35
votes
Debunking the myth of Hollywood's "fake" transatlantic accent
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- Title
- Hollywood's "Fake" Mid-Atlantic Myth DEBUNKED!
- Authors
- Dr Geoff Lindsey
- Duration
- 26:03
- Published
- Jun 30 2024
Dr. Geoff Lindsey is one of the few people whose language-centric YouTube content is super well-founded on actual modern linguistic theory, since he has an academic background in phonetics, and he does an excellent job of making his videos understandable even to an audience that doesn't have any linguistics background.
This particular video does a good job of debunking a widely-spread myth that you'll almost definitely have heard if you've watched any language-related videos from generic pop science sources. Even as someone with a linguistics degree, I took this myth for granted because I'd heard it repeated so often and it was about a different subfield than the one I focused on. I hope others here are as impressed by this video as I was!
Thanks for sharing! Watching subject matter experts deconstruct common misconceptions is one of my favorite genres of youtube video.
Another mythbusting video of his that I think is great is the one about vocal fry: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0yL2GezneU
Yeah I'd recommend pretty much all his videos! He knows his stuff and is a great presenter.
See now this is mildly troubling because he referenced a few channels I'm subscribed to. One, Half As Interesting (or one of Sam's other channels) I'd held in high regard as being factual because there does seem to be some care and effort put into getting things right. The other, Weird History, is absolutely just popscience/history junk food and I always take everything from them with a pinch of salt.
But then again, it sounds like even when the research is done and sources are cited, the underlying sources are completely wrong, too! I guess this serves as a good reminder that history is complicated and just because a theory is popular it doesn't mean it's correct.
What ruined the short video essay genre for me was realizing the vast majority were just paraphrased versions of the wikipedia article and did not contain any depth whatsoever. Some channels are better at hiding it, but once I realized it there was no going back from seeing the table of contents match the chapter outlines.
Yeah I recognized Half As Interesting in there and was disappointed, but no one is perfect. If I gave this myth no second thought myself despite my background in linguistics, I'm not surprised to see it happen for people without any such background.
The Wikipedia talk page already has a pretty constructive discussion of how to improve that article based on this video, and I assume if Sam comes across it his response would be similar.