's Advocate) in a major roll. There are so many different varieties of southern accent and it's hard for me to think of anyone off the top of my head who's mastered any of them. "Kenneth the Page" on 30 rock's natural Georgian drawl is one of my favorite aspects of the show, for this reason. Not going to hear it imitated well anywhere else.
Yikes the Toronto one was bad - a poor stereotype of the "aboot" accent that is not really a Toronto accent at all, and is seldom heard in Canada anywhere. Toronto actually sounds about the same as her Seattle.
Texan is Texan and Georgian is Georgian. They are entirely distinct.
> #50 posted by teapot7 , May 19, 2008 9:33 PM
I think I know what you mean about Adelaideans sounding English (it's not really English, but shares audible similarities to it), but I find this much more prevalent in people from Perth.
Sydney and Melbourne are seamless, and to a lesser extent Brisbane. The thickest accent of all has to go to northern Queenslanders and Territorians. They've got that really nasal tone, with sharp emphasis on the vowels: "How're you going?" coming out as "Ow yaa gairn?"
what is the most unidentifiable English language accent? IE: no accent? Who speaks English that gives nothing away, except perhaps by elimination?
I'm a sucker for a beautiful girl with an exotic accent. I think I've fallen in love 21 times.
@ #52: I can definitely tell when someone's from Ontario, actually, because of the way Ontarians say words like "car". In Western Canada, where we sound an awful lot like the Seattle accent, it's pronounced "cahr" and in central and Eastern Canada it's like like "care". I don't know if this is entirely accurate, but I tend to think that the vowels in Western Canadian English are softer than in the rest of the country.
It's too bad that she didn't do a Quebecois accent after the Paris one. The difference is very noticeable.
As an amateur student of accents, this performance completely blew me away. I don't ever recall applauding something I saw on the internet before, but found myself uncontrollably clapping at the end of this clip. Bravo.
I personally found her "Scottish" accent a little vague and/or generalized. It would have been better if she had picked one out of the dozen or so. Also, the Seattle was a little off if there is one at all. Better still she should have (if possible) done South Chicago, Boston, and true Midwestern (which I am close to believing is the closest to non-accented Enlgish to be found in the states, and possibly the world. Her "Sydney" was spot on though.
#59: "And possibly the world"? That's a bit self-centered. That's like saying a place is the "least regional region" of anywhere.
Most neutral accent? I thought this one v hard to place. http://tinyurl.com/dejxp
I love the diversity of regional accents in Ireland and Britain. Clickable map here.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/voices/recordings/index.shtml
You can hear Irish accents if you poke about on rte.ie. A program like farmweek usually will have a range. http://www.rte.ie/radio1/farmweek/
The New Zealand accent was pretty good (in that it didn't sound at all like the Aussie one!)- would definitely fool me if she could keep it up. The English ones sounded a little cliche to me, but then I've spent more time there than in the US.
"59 Better still she should have (if possible) done South Chicago, Boston, and true Midwestern (which I am close to believing is the closest to non-accented Enlgish to be found in the states, and possibly the world."
I have a hard time believing anyone truly thinks this way. One time I was told in all seriousness `Where I come from, the people are virtually accentless', in a deep, down south USA accent.
You don't hear your own accent, unless you are surrounded by other accents.
Non accented english. Sheesh.
I am from Taranaki New Zealand, and Have lived in Wellington for 9 years as well as travelling in Asia a lot. Her NZ accent is one of the best impressions I have heard ;-)
I would've enjoyed a Rhode Island accent. Or any New England accent really.
@#50, #54
As a sandgroper (and someone with a degree in linguistics), it would be cool to hear her nail a Perth accent next. The Sydney one she did was unmistakeably Sydneyish - Melbourne puts more 'aw' into its 'eye' sound, to my ears. And yes, the more westerly capital cities of this country's south tend to have a slightly more open-mouthed and less broken-vowelled accent than the east coast, which registers Southern English for some and American for others. But only slightly.
As for the criticism of the broad Aussie accent? My mum's family is from Queensland and her sisters sound exactly like that, or even worse depending how much they've had to drink.
The Dublin accent is totally wrong. Its not a Dublin accent its a stereotypical Irish accent
The South Carolina accent was way off - I've seen a lot of comments about the Texas accent but I have a friend from Texas and she sounds pretty much just like that.
I saw this a while ago. It's terrible. It screams of ignorance about the various accents that she hasn't actually heard, so she goes with generic ones. So she can do the subtle difference between LA and Seattle. She's from there, no?
That Toronto accent was laughable. It wasn't even a passable stereotypical "Canadian" accent. Ditto with many other ones ("Dublin", "Texas", "South Carolina") that have a cartoon-ish generic version that people associate with them.
Sure, she nailed some, but she really stretched on a bunch of them.
Her Texas accent sounds like a Dolly Parton imitation.
