You know how you have that one friend who does impressions?
“Tohp o’ the mohnin’ tewya,” he says, his voice slightly higher and his mouth slightly rounder than usual. When you finally ask which person he’s impersonating, he answers that he’s being a British person.
Well, in spite of what your comedian friend seems to believe, to say nothing of countless amateur Shakespeare troupes, there isn’t one particular British accent. (That’s kind of like saying that there’s just one way of sounding American.)
When most of us think about “the way Brits talk,” we think about a British dialect that linguists call Received Pronunciation (RP) — also known as BBC English. But as comedian Siobhan Thompson shows in this amazing video, there are more than a few ways of sounding like a British person. In fact, Thompson has 17 of them.
