On Mad Max etc, when Gibson was in his early twenties, in interview he had a “mixed” accent: pretty Aussie but sometimes the vowels were a bit wonky. In film or on TV in those days, though, his Australian accent was basically flawless but for all I know he was being heavily coached.

Speaking of all this ... I am now watching James Murdoch being grilled. What a weird accent he has, it’s all over the shop.

OP Tipping - 19 July 2011 06:22 AM

Speaking of all this ... I am now watching James Murdoch being grilled. What a weird accent he has, it’s all over the shop.

He also seems to be using the occasional Americanism, such as “gotten” - I see that while he appears to have grown up in Oz and/or Britain, he went to school and then university in the US.

ElizaD - 19 July 2011 12:19 AM

I don’t think I do consciously or otherwise, change my accent or phraseology when I’m abroad, unless I need to speak more slowly to a foreigner or someone who has difficulty in understanding what I’m saying (I do a lot of that, even in the UK).  Foreign call centres used by many big UK businesses would do well to practise speaking slowly.  Grrrrrrr.....

You’ll be pleased at this news, then, Eliza - Bank repatriates its call centres from India back to UK:

Clashing accents appear to be part of the problem. In January, British Telecom apologised to one of its customers after a row about accents. The woman initially complained that she was unable to understand call-centre workers in India. The company then sent her a letter saying the call-centre workers had a problem understanding her accent. The apology followed.

A representative from [the bank] Santander also told British media about customers who had complained about Indian call-centre workers not understanding them. “A volume of the complaints said they would prefer to deal with call centres in the UK, where staff could understand them better as individuals and know where they are coming from”, a Santander representative told The Telegraph.

When I was in graduate school, my best friend, a physics student, told me about two physics grad students, one from Texas and the other from India, whose accents were mutually unintelligible.  Anybody else in the department could understand either of them, but when they talked to each other they needed an English-to-English interpreter.

You’ll be pleased at this news, then, Eliza - Bank repatriates its call centres from India back to UK

Very! I find it’s both the accent and the speed at which many operators talk.

I just saw Inglourious Basterds. I thought Myers’s accent was _pretty_ good, but went up and down the social scale a bit. For instance, take his pronunciation of /aʊ/: in some instances, it is more or less straight RP/BBC English, but at least once it is a more aristocratic [æy].