British Regional Stereotypes

Exurban suburbs/areas around american cities

"What's a sheep tied to a lampost?"

"A community center in Wales"

edited 22nd Mar '11 2:02:41 PM by BalloonFleet

Already made the same joke about Aberdeen earlier in the thread

Apparently I sound like "a posh English bloke", although I'm pretty sure I sound as Norn Iron as most people around here.

Going back to Haig, the thing with his voice isn't so much his accent as that he seems to be trying to invert This! Is! SPARTA!. If ever there was a candidate for talking in all lower case it is him.

Question about Scottish stereotypes (they count as British!), is there a stereotype of Scottish characters being old? Or is it just my small reference pool from when I first discovered the Scottish stereotype, the two characters I thought of as representing the stereotype were Angus Mc Badger from Wind in the Willows Disney version and Mac Morehouse from the Disney Pigs is Pigs and so I thought the Scottish stereotype was that they were all old men (I know that's not true and that real-life Scotland has the same age and gender range as most places but that's what I thought the STEREOTYPE was when I first was learning about what stereotypes were).

Is this just a Disney thing, then? Because that doesn't seem to be true for Scottish characters in other media, although it does seem to be rare to see a child or teenage character with a Scottish accent in American shows, at least (probably related to The Kids Are American trope which I hate).

That's a Disney thing as far as I can tell. Our population demographics are the same as the rest of the UK, and Europe generally - gettng older, but there's still enough young people here yet!

Well the hard drinking and UV radiation would make you look older.

William Hague: Yorkshire, from a well off family.

Patrick Stewart: Yorkshire, working class family.

And yet if one asked who has got the posher accent...

Partly that's because Stewart is (a)an actor and (b) an actor from a generation where actors were still expected to have RP accents.

About Pigs is Pigs, I just looked up the original text of the book the cartoon was based off of, and I noticed something interesting. First of all, Mc Morehouse refers to Flannery as being a foreigner, and the story is implied to be taking place in the US, not Scotland, so more than likely Mc Morehouse wouldn't actually be from Scotland himself (unless that was a bit of Hypocritical Humor) and wouldn't have a Scottish accent like in the cartoon. His age isn't given in the text either, and it more implies he's middle-aged, not elderly like in the cartoon. So Disney may have been invoking some kind of "old cranky Scottish guy" stereotype here, or a cross between Thrifty Scot and Grumpy Old Man. Link to the original book's text:

http://www.classicreader.com/book/3507/1/

The book itself is a good example of Irish stereotypes, which fits the topic, and also a good example of Funetik Aksent for Flannery.

Edit: I was curious about the Brummie and Geordie stereotypes. About Brummie, I've heard that it's associated with stupidity, but I wasn't sure if there were any other personality traits or things stereotypically associated with it. As for Geordie, I've heard that it has a violent stereotype. Is that correct? Because I remember reading that the Geordie stereotype is about violent, sexist guys but that the girls are also tough and violent too.

edited 5th Oct '11 7:23:18 PM by Rainbow

"It just hit me that the Boston Brahmin accent must sound as weird or even weirder to Brit ears as it does to Americans. I think William F. Buckley is the purest example you can find. "

Charles Winchester in M*A*S*H has this accent - and yes, it does sound odd to Brits, like a British actor trying hard to do a "bad" American accent, arriving at something that to untutored ears sounds like neither one thing nor the other. Kelsey Grammer, as Frasier and in Cheers, has echoes of Winchester (living in Boston and being snobbish?). And am I the only one to look at two characters separated by forty-odd years and to think - seperated at birth?

Seems strange to necro a 4 year old thread...