Ooh, Me Accent's Slipping

Lisl: Me nightie's slippin'.
James Bond: So is your accent, Countess.

—For Your Eyes Only

When an actor has a Fake Nationality, they may not always be able to hold their accent in place and may start to lapse into their native accent. Especially when yelling or for emotional scenes.

This can also happen intentionally, usually because the character was faking an accent for whatever reason - normally when this happens, it's Played for Laughs.

Compare with Not Even Bothering with the Accent, What the Hell Is That Accent?, Accent Relapse, and Ooh, Me Social Class's Dialect Is Slipping.

Examples of Ooh, Me Accent's Slipping include:

Straight(er) Examples

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• While The Most Interesting Man in the World is ostensibly a Badass Spaniard (or Ernest Hemingway), and at first had the appropriate accent, in later spots his actor's New York Jew twang bleeds through every other word or so.

Anime

• In Dragon Ball, Commander Red goes in and out of an Irish accent. It became especially apparent just before he got shot by Staff Officer Black.
• The English dub of Axis Powers Hetalia has a few characters with this problem.
  • It seems to be the opinion of the voice actors themselves that the most Egregious accents were intentionally chosen.
• Many early Manga UK dubs had British actors putting on American accents with varying degrees of success, often so bad it's hilarious. These also included colloquialism failures, such as saying "knickers" instead of "panties" (for women's underwear), etc.
• The English dub of Laputa: Castle in the Sky features Anna Paquin as Sheeta, and her accent varies between American and New Zealand for much of the movie.
  • Her Mancunian accent in Steamboy slips from time to time.
• Yu-Gi-Oh! GX; in the dub version of the duel where Asuka duels Sommelier Parker (called Maitre' D in the dub, an obvious stage name) he speaks in a thick French accent, but drops it when he gets frustrated with Asuka's resilience; she wastes no time ribbing him for it.

Audio Plays

• Lifelong Doctor Who fanboy David Tennant, before being cast as The Nth Doctor himself, was cast in several Big Finish Doctor Who audio plays—at the time, the only new dramatic Doctor Who being produced. In one play, "Colditz", he played an evil Nazi. The very Scottish Tennant preformed his role with a very German accent, and only slipped once: "I vil do my" (in a massively Deutschland accent) "DOOOO-ty!" (sounding nothing so much like the most stereotypical Scotsman you have ever heard).
• The audio book of the Doctor Who novel "The Coming of the Terraphiles" is read by Clive Mantle, whose struggles to reproduce Amy Pond's Scottish accent result in him sounding not entirely unlike Mrs Doubtfire.

Comics

• Deliberately invoked with Hank, American Alfred to the British Batman in Knight & Squire. In the text piece, Paul Cornell says he imagines Hank as being played by an actor from Milton Keynes, with an accent that wanders all over the place, just like American characters on British TV when he was a kid.
• In-universe example in The Sandman, where a Chinese character switches between speaking perfectly good English and "Solly, no speakee English" by way of Obfuscating Stupidity.
• Many of the characters in Preacher (Comic Book) speak turn of phrases decidedly not American/Texan and more Irish (writer Garth Ennis' homeland). These are usually funniest when the main character is written with his typical Texas drawl saying them.
  • When Cassidy has to fake a Texan drawl, he slips up, and gets called on it.

