History Main / JustAStupidAccent

* In ''Film/{{Exodus}} most characters speak with their actors' native accents (British or American). In two cases this doesn't happen. One works; David Opatoshu as Akiva speaks Yiddish accented English (Yiddish was the character's mother tongue, as it was the actor's, though David Opatoshu hailed from the United States as opposed to Eastern Europe). One...doesn't; American Jill Haworth, playing German-born and Danish raised Karen Hansen Clement, puts on a weird accent that can best be described as "vaguely Eurotrash."

* If ''VideoGame/RomeTotalWar'' is an indication, the Greeks, Egyptians, Eastern peoples, Carthaginians, Numidians, and the various barbarian tribes, all spoke perfect English aside from their accents. ''VideoGame/MedievalIITotalWar'' takes this one step further: Scots speak in a thick Scottish accents, The Holy Roman Empire and France speak in thick over-the-top German and French accents and throw in GratuitousGerman/[[GratuitousFrench French]] on a regular basis, the English speak in a posh [[UsefulNotes/BritishAccents English accent]], the Moors, Turks and Egyptians speech is in an Arabic accent and is laced with Arabic terms, the Spanish, Portuguese, various Italians, and the Byzantines all speak in a generic Southern European accent, the Eastern European factions (and, for some reason, the Danes) speak in a generic Eastern European accent, and the Mongols and Timurids speak in an JustForFun/{{egregious}} East-Asian accent.

* In 2020, the Scots-language Website/{{Wikipedia}} discovered it had silently been undermined by a crisis that had been boiling away for seven years; a teenage brony from North Carolina had been working away at the site for all that time, starting when he was just 12 years old, and during that time he had written ''tens of thousands'' of articles in a malformed, mutilated amalgamation of Scots and English, [[UncertifiedExpert all while claiming he could speak the language perfectly]], which he may have somehow [[BelievingTheirOwnLies ended up duping even himself into believing]]. In reality, what he was actually doing amounted to writing articles in their butchered form by literally fingering through a dictionary, then picking the first words in Scots he could find, regardless of their grammatical context or presence in the language's modern vernacular, and when he couldn't find a word he was looking for, he'd instead resort to [[DeterioratesIntoGibberish completely making it up instead]]. In the end, over 10,000 articles were deleted, thousands more were updated with notices alerting users of the site that they had been written by someone who knew absolutely nothing about Scots, and at one point, the very future of the wiki was in doubt, as the damage was so severe and so thorough that some questioned whether it would be easier to just delete the whole thing and start over. As for the teenager, he was accused by numerous sources - including national and international newspapers - of committing [[https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/aug/26/shock-an-aw-us-teenager-wrote-huge-slice-of-scots-wikipedia cultural vandalism]], became the laughing stock of the internet for quite some time, and eventually disappeared off the face of the Scots Wiki in disgrace after apologising for his actions.

* The film version of ''Film/MemoirsOfAGeisha'' is extremely bad about this. Not only do the Japanese characters speak [[GratuitousEnglish Engrish]] with a bit of GratuitousJapanese thrown in, but they actually hold conversations with an [[{{Eagleland}} American]] ([[RaceLift who was Japanese in the book]]) with no explanation given as to how they can understand each other.

** "[[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin Several Species of Small Furry Animals]] [[LongTitle Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving with a Pict]]" has Roger Waters attempting a Scottish accent as he tells a story a bunch of rodents about a battle [[UnreliableNarrator he apparently]] [[PosthumousNarration died in]]. His accent is stunningly modern for a ''pict,'' who were absorbed into the Gaels by the 11th century.

* In the dub of ''Webcomic/HetaliaAxisPowers'', whenever we see non-English speaking characters talking to each other or to their nations, they simply speak English with a foreign accent.

* The remake of ''Film/TheGirlWithTheDragonTattoo'' has most of the cast speaking in a Swedish accent. Creator/DanielCraig is the only exception, speaking more or less in his natural British accent.

* The ''ComicBook/{{Asterix}}'' comics do this with the ''font'' of the foreigner who was speaking. The Greeks would use angular letters, the Germans would speak in Fraktur, and the Normans would use Nordic-looking letters. Sometimes the differently-fonted speech can be understood by the Gaulish protagonists, but not always. The Egyptian hieroglyphics were often pictionary but sometimes just random drawings or French visual puns, and they weren't understood by the Gauls. In one hilarious scene, when Gaulish sidekick Obelix asks an Egyptian to tell him to say "speak" in hieroglyphics, Obelix's speech is rendered as crude stick figures instead of hieroglyphics.

