I can do a passably rubbish American...
But... Some people say my American is good. And... I reply that they have hearing problems. Also, a lot of imitations of English accents aren't much good. Some people forget we do not say mall = shopping centre or something, (can't even SAY that word
), sidewalk = pavement, yard = garden, oh yeah... we don't have Target, Limeted Too or 7-Eleven or Sevemn-11, whateve it is.
7-eleven is a convenience shop known almost entirely for having the Slurpee, a kind of iced/slush drink which the Squishee from
The Simpsons is a parody of. The vast majority 7-11s are open 24 hours a day and are, by and large, attached to gas stations in the southern US and stand-alone convenience shops everywhere else.
I am sort of interested what would be an "American" accent, since there are so many differences between Southern (even the differences between the generic "Southern" accents), Boston, Chicago, Californian, New York(...ian? xD), etc accents, that it seems odd to have one that's called "American". From my experience, I live in Illinois, and there are people with Southern accents, the Chicago accent (obviously), some accents that I can't even really describe, and, well, what I would like to call a "lack of an accent", but obviously that's not true.
Or are all of those, collectively, considered American accent?
When faking an American accent, when I can tell what they're going for (I often can't), it usually seems to be either a generic Southern or a New York. But yea, I often can't tell what the hell they're trying to do...I suppose there's that kinda "generic" American accent which you get on a lot of tv shows, and that's probably what they're trying to imitate if they aren't going for a more specific one.
...I have no idea if any of that made sense.
(Moongewl says it slightly better than me, and also makes a good point with the whole generic "English" accent thing, too.)
I tend to think of the generic American accent this way:
-There are no glottal stops like in many English accents, such as is often the parodied Cockney accent (meaning you'd say "Glo'al stop")
-You pronounce every letter that isn't canonically silent (non-accented Americans say, "I parked my car in Harvard Yard," while Bostonians say "I pahked mah cah in Hahvahd Yahd,"which is a comedically pleasing evolution of what I perceive to be the general British hatred of the letter R)
-There's no lyrical quality to the language, like there is in Irish English or in southern american hill dialects that arose from Irish and Scots immigrants (If you've heard the phrase, "Fussin and a-feudin," or "He's gone a-fishin'," that added particle, the "a-" prefix, is there to maintain an iambic quality to the phrases, with up-down-up-down accenting of the syllables, which arose from the primarily Irish immigrants who settled outside of major cities in the southern US).
-There are no added phones to the words. "India" is pronounced, "IN-dee-yah," not "IN-dee-ehr," which happens a lot in British English dialects, for some reason I just don't know.
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Gutted.