Film

• In August Rush the English actor Freddie Highmore plays an American boy who's lived just outside New York all his life. Granted it was the first time Freddie had to put on an American accent, but it was weak and often slipped.
• In The Town the English actress Rebecca Hall plays American bank manager Claire Keesey. Her accent subtlely slips throughout the movie, one example being in the scene where her character and Doug (Ben Affleck) are on a date and run into Jem (Jeremy Renner). The line "So I've been telling all my friends about you," is clearly said in a British accent.
• In The Third Man, Alida Valli (playing Anna) obviously believed that it it would be appropriate to use several English accents in her role as an east-European escapee of Communism; One time it's Russian, another time it's perfect British English, then it's German English, then one time it's American English, then Dutch English.
• In Stardust, Michelle Pfeiffer plays an English witch with English sisters, who have actual English accents. Pfeiffer attempts an English accent, which works now and then in the film, but often sounds horrendous.
• In the film Michael Collins, most of the cast are Irish and have according accents. The female lead is Julia Roberts, whose accent slips from Irish to Southern twang every time she's on screen, most jarringly in her first scene.
  • The eponymous male lead was played quite well by Irish actor Liam Neeson, but not with the appropriate Cork accent.
    • For more bizarre vocalising from Julia Roberts, see her performance as English maid Mary Reilly in the film of the same name.
• The King of Accent Slippage is Sean Bean. His native South Yorkshire accent escapes in virtually all of his movies - including GoldenEye where he refers to James in a way that wouldn't be out of place in Emmerdale. I'm pretty sure Count Vronski in Anna Karenina wasn't from Sheffield.
  • Liam Neeson is right up there with him, usually when he has to say anything with an "oo" sound, like "you". He's got better at it as he's gotten older, but some of his early films, like Darkman, are a fairly Egregious case of this trope.
• Claire Forlani plays Brandi Svenning in Mallrats, set in New Jersey. Her accent is decidely unJoisey and her natural English accents slips in quite often.
• In The Dark Knight Saga Gary Oldman's accent slips throughout the movie but is especially evident during the scene on the roof when he, Harvey Dent, and Batman are discussing what to do about Lau.
• In Pirates of the Caribbean, Bill Nighy played the Welshman, Davy Jones with a Scottish accent that tended to fade in and out.
• Played with in Nim's Island, in which Gerard Butler plays Alex Rover, with his natural accent, as well as Nim's father, with a Fake American accent that is truly embarrassing to hear, even when the Scottish vowels and Rs aren't forcing their way out.
  • Best seen in the scene where Nim and her father are reunited. About a minute of relieved, Scottish-accented ranting, then he switches back to American in the space of a glance.
  • The Movie of The Phantom of the Opera is even slippier with Gerard's accent.
  • His accent seems to alternate a lot during 300.
• In Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Cate Blanchett's Ukranian accent seems to slip a bit in some scenes, particularly when saying "Jones".
  • Happens in Raiders of the Lost Ark too. Listen to both Paul Freeman (Belloq) and John Rhys-Davies (Sallah). Both their English accents shine through during the dig scenes.
• Keanu Reeves gave a mediocre English accent (with some passable moments) for the first half of or so of Bram Stoker's Dracula, but by the end of it the poor fellow seems to have forgotten that Jonathan Harker was not raised in Canada...
  • Same goes for The Devil's Advocate: he seemingly arbitrarily alternates between his natural accent and a Southern-sounding accent (the latter being more appropriate for his character). As with Bram Stokers Dracula, he basically abandons the second accent about halfway through.
• Orson Welles playing an Irishman in The Lady From Shanghai. He doesn't do too badly, but he still sounds like Orson Welles.
• In the (sadly rather shithouse) Australian slasher film Nightmares from 1980, the central character's accent swings back and forth wildly between something resembling an Australian accent and something resembling an American accent. She was an American trying to sound Aussie, but her accent lapsed so regularly that it really was a 50/50 chance guessing which was the real one.
• Richard Gere is apparently supposed to be an ex-IRA man (i.e. most likely from Norn Iron) in The Jackal. Don't know what accent he was going for though.
• In the Conan the Barbarian film, surfing champion Gerry Lopez played Subotai the Hyrkanian with a vaguely foreign accent (the Hyrkanians were effectively proto-Mongols), but occasionally slips into a California accent.
• Though not a fictional role, per se, in Christian Bale's Epic Terminator 4 Rant, his normally convincing American accent slips generally in a direct relationship to his frustration and rage.
  • Although Bale's accent is his own bizarre Transatlantic creation nowadays. His Welsh birthplace is often mentioned but he has never sounded remotely Welsh - probably because his English family only lived there temporarily. His natural voice (seen in his earliest movies like Empire of the Sun) is RP Southern English.
  • In the actual film, Sam Worthington's American is extremely shaky (it still wobbles a bit in Avatar, but he has improved). Worthington reverts to his own accent for several minutes in the middle of the film, when he's in bondage and having a heart-to-heart with Bale, making one wonder how it was able to slip past the cast, the director, the crew, the editors, and the test audience.
  • Christian Bale's accent slips a few times in The Machinist, especially when he's angry, but in other places too. Check out the scene at the DMV, particularly the line "I wouldn't ask if it weren't extremely important."
    • In The Dark Knight Saga, in the scene where Bruce Wayne crashes into the police escort, Christian Bale's accent slips very obviously.
  • In Public Enemies, Christian Bale attempts a southern drawl every other scene.
• The Thirty-Nine Steps has Robert Donat playing a Canadian vacationing in London. Somewhere around the final act, he slips more and more into his British accent.
• In the Street Fighter movie, although Jean-Claude Van Damme maintains a pretty good American accent, during the speech towards the end, when he announces that he'll "kick that son of a bitch Bison's ass", try not to hear his native Belgian accent. The rest of the movie probably qualifies as well. "If Sagat runs (unintelligible) to Bison..."
  • Ah yes, for you Jean-Claude Van Damme's "up reever" speech was a clear example of this trope. But for me it was Tuesday.
• The Lord of the Rings Film of the Book had Viggo Mortensen as Aragorn. Now, he did a pretty good job, except the accent, which tended to fade in and out when it was present at all.
  • He speaks Elvish with his own accent, so it comes off like he's slipping into that.
  • Aragorn's accent seems to be variously RP English, American, or lilting Welsh, and at one or two moments he even sounds like a Newfie.
    • This deleted scene has him sounding strangely Oirish.
  • Of the same movie, some critics have complained that Sean Astin's accent as Samwise sounds slightly Cockney. This may be because before shooting started, Astin—realizing that there were upper- and lower-class accents in England, but failing to realize there were urban and rural accents—rehearsed the role on his own with a Cockney accent.
  • Less evident than the above, but there were a couple of times when Elijah Wood's accent seemed to be wavering, though it is mostly good.
  • Notably averted by Brad Dourif, whose pronounced West Virginia drawl never makes an appearance.
    • It's similar to below (Bridget Jones) when he did revert, the extras were all in shock.
• Caroline Rhea in The Perfect Man is supposed to be from Brooklyn. The accent comes and goes. Mostly...it goes.
• Alec Baldwin's southern accent occasionally disappears completely in Ghosts of Mississippi.
• In The Insider, the British Michael Gambon plays the CEO of a tobacco company in Louisville, Kentucky. His accent goes back and forth between the South and England.
• In the film Mary Poppins, Dick Van Dyke puts on a painful cockney accent that comes and goes depending on what scene he's in.
  • Made fun of by Death in the pages of The Sandman

