Going with the belief that 'Fake Brit' refers to all Brits and not just English accents, I removed part of the example involving the different James Bonds. Connery and Dalton are not being 'fake Brits' as Scotland and Wales are part of Britain. If the Trope is actually about fake English accents, that's a different matter of course.
Okay, either I missed it or it has been added in since: Fake Brit refers to faking a Southern English accent... Or apparently faking a Cockney or posh accent... Which makes me wonder again at the confusing title.
Presumably the trope title is a reference to the fact that 'British accent' is used to refer to an English accent. Now that Fake Scot and Fake Irish are separate tropes entirely, it's just restricted to English accents.
If there's an alternate title, by all means suggest one. Sadly the only one I can think of is 'Fake Limey'.
Then why isn't this trope called Fake Anglo because British by it's very definition is English, Scottish or Welsh. It's just gonna propagate incidents where England and Britain are confused as one and the same.
Don't Keep Saying That!
Under music this was written:
Many American New Wave bands, eg The Ramones. In this case it was more with the way Joey Ramone sounds like.
First The Ramones were punk, not New Wave, but that’s minor. More importantly, how are they fake Brits?
And, I have no idea what that second sentence means. Perhaps they meant that was what he actually sounds like?
Any ideas on cleaning it up, clarifying or something else?
Kwisatz Haderach
This page's description seems far more negative than the Fake American one. The Fake American page gushes about actors playing American characters that you'd never expect were actually Britons or Australians, whereas this one mostly makes fun of the bad accent attempts, as if only native Britons were capable of pulling them off.
Sure, Dick Van Dyke was truly THE WORST in Mary Poppins, but there are many Americans (and Australians and Kiwis too) that can pull off a flawless British accent, like Meryl Streep, Johnny Depp, Claire Danes, and Gwyneth Paltrow.
Do you think it would be appropriate to make these two pages a bit more even in their tone?
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Agreed. And part of the reason that American accents are often done better is that for years, British media barely got released over there. Only the occasional TV show or film, in contrast to American media that's everywhere internationally. Americans just didn't get exposed to much British culture and therefore weren't as familiar with the accents. These days with Harry Potter proving that Americans will watch British stuff, more and more British media is exported over there. So the newer generation of actors have more opportunities to hear natural English accents. Plus they can easily You Tube actual Brits speaking these days too.
Removed the incorrect example of Billy Boyd as Peregrin Took in Lord of the Rings. The example stated they'd originally wanted him to speak with an English accent but kept his Scottish one in the end, either way, both of these accents are British so it was irrelevant.
First time troper. Was wondering why this one hadn't been mentioned before.
Mark Lawson misinterpreted the claim that Robin Hood came from "somewhere else". (It meant "somewhere other than Loxley", not "somewhere other than England".) Russell Crowe became very angry when he speculated that Crowe might have been doing the accent with (being polite) "a hint of Irish" (along with a bit of time spent in Australia, Lawson added when asked about the interview later on).
I don't get the hoo-hah over historical accents.
It is suggested by lingustic experts that the prevailing English dialect in Elizabethan times (a much later period) pronounced words in a way that is more closely related to American today such as sounding the r at the end of words. If we are going back to the twelfth century, goodness only knows how they would have sounded but it would have been nothing like modern British.
If you think about it, expecting a modern English accent is as ridiculous as having flims about with all the characters putting on Italian accents (though this might be quite comical).
Crowe did quite a spectrum of accents during this film - Irish, his own New Zealander, Liverpudlian (or there abouts), a hint of English - but as we can't be sure precisely how they spoke, it doesn't seem like a big deal. I still really enjoyed the film, myself.
In the early novels James Bond was never described as an Englishman. In the early novels it is unspecified British. It is not until You only Live Twice Fleming reveals hims to have been of a Swiss Mother and Scottish Father and gives him some clearly Scottish vocal patterns in the dialogue.
I need confirmation as to whether this trope actually refers to all British accents (English, Scottish, Welsh) or is only referring to English which would render the Trope name incorrect. The examples seem conflicted.
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