I'm a lifelong Angeleno, and her L.A. accent was really more of just a Valley Girl accent. Her "Seattle" actually sounded more "neutral" to me, i.e., what I hear around here mostly. Although I guess the exaggeration of a particular region is what doing accents is all about... I could do a Huntington Beach accent and what it would really be is what a particular type of Huntington Beach resident would say. Her "Seattle" is basically just her own regular speech; she didn't exaggerate it to some particular subculture of Seattle.
Still, pretty impressive.
The Dublin accent sounded like the bizarre Hollywood Oirish that turns up in TV, which is to say wildly inaccurate; the Belfast one was completely incomprehensible, but the only known American who can get it right is Dustin Hoffman. Even Liam Neeson can't do it perfectly, despite being from another city in the same county, Ballymena- their accent is very different. There are quite a few Belfast accents, despite it being a small city on the grand scale of things, which is one of the reasons that it's only really possible to learn it from a native. FWIW, Hoffman's recorded snippets of Belfast are old-fashioned South Belfast.
The English ones were all right, if forced, and the Scottish one had one good Glaswegian vowel.
I'm sure the American ones were great- sure yez all sound alike anyway ;P
#14 Buckets McGaughey
I take your point about the Belfast Accent .
And also your point re NI Actors too.
Did anyone ever see the film Divorcing Jack?
Now none of the main actors are Irish let alone from Ulster and they have varying derees of success, but the one who got closest with out turning into a cartoon was Rachel Griffiths. and she's from Saint Kilda Melbourne.
Regional charicatures are easy. I'll be impressed when she can pull off something really hard like a convincing Philly accent.
who'd she yell at off-camera? i thought that was pretty funny.
I think some of you are missing what is most impressive about this. Whether she's perfect or not on any given accent is besides the point. Switching between them like that is exceptionally difficult.
I'm very good with accents myself, but one thing I simply can't do is switch between relatively close accents without taking a while to purge the previous one from memory. Try it. They all get mangled and mashed together.
She mimicked 21 different accents, many of them extremely well. And all anyone has to say is how she should've done more accents, or didn't nail a particular one perfectly.
Does the internet make us harder to impress? Have we seen so many fantastic things here that we come to expect magic by default?
Hello, my name is Amy Walker, and my teeth are impossibly white.
Here I thought there wasn't any difference between Californian and Washingtonian speech, but the Seattle accent is the only one that sounds perfectly normal to me.
I liked the subtle difference between Prague and Moscow.
I thought Seattle accent was OK-- when I lived in Seattle for a time I didn't notice any particular accent, whether they were transplants or natives.
I'd like to hear her try a few New England accents-- people do Boston accents so poorly in most movies.
Doesn't seem like Amy really learned 20+ accents; rather like she's superficially aping them just well enough to impress most people. I'd be impressed if each sample was constructed to contain some distinctive words that illustrate typical features of an average, representative speaker's pronunciation, considering there's only about two sentences per accent. Portraying speakers who in theory could plausibly originate from the respective areas, give or take, doesn't seem like such a big achievement to me; it's quite a long way to spot-on characterisations from there.
I'm from the midwest and have lived in Seattle for 3 years. I've found it hard to pick out "the" Seattle accent with all the transplants, but it's there. Sorta midwestern, sorta west-coast, a bit drawly. Really drawly in some cases, but not in the American southern sense. Grizzly Adams on morphine perhaps describes it.
Then there's Ballard, where even I (from rural MN) think they're exaggerating the Scandinavian thing to mess with the newcomers.
I've lived in Seattle for 15 years--there is no accent, except whatever residue is left from wherever non-natives came from.
I agree with your Ballard assumption--they're just messing with your head.
Based on what I'm reading here, she's probably not quite good enough to fool a native of a city that she's from there, but she's certainly good enough to fool nearly anyone into believing she's from somewhere else.
I couldn't reach any of the longer videos (404 errors), but it would be interested to watch her have a conversation to see if she could keep an accent straight while doing something non-scripted. Like #75 said, it's tough to keep an accent straight and not merge into something slightly different. Heck, my own accent changes based on who I've been talking to, but that may be an affect of having always lived in a transient city like Atlanta.
An interesting study in Perceptual Dialectology, this thread. She said a magic word in there, at least for the US viewers--"Seattle". Pegging her "General American" accent to Seattle has cause a tide of readers to say, "Yeah, Seattle has no accent! Yeah!" Had she said "Denver", "Salt Lake City", "Boise", "Portland", or "Omaha", I'm sure we would have gotten responses from those people, all of whom have very similar phonological varieties.
Everyone has an accent except the people that sound like you.
I'm impressed by actors who can seem natural speaking in an accent that is unnatural for them. No, not YOU Madonna.
Hugh Laurie sounds perfect as Bertie Wooster and pretty darn good as Gregory House. I had no idea Jamie Bamber of BSG was so British sounding. Ewan McGregor has excellent diction on screen but when I met him briefly maybe one word in three got through the Scottishness to my Michigan ears. I'm guessing it takes a lot of hard work to make that look easy.
I, for one, really enjoyed that (even though as a native, I would also protest the Toronto "accent"; I'd say we sound more like Seattle). But that's not the point. Very entertaining. Thanks, Amy!