Death: Dick Van Dyke's British accent defies belief. "Hoh, hit's a jolly 'oliedye wiv yew, Mairee Pawpins!"

• • This accent was so horrendous that in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, he kept his natural American accent despite having a very obviously British father, obviously British children, and an obviously British love interest, in what was very obviously Britain.
  • Clearly said cockney accent is the stuff of legend. Eddie Izzard also made fun of it:

Eddie: Dick Van Dyke went for a cockney accent ... except I think he went to Australia to learn it. "G'day, Mairee Pawpins, haw're yew?" That is Australian, isn't it?

• In Blood Diamond, Leonardo DiCaprio does a passable Rhodesian accent until one scene in which he shouts at Djimon Honsou for going another way. As he raises his voice, he reverts back into his normal American accent.
• Kate Beckinsale as Anna Valarious in Van Helsing is unable to maintain an Eastern European accent for longer than a couple of lines at a time. She eventually gives up completely about halfway through the movie. To their credit, the Brides of Dracula didn't even try to sound anything other than American (even though only one of the three brides is actually American).
• In Volunteers, Tom Hanks' bad New English "Haahvahd" accent flips on and off like a lightning bug.
  • He uses a similar one in Catch Me If You Can. It's improved a lot in 20 years, but still wobbles a little on occasion.
• Basil Rathbone's French accent in Captain Blood sometimes gives way to his native British South African in the middle of sentences.
• Clive Owen's American accent for Derailed slips for just a teensy line near the end where he pops in the hotel room to tell a stranger he's being scammed. The word "scam" comes out in his original British accent.
  • Additionally, he seems to attempt an American accent for about half of the first scene in Inside Man. Drops it pretty quickly after that, and it never resurfaces.
• Eddie Izzard does this and then, upon realizing it, often hangs a huge Lampshade on it. As here, in the same show, Definite Article:

Eddie(as Welsh Pavlov): Excellent. Changed my name from "Evans" to "Pavlov". Now "Gareth Pavlov" and fitting in well.

