Cultural Accents.

[Vampyre]

I think there was just a period where it was fashionable, but cockney rhyming slang is still used a little bit.

[Asmiley]

sure. I gues I picke da good topic.

[Anni]

True Cockney is very fast spoken and practically unintelligible. Spike has a Londoner's accent, but not necessarily a 'Cockney' accent. And Cockneys generally were called that if they were born within the sound of Bow Bells (A church in London's Bow Street area).

Spike's accent actually is quite good. He doesn't over accentualise the English accent, the way that many Americans do when they're supposed to be British. They tend to make it very cariacatured and laughable, which is usually how Angel's Irish accent strikes me when it's used. He should stick to the Transatlantic accent. Some people are good at them and some people suck!

[Vampyre]

I think you may begetting Cockney mixed up with Pikey (Gypsies, travellers, whatever you want to call them) talk there.

[VAMPette]

In 'Fool for Love' Spike had a much posher accent at the beginning, so I think the cockney bit was just put on to make him more of a hard man.

Just talking of rhyming slang, remember when Lock, Stock came out, and everyone started with the 'apples and pears' routine - twas quite amusing.

[Tabitha]

It was amusing, but also confusing, as I could never understand what people were on about!

[Anni]

No I'm not getting mixed up between Cockney and Pikey..... I've both lived and worked in London, and although I am not a Londoner I am aware what a Cockney is and why they are described as that. Pikeys are something else entirely and very rarely appear in central London. They're more a parody of the true gipsies, and again the true Romany is actually disappearing.

Pikeys are just travellers who attach themselves onto the fringes of settled society, their accents are wide and varied because they come from all over England. They have no common dialect. whereas the Cockney has a definite developed dialect, although I think it's disappearing to quite an extent itself.

In 51 years of life I have met many people from all backgrounds and realistically speaking.....Angel, if he was part of a 'gentleman's' background as they did indeed portray him in scenes of his past would be more likely to speak the language of the 17th/18th Century (which did differ from our speech today quite a lot), with very little of an Irish burr, although it might be discernible. From what I could see of the couple of scenes with his family they looked fairly well to do for an Irish family at that time.....most ordinary Irish folk during the 17th/18th century were poverty stricken and struggling to make a living...the Potato Famine leaps to mind. This was why so many of them took passage to the New World to find a better life away from starvation.

Therefore Angel's family were relatively high up on the social scale. They would have had him educated at a decent school for gentlemen and the school would have beaten the Irish burr out of him, because it would have been unthinkable for him to enter society with that kind of 'stigma' hanging around his neck.

Spike doesn't speak with a Cockney accent, he speaks with a London accent and there is a great difference between them in the truest sense. But I think that is blurring with time anyway.

[Vampyre]

Well...if you describe Barbara Windsor's voice (she's lost it a bit now) as very fast spoken and practically unintelligible, then...fair enough.

[Tabitha]

Originally posted by Anni

In 51 years of life I have met many people from all backgrounds and realistically speaking.....Angel, if he was part of a 'gentleman's' background as they did indeed portray him in scenes of his past would be more likely to speak the language of the 17th/18th Century (which did differ from our speech today quite a lot), with very little of an Irish burr, although it might be discernible. From what I could see of the couple of scenes with his family they looked fairly well to do for an Irish family at that time.....most ordinary Irish folk during the 17th/18th century were poverty stricken and struggling to make a living...the Potato Famine leaps to mind. This was why so many of them took passage to the New World to find a better life away from starvation.

Therefore Angel's family were relatively high up on the social scale. They would have had him educated at a decent school for gentlemen and the school would have beaten the Irish burr out of him, because it would have been unthinkable for him to enter society with that kind of 'stigma' hanging around his neck.

Ireland was even more polarised between rich and poor at that time than the rest of the British Isles. There was no middle-class to speak of (except perhaps in Dublin and Belfast, and even then it was very small), and from what we have been shown Angel's family were almost definitely landed gentry. The upper classes in this period in Ireland would almost all have been decendents of English settlers over the past few centurys, and thus their offspring (well, the boys anyway ) would likely have been educated at Trinity in Dublin, or in England, and therefore ending up speaking with more of an English accent than an Irish one. You are right in describing the Irish accent as a stigma (see George Bernard Shaw's play "John Bull's Other Island" for a good portrayal of this).

One idea I might add is that if memory serves, Angel grew up in Galway - relatively far from the English bastion of Dublin. In the more remote regions the landed gentry were much closer to their poor neighbours, and (in the 17th C at least) were often Catholic descendants of the earliest English settlers, so the pressure to "fit in" with the English aristocracy in Dublin & England might have been less powerful, and accents and other markers of elitism would have possibly been less noticeable.

In addition, Angelus' Irish burr is hardly very strong, as those of you who have visited Ireland will notice, so perhaps it is more fitting with reality than we give it credit for.

I have been thinking - does anyone know why Spike has retained his accent, yet Angel has not? I know that some people are more susceptible to losing their accents than others (I pick up accents at the drop of a hat - but then I am not too keen on my "Belfast Brogue" so I probably shouldn't complain :lol: ).
I guess another reason could be that Spike is relatively young compared to Angel and therefore his accent has not yet faded, but might in the future. In the flashback scenes from when Spike was sired - Angel still has an Irish accent doesn't he? Hmmmm.

[Tabitha]

Ooops that turned into a bit of lecture - sorry folks! :eek7:

[Vampyre]

Spike used to speak in a fairly posh accent, then he changed his voice when he became a vampire.

Spike: You’d do well to remember it, mate.
Angelus: I’m not your mate. And when did you start talking like that?

[Tabitha]

Aha!

I forgot about that, I wonder why he did it - it was decades before Guy Ritchie became famous :wink2:

[Tabitha]

Originally posted by Asmiley
sure. I gues I picke da good topic.

You did indeeed Asmiley!!!! :wave:

[Vampyre]

Spike probably did it to make himself sound bad. Otherwise he would have been a posh sounding vampire...

[Highlander II]

yeah - could you imagine a vampire trying to be the 'big bad' and talking like Giles?

just not the same ----