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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022

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Why do you think British-accented Chinese English is "silly fake accent" but American-accented Chinese English is "regular English"? Because you are an American? For the other way round, I find non-Western speakers of English with American accents to be "silly fake accents".

I say silly and fake because it sounds like a poorly done affectation. They try too hard and screw it up. Not that an actual British accent is inherently silly.

But the American accent in the Beijing subway was spot on. So I’m saying that announcer probably grew up in the US and speaks like a native English speaker. That one announcer doesn’t have a silly edge to their speech.

It's fair to say that to count as "regular English", you need to at least sound like some relatively large subset of native speakers who speak it as a first language. Accented Chinese English wouldn't qualify.

Probably more restrictive than that; it's a fairly limited set of U.K. and American accents; Scottish, Southern US, Down East, the old New York accent, etc, need not apply. Nor would any Indian accent qualify.