And later:

Eddie (during a James Bond scene): I am a Schmuf agent, and Ah have a voice synthesahzer in mah threut. Ah can do eny accent yu can theenk uv. Unfortunitly I've lowst the enstructions at the moment, and it's stuck on "shop deymonstraation."

Of course, he also uses "stock accents", such as parodying James Mason's accent for God in multiple shows and using Sean Connery for, among others, Henry VIII and Noah.

• • To bring two examples together, Eddie does an absolutely hilarious skewering of Dick Van Dyke's Cockney-by-way-of-Australia accent in his special Glorious
• Done intentionally (and cleverly) in the film version of Watchmen. Adrian Veidt/Ozymandias, played by Matthew Goode, only speaks with a German accent when in the presence of people he's familiar with- presumably, because he's trying to sound "more American" to the general public.
  • This actually came about because the decision to play up Veidt's German background wasn't made until after the first scene in which he addresses the press - for which Goode used a generic American accent—had already been shot. Nevertheless, the end result is very effective, arguably more so than if Goode had simply spoken with a German twang throughout.
  • Goode also occasionally slips back into his native British, giving Ozymandias a grand total three different accents.
• The Sci-Fi original movie Rock Monster has a supposedly Scandinavian character, who occasionally attempts a generic Eastern European accent.
• According to some fans, this happens in Newsies to a humorous extent.
  • Christian Bale's Jack, in particular, sounds like he couldn't decide what New York accent to do and decided on all of them.
• In Hannibal, Julianne Moore has Clarice's accent for her first few scenes and then drops it for the rest of the movie. Of course, the original Silence did establish Clarice was trying to lose her Southern accent, but who knew she'd accomplish it so suddenly?
  • It's quite glaring in certain scenes.

"Yew swear tew!"

• There's a scene in Madhouse where temperamental horror icon Paul Toombes (Vincent Price) has just been disrespectful of his female costar's alleged unprofessionalism. She draws herself up to her full height and tells him exactly what she thinks. And then...

Toombes: Your stage accent is slipping.

