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21 accents
Of the lot I enjoyed the Kiwi imitation most, but they're all good. I was least convinced by Texas.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on March 2, 2008 at 07:05 PM in Sports | Permalink
Comments
My guess is the more you know about any of the individual accents, the less impressive it is. I'm from Tennessee and I got a good laugh out of her South Carolina accent.
Posted by: Swimmy at Mar 2, 2008 7:18:23 PM
Yeah, she had breadth, if not necessarily depth. But still fun.
Posted by: at Mar 2, 2008 8:02:08 PM
The "Toronto" accent was actually Newfoundland.
Posted by: Phil at Mar 2, 2008 8:53:07 PM
I was thinking, "eh, close" for each until she got to Texas. Then I laughed out loud. Not even close.
Posted by: Ethan at Mar 2, 2008 9:49:54 PM
I'm from the Lowcountry of SC and she got the Charleston accent down pretty well. I'm impressed.
Posted by: Tom at Mar 2, 2008 10:31:03 PM
California was pretty good except for the glaring English accent when she says "twenty-five." Some other misses but I'm nitpicking a bit. She did a phenomenal job overall especially taking into account she was reeling them off one after another.
Posted by: Neal at Mar 2, 2008 11:27:54 PM
All the British ones were spot on. To my ear the others were also very good, though I'm less well qualified to say.
Posted by: Finnsense at Mar 3, 2008 2:10:49 AM
I am a New Zealander and the Kiwi accent is pretty good.
Posted by: James at Mar 3, 2008 2:41:42 AM
These were very good, especially the SC, Texas and New Zealand one. My eye kept being drawn to the title "Does anyone know this chicks name or at least her age?", which only added to the comedy.
Posted by: at Mar 3, 2008 5:12:40 AM
The best response I've seen to this is:
"I am from all of the 21 places whose accent she tries to immitate, and she gets all of them wrong."
Posted by: Zoobin the Zooman at Mar 3, 2008 5:28:30 AM
Can't believe some of the nitpicking on that site, considering most people can't even hide where they're from with their accents! Those of us who aren't trained linguists and dialectologists will only ever have superficial and cursory 'knowledge' of what an X/Y accent is supposed to sound like anyway.
Now having said all that I definitely thought the North American ones were less convincing.. overall a terrific job though. Cheers.
Posted by: Chris at Mar 3, 2008 5:45:15 AM
I haven't been in the US all that long (barely six months), but I definitely found the North American accents a bit fake, and even the more convincing ones among them had a slight touch of some sort of British accent. Overall, very commendable.
By the way, this is a much higher quality video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UgpfSp2t6k
Posted by: johnleemk at Mar 3, 2008 6:18:47 AM
She made a couple of slip ups, but the accents were dead on. Even the Texas one, after she had a moment to get into it. The difficulty is going straight from one into the next. It takes a moment. But once she had a few words to get into it, in all honesty she could have been any lady from Texas.
Posted by: liberty at Mar 3, 2008 9:18:08 AM
As numerous commentators have noted, the "Toronto" accent was not even remotely close. I would hazard a guess that she may have met someone who lived there but did not grow up there.
Still very impressive, and there seems little doubt that she'd be capable of nailing a Toronto accent, or any other, if she only learned it in the first place.
Posted by: at Mar 3, 2008 7:45:40 PM
She is amazing, but I want to point out that her Parisian accent was fairly bad. I'm not sure how to describe it, but Parisians tend to have a very "tight" voice.
She sounds more like the Haitian or African elites who were raised in private schools.
Posted by: David Shor at Mar 3, 2008 10:01:41 PM
I thought her TX accent sounded exactly like Holly Hunter in some movie
which I can't remember.
Posted by: nattybumpo at Mar 4, 2008 12:14:48 PM
You people are picky. I've been to half those places and known natives from all the others; she did a better job than I could (especially skipping from one to the other that quickly) and I'm pretty decent at accents (I've been mistaken for English, Irish and US Southern by natives of those places over an extended conversation).
I'm also very amused by all of you who think her British is good but her American accents are weak. It says right on her YouTube bio that she's an American.
Posted by: Brock at Mar 4, 2008 4:22:33 PM
the czech accent is completely wrong.
Posted by: prague at Mar 5, 2008 8:26:31 AM
Her Texas accent was a dead ringer for Sandy on "Sponegbob Squarepants".
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