Americans have a sort of fascination with the English accent. It’s entranced and captivated us for centuries, not to mention all of the British-accented hot actors du jour (I’m looking at you, Andrew Garfield).
But pulling off a British accent is easier said than done. London-based comedian, presenter, and self-described “chronically English person” Benedict Townsend recently posted to TikTok, saying there’s one word in particular that seems to trip up Americans playing English characters.
It’s not that they forget to pronounce the “h” in “herb,” or keep the American pronunciation of “vite” rather than “vit” in “vitamin.”
It’s way less conspicuous, in fact: the word “daughter.”
Americans playing English characters in movies and television tend to pronounce the word as “dah-ter,” but Benedict says that’s a “dead giveaway” that they’re not actually from across the pond.
“I think any word that has that specific ‘a’ sound is always a giveaway, like ‘water.’ You’ll hear someone doing a pretty flawless English accent, and then all of a sudden, they’ll say ‘wutter,’ and your eyebrow goes up,” Benedict told BuzzFeed.
He explains in his video that as far as he knows, there’s no English person who would pronounce “daughter” with a short “o” sound for the first syllable. Rather, it will usually sound like the vowel sound in a word like “north.”
Benedict made a follow-up video a few months later, explaining how he and his wife “within one microsecond” spotted the American in the cast of Netflix’s A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder.
Benedict’s advice for Americans trying to do a convincing English accent is two-fold. First, think of the English pronunciation of “door” when saying the word “daughter.” And second, go for a fully fleshed-out accent based on a specific location in England rather than the “quasi-English accent” employed by many (including Peter Dinklage on Game of Thrones — “but I forgive him,” Benedict said).
“I think the biggest mistake is going too broad. A lot of US actors decide to do a generally ‘British’ accent that’s sort of a mishmash of every English accent they’ve ever heard, and they end up sounding like the world’s poshest northern chimney sweep. The best move, I think, is to go for an insanely specific accent (and England has many) and stick to that like glue,” he told BuzzFeed.
The word “daughter” is far from the only English accent blunder, though. “There was an obsession for a while with saying ‘pip pip’ when doing an English accent. I have no idea what ‘pip pip’ is; no English person, no matter how fancy, has ever said ‘pip pip,'” Benedict said. “The word ‘lorry’ also trips people up, and becomes ‘lowree.'”
Commenters on his video pointed out other words they’ve noticed American actors mispronounce:
As some pointed out, this pronunciation mix-up stems from what’s called the cot–caught merger, a linguistic sound change in which North American English speakers began to pronounce words like “cot” and “caught” (or “tot” and “taught,” “stock” and “stalk,” etc.) the same over time, whereas in British English, they are still distinct.
I also asked Benedict whether there are any quirks he notices about the way English actors do American accents. “Oh, all the time. The most glaring one that loads of people in my TikTok comments brought up is the word ‘anything,’ which English actors love to pronounce as ‘ennything,’ even when playing Americans. I also have long said that the word ‘America’ itself is maybe one of the hardest words for a non-American to say in a US accent.”
So, pulling off a convincing English accent isn’t as easy as dropping your jaw low and sprinkling in some “pip pips,” but with some study and practice, you’ll be fooling people in no time, Renée Zellweger style.
Who’s your “wait, they’re actually British (or American)?” actor? Is there a word you think is a dead giveaway that an actor is imitating an accent? Sound off in the comments.