• In the X-Men movies, Australian Hugh Jackman didn't seem to experience accent slippage portraying the Canadian Wolverine, aside from an odd-sounding vowel here and there (glaring example: near the end of X 2 X Men United when he says 'you don't wanna go that way, trust me'). These seem pretty well impossible to excise from Australian actors (compare to Cate Blanchett, Russell Crowe, Heath Ledger, etc, especially on O sounds).
  • Jackman slips into Australian in the first movie the first time he says "Storm" (just before "What do they call you? 'Wheels'?"). And also in the truck, right after Rogue tells him that he should buckle up. And again when he says to Jean "Couldn't wait to get my shirt off again, could you?". And in the second movie, on the word "art" when talking to Bobby's parents.
  • In the first film, Anna Paquin at least attempted to remember to give Rogue a southern accent on occasion. Seems like she gave up by the end of the third film, though.
  • Also in the first film, Halle Berry speaks, very briefly, in a vaguely foreign accent. This is made even more evident if you watch some of the deleted scenes. She completely abandons this by the end of the film.
    • Pretty sure she was angling for Sub-Saharan African accent, what with Storm being from Kenya in the comics. But its worth noting even director Bryan Singer referred to it as an "attempt" in his DVD commentary.
  • In X Men First Class, by the end of the movie Michael Fassbender can't keep Magneto as a German and lets his Irish accent lapse unceremoniously.
    • By the end of the movie? More like after the first ten minutes... though of course Ian McKellen didn't even attempt a German accent when he played Magneto.
    • And James McAvoy, portraying Charles Xavier as English, sounds pretty Scottish on the line "Hank, LEVEL THE BLOODY PLANE!"
• In Spider-Man 2, Alfred Molina, who plays Dr. Octopus, is from London. When he says, "I should've known Osborn wouldn't have the spine to finish you!," his British accent is audible.
• Used in-story in Max Keeble's Big Move.
• In Thirteen Days, which is set during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kevin Costner's Boston accent (he plays Kenny O'Donnell, a presidential aide to John F. Kennedy) is particularly atrocious. The other actors do better, but he horribly stretches out his vowels and just generally exaggerates everything in a really distracting way. It's especially noticeable considering that his character has a lot of the more dramatic dialogue, the other accented characters speaking a lot of stuff that is more-or-less lifted straight from transcripts of White House recordings.
• In the animated film An American Tail, the Irish mouse Bridget's accent comes and goes.
• In The Stepford Wives, Nicole Kidman has an American accent for most of the movie, but during her speech at the start, she clearly has an Australian accent.
  • She slips a fair few times in The Portrait of a Lady as well.
• In the Errol Flynn Western Virginia City a Mexican bandit is played by Humphrey Bogart. His accent is...not flawless.
• In the film The Boys from Brazil James Mason's German accent...doesn't sound very German.
• In Clockstoppers, one of the main characters, Francesca, loses her Hispanic accent shortly into the film and never regains it. Somewhat humorously, the actor who played her, Paula García, was born in Colombia.
• Portraying a Chicagoan in Twilight, Robert Pattinson manages to just sound stoned and in pain. This may be intentional, given his resentment toward his own character.
  • He (unfortunately for the lulz) got a lot better at it in the sequels, but as the Riff Trax geniuses point out, in the first film he slips, drops it for whole sentences, or- best of all- morphs into Christopher Walken.
• In |Twenty One, English actor Jim Sturgess does what could charitably be called a decent American accent. Mostly. When he remembers.
• In Goal!, Anna Friel, playing the Newcastle United club physician, does what could charitably be called a decent Geordie accent. Mostly. When she remembers.
• The actors of The Shipping News attempted the Newfoundland accent with varying degrees of success. Extremely distracting, however, was American actress Julianne Moore's version of it, which usually settled on sounding like a badly-faked Irish accent.
• Brendan Gleeson's American accent in Green Zone seemed to slip into Irish on the odd word.
• About twenty minutes into the first Star Wars movie, Princess Leia inexplicably gains a clipped, pseudo-British accent when dealing with her Imperial captors. It disappears after she is rescued and never returns again. (One could, if feeling charitable, chalk this up to her attempting to sound high-class, as the Coruscanti accent is close to British. Or possibly to mocking Admiral Tarkin's accent.)
  • Carrie Fisher, the actress, has explained this disappearing accent. The scene in question was the first scene she filmed, and because she was a Princess, she decided to put on the faux-British accent you hear. However, after filming finished, she and the filmmakers concluded it didn't sound right and dropped it in future scenes. Due to the film's tight budget and schedule, reshooting the scene without the accent was out of the question.
  • A later explanation Fisher gives during her one-woman show Wishful Drinking was that the accent was an after-effect of 18 months of studying at London's Central School of Speech and Drama where by necessity she picked up a Received Pronunciation accent.
  • In The Empire Strikes Back, the snowspeeder co-pilot Dack slips into a British accent when he says "Feeling alright, sir?" to Luke.
• Natalie Portman in V for Vendetta. The character, Evey Hammond, lives in London. Portman's accent in the movie varies between Cockney, Australian, RP English and a strained-sounding American. Strangely, it comes across as quite endearing.
  • Although she improved quite a bit by the time The Other Boleyn Girl came along.
• Ewan McGregor does this a little bit in Moulin Rouge—most noticeably when he says 'No matter how things get or whatever happens, it will mean that we love one another.' to Satine.
  • And since he's Scottish, every once in a while, his "oh" sounds will sound like "oo." (Like "humble abood" and "goo away.")
  • He mostly has an American accent in The Men Who Stare at Goats, but on certain lines ("You forgot your caaaaahp!") it lapses noticeably.
  • It's pretty noticeable when he says "No, I won't" during the Elephant Love Medley Scene.
• Occasionally in On Her Majesty's Secret Service you can hear George Lazenby (as James Bond) slip back into his native Australian accent. It's not especially noticeable as the 1960s Australian accent was a little more English-sounding anyway, but it's there.