* ''Wiki/SCPFoundation'': Captain Dmitri Arkadeyevich Strelnikov talks like your standard Russian movie bad guy. Goes even further in his masterpiece of BlackComedy, [[http://www.scp-wiki.net/reddawn Killing The Enemies And His Family Too]].

* In 2020, the Scots-language Wiki/{{Wikipedia}} discovered it had silently been undermined by a crisis that had been boiling away for seven years; a teenage brony from North Carolina had been working away at the site for all that time, starting when he was just 12 years old, and during that time he had written ''tens of thousands'' of articles in a malformed, mutilated amalgamation of Scots and English, [[UncertifiedExpert all while claiming he could speak the language perfectly]], which he may have somehow [[BelievingTheirOwnLies ended up duping even himself into believing]]. In reality, what he was actually doing amounted to writing articles in their butchered form by literally fingering through a dictionary, then picking the first words in Scots he could find, regardless of their grammatical context or presence in the language's modern vernacular, and when he couldn't find a word he was looking for, he'd instead resort to [[DeterioratesIntoGibberish completely making it up instead]]. In the end, over 10,000 articles were deleted, thousands more were updated with notices alerting users of the site that they had been written by someone who knew absolutely nothing about Scots, and at one point, the very future of the wiki was in doubt, as the damage was so severe and so thorough that some questioned whether it would be easier to just delete the whole thing and start over. As for the teenager, he was accused by numerous sources - including national and international newspapers - of committing [[https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/aug/26/shock-an-aw-us-teenager-wrote-huge-slice-of-scots-wikipedia cultural vandalism]], became the laughing stock of the internet for quite some time, and eventually disappeared off the face of the Scots Wiki in disgrace after apologising for his actions.

Not to be confused with PoirotSpeak, where a foreign character speaking English will pepper their speech with words and phrases from their native language. Although the effect is much the same, Just a Stupid Accent can grate a little more, as the viewer is left to surmise that [[HerrDoktor Doktor Von Evil]] speaks flawless English but somehow never learned the word for "yes".

** This was also the the case with the Russian soldiers in the earlier (that is, UsefulNotes/WorldWarII themed) ''VideoGame/CallOfDuty'' games, most likely because they were on the player's side, and having to read subtitles would probably have jarred with the game's generally fast-paced nature. This trope was also, however, completely averted with the German soldiers, who speak what is very definitely actual German.

--> '''Bloo:''' Luckily I speak French fluently and for a small fee plus gratuity I'll teach you phrases necessary for survival. Repeat after me: EXCUUUUSE ME MADAME, THERRRE IS PERRFUUUME IN THE HOUSE-PLAIT!

->''"We do not even have a language!'' ''Just a stupid accent!"''\\
''"She's right! We all talk like Creator/MauriceChevalier!"''
-->-- '''Creator/MelBrooks'''' ''Film/HistoryOfTheWorldPartI''

* Since 2009, UK price-comparison website comparethemarket.com has been running the advertising campaign Advertising/CompareTheMeerkat starring Aleksandr Orlov, a Russian meerkat, and an [[LoadsAndLoadsOfCharacters ever increasing cast]] of similarly Russian characters. None of them ever speak actual Russian, only heavily-accented English.

For the written version, see ForeignLookingFont. Not to be confused with WhatTheHellIsThatAccent.

* Creator/DanielDayLewis in ''Literature/TheUnbearableLightnessOfBeing'' is an Irishman portraying a tragic Czech lothario by putting on an accent that is a mixture of TV-presenter British and cold-war-spy-movie Russian. The effect is less than suave, more like distractingly ridiculous.

* Lampshaded in the ''Series/DangerForce'' episode in "Mime Games" when the gang is in France, they are told French is just English with an outrageous accent.

** [[LampshadeHanging Lampshaded]] in ''Film/HistoryOfTheWorldPartI'', when Madame DeFarge says "We are so poor, we do not even have a language! Just a stupid accent!".

** [[LampshadeHanging Lampshaded]] in ''Film/HistoryOfTheWorldPartI'', when Madame DeFarge says
"We are so poor, we do not even have a language! Just a stupid accent!".