• In Doom, Karl Urban holds up his American accent awfully well. But as the film goes on, it gets shaky, especially when his character starts to yell.
• What's up with Sean Connery's accent in Marnie? It starts off as some sort of vaguely American thing before rolling back up the high country for an egg wrapped in sausage meat.
• Russell Crowe in Robin Hood (2010 film). The accent went round several regions of Britain in the same scene sometimes. When questioned by Mark Lawson that there might be "hints of Irish", Crowe was furious.
• In The a Team, Sharlto Copley uses a vaguely Southern accent which he has a hard time keeping up when he's excited (see the line "You gorgeous old rust bucket, you! Did you miss your daddy?", which is entirely in his natural South African accent) or shouting. Though it kind of works for the character.
  • Though given that it's Murdock, it's entirely possible a lot of it was intentional, particularly the 'gorgeous old rust bucket' and 'heat seekers' lines.
    • In fact, it's probably all intentional, given that in the 80's TV show, Murdock uses no less than five different accents in the four-part pilot alone.
    • It's used deliberately in a brief scene where he impersonates a South African reporter.
• Mel Gibson in Braveheart. ([Gibson's natural accent] "We won at Stirling!" [Scottish accent] "And still you quibble!")
• Brit Aaron Johnson does a decent job with an American accent in Kick-Ass, although towards the end he mentions being troubled by the "idear" of never seeing his friends and family again when he thinks he's about to be killed.
• In L.A. Confidential, it seems more like James Cromwell is occasionally slipping out of his native American accent. He's plays an Irish-American cop in the movie, but most of the time he sounds American, occasionally with a terrible Irish accent. It's most notable when he says Irish things like "boyo."
  • 'Boyo', of course, being a stereotypically Welsh thing to say.
    • In the novel, it's made a bit more clear that Cromwell's character takes care to cultivate the stereotypical Irish Cop image, so that people will underestimate him, in a sort of native variety of Funny Foreigner.
• Christopher Eccleston in G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra certainly didn't have the Scottish accent he was supposed to be trying for. He slips into his natural Mancunian accent multiple times.
• Kate Winslet managed a pretty decent American accent in Titanic, but it did falter in a couple places. Watch the sequence where she tells Jack that she is engaged.
• A rare deliberate example occurs in 7 Faces of Dr. Lao, with the eponymous wizard slipping in and out of a Chinese accent on whim.
• In National Treasure, Diane Kruger's attempts at a nondescript American accent fall short quite often under scrutiny. The accent-masking is convincing when it isn't slipping, but the slips are very noticeable.
  • It's lampshaded in the film. Ben (Nicolas Cage) asks about her accent--"Pennsylvania Dutch?"
  • Justified as it's mentioned her character is German born. Kruger can speak fluent english without and accent so her slight german accent poking through is likely intentional.
• Happens to Mike Myers a few times in the Austin Powers movies. The ending of Austin Powers in Goldmember is a particularly egregious example.
  • Myers points out in the commentary that he sounds particularly Canadian when Dr. Evil meets Farbissina in jail, even adding an "eh" to the line "I was adopted by frickin' Belgians."
• Poor Cary Elwes seems to get saddled with a phony American accent in nearly every movie he makes, and he struggles. It's especially evident in Liar Liar.
  • Cary Elwes's agent (or manager, or somebody) apparently convinced him a few years ago that he should lose his native accent - he mentioned this on The Tonight Show or somesuch once. This falls somewhere below Ishtar, but not too far below, in Disasters which might have been avoided.
• Stoick the Vast in How to Train Your Dragon has a Scottish accent. Intermittently. The rest of the time, it tends to fluctuate.
  • Again, it's Gerard Butler.
  • Especially odd, as that is his actual accent. Why not just leave your voice alone? Scottish is obviously what the filmmakers wanted, or else they wouldn't have cast Gerard Butler and Craig Ferguson.
    • Because he's from Paisley and that's a horrible accent...
• Brad Pitt is something of a serial offender in this field, most notably in The Devils Own where he plays an IRA bomber hiding out in New York: he's full-on "terty-tree-and-a-turd" Oirish for the most part, despite his character being from Northern Ireland, but starts to lose it when the waterworks get going for the climax.
• A Man Of No Importance: for whatever reason, Albert Fiiney is flat-out incapable of pronouncing the "R" sound. Ths makes it a little harder to enjoy his portrayl a an Irish theatre director trying to organise rehoouusals.
• In Slumdog Millionaire Dev Patel's Indian Accent slips to an English one when he's shouting.
• Marlon Brando in The Missouri Breaks. He starts off with an exaggerated top o' the mornin' " Irish accent, which is quite jarring since the film's set in the Old West and his character's named Robert E. Lee Clayton. But later in the film this accent's gone and Brando's back to his natural voice. Supposedly Brando claimed that this was deliberate, to show that Clayton was mentally ill.
• Burt Lancaster, an American, portrayed Irish born Colonel Anthony Durnford in the film Zulu Dawn. Lancaster's Irish accent slips in and out several times. It doesn't help matters that he's the only American in the cast surrounded by big name British actors, including Irish born Peter O'Toole.
• Jim Carrey in any of his movies. While his characters are not outright stated to be American, one assumes anyway. Certain words are very glaring to his Canadian accent (e.g., "borrow," "progress"). To be fair, he either doesn't try to hide it or doesn't think to do so.
• According to some accounts, Renee Zellweger averts this in the Bridget Jones movies. Her British accent was reportedly so convincing that when she reverted back to her natural Texan one after the first film wrapped, somebody asked why she had adopted such a "phony American accent."
• Channing Tatum couldn't seem to make up his mind whether he had an accent or not in The Eagle. It goes back and forth from vaguely British to American. One can only assume he was going for The Queen's Latin.
• Happens in Your Highness. As they enter the labyrinth, Thaddeus speaks a sentence in a clear "standard American" accent, as opposed to the British one he had the rest of the time.
• In Scream 2, Randy inexplicably has a faux-British accent during his first scene.
• Parodied in The Producers (the remake) when Max Bialystock calls himself O'Bialystock and fakes an irish accent, which gets progressively worse as he continues talking.

Max: And now I'll be on me way, before me voice gets any higher!

• Al Pacino's accent in Carlitos Way goes from a slight Puerto Rican accent to normal Pacino accent to Scent of the woman accent.
• In Dr. Strangelove, British Peter Sellers' portrayal of American President Muffley noticeably lapses into English pronunciation during the doomsday scene. The supposedly Soviet Ambassador (played by the also-British Peter Bull) was a lost cause from the beginning.
• Related: in The World Is Not Enough, John Cleese is introduced as Q's assistant and James Bond jokingly calls him "R". Cleese goes by that name in the video games between that and the follow-up Die Another Day, in which he goes as Q - to which the Irish Pierce Brosnan expressed relief, as couldn't hold his English accent saying "R".
• Toby Hemingway is British. His character Oscar in Feast Of Love is American. His accent wavers a bit sometimes, particularly in the scene of Oscar and Chloe in Oscar's bedroom, where they discuss his past.
• Steve Coogan in Hamlet 2.
• British Alan Rickman's German accent as Hans Gruber vanishes when he delivers the line "Blow the roof!"
• Katie Cassidy slips back and forth between a Texas accent and normal American accent in Monte Carlo.
  • Though in the same movie Cory Monteith and Selena Gomez pull off Texas and British accents flawlessly.
• Miley Cyrus had to get a vocal coach to keep her from using her natural Tennessee accent (although, it seems to be less noticeable since she's moved to Los Angeles) in The Last Song. While she generally managed to not sound Southern, she never managed to keep any sort of New York (where her character was from) accent for long and in some scenes you could definitely hear her true accent, usually the more emotional ones. The Australian Liam Hemsworth who plays Miley's character's Georgian (as in the state, not the country) love interest, seems to avoid this trope entirely, though.
• Sir Alec Guinness in Cromwell as King Charles I. The character deliberately puts on an English accent to cover up his natural Scottish accent. The Scottish comes out when the character gets angry or isn't surrounded by courtiers.
• Simon Baker struggles with his American accent at times in Margin Call. He doesn't quite slip back to his native Australian, but he acquires an odd brogue for some lines.
• British actress Emily Lloyd's Brooklyn accent in the 1989 film Cookie was considered so poor that, for the next movie where she played an American, In Country, she went to live with a Kentucky family for a long time before shooting started. As a result, her accent in that film was much better.
• In Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Englishman Bob Hoskins does a fantastically convincing New York accent for the character of Eddie Valiant. It only slips once: when Roger hides in his desk drawer, Eddie screams "GET OUTTA THERE", sounding very British. (It's not the pronunciation so much as the inflection; most Americans would put the emphasis on "outta", but Eddie puts it on "there")
• In Safe House, Irish actor Brendan Gleeson plays an American CIA higher-up. His accent is not particularly convincing.
• Rachel Weisz's American accent in The Fountain is, for the most part, passable, but there are moments it goes straight up her nose.

Literature

• In an early Nero Wolfe novel (Over My Dead Body), the suspect Madame Zorka, exotic foreign fashion designer, always used an incredibly thick Pottsylvanian accent. Until, of course, her real identity was discovered - Pansy Bupp of Ottumwa, Iowa - whereupon she collapsed into a Midwestern American accent. (After all, is High Society going to patronize a fashion designer from Iowa?)
• In a recent novel about the murderer Crippen, an upper-class woman was revealed to be a lower-class social climber when she got angry and said, "He's very handy with his dukes!"
• In Night Watch, Edgar usually speaks with a perfect Moscow accent, but tends to slip into his native Estonian accent when agitated.
• Doctor Lao has a fluid relationship with his accent in The Circus of Doctor Lao (and in the film based on it).
• Terry Pratchett's Discworld has many characters whose accents slip - the younger Igors occasionally forget to lisp, and Doreen Winkings (aka the Countess Notfaroutoe, a vampire by marriage) has an Uberwaldian accent far thicker than any native Uberwaldian, except when she forgets...
• In the Gaunt's Ghosts novel Blood Pact, when Baltasar Eyl Damogaur catches up to Gaunt and Mabbon for the last time, he goes back to his natural outworld accent, having difficulty maintaining his civilised veneer.
• In "The Queen's Thief" series, Eugenides fakes an Attolian accent and no one even thinks to look for his Eddisian one (despite knowing he's Eddisian) until he slips because he's talking in his sleep.
• This was a key plot point in a Nancy Drew Case Files mystery. A supposedly American man said that someone was "in hospital" instead of "in the hospital", and used other Britishisms, leading Nancy to suspect that he wasn't who he claimed to be. It's capped off during a scene in which he gets into an argument (a classic "highly emotional scene" as mentioned in the page description), when he suddenly begins speaking with his British accent.

Live-Action TV

• Psych has an in In-Universe example—a fortune teller speaks with an eastern European accent until things get really serious, and then it totally disappears.
• Just a general notice, that blond Australian actresses (with the exception of Yvonne Strahovski^[1]) seem to be incapable of accurate American accents. Sarah Wynter is the most egregious offender, followed closely by Poppy Montgomery and then Anna Torv. Portia de Rossi isn't too bad, but she slips up every so often. Strahovski does a perfect accent, but it's obvious by the way her mouth moves when she talks that she is speaking in a different manner than normal.
• Poppy Montgomery is guilty in Without a Trace and Unforgettable.
• Portia de Rossi, as mentioned, her accent isn't too bad but there are times when her accent slips up.
  • In Arrested Development her accent gets sketchy from time to time, especially when she says, "stupid."
  • She also occasionally strays into her Australian accent in Better Off Ted.
• Phoebe Tonkin (an Australian actress) is playing Faye (a girl living in Washington) on The Secret Circle. In the pilot, at least, it is painfully obvious that she is Australian. She seems to be getting better as the series progresses, though.
• The third season of Wonder Woman has a leprechaun. The Irish accent is limited to the actor saying "me gold" every couple of minutes. "Never talk about me gold!"
• In Without a Trace, Anthony LaPaglia and Poppy Montgomery (as already noted above) are guilty. Within the realm of possibility that Marianne Jean-Baptiste has also.
• On The Suite Life On Deck, an episode where the group goes to the author of Sherlock Holmes' home, the original draft of the first Holmes story, which is on loan from the Queen's library, is stolen. Cody then tries to figure out who the thief is, and succeeds, as a supposed British detective stole the book, which Cody figured out because his accent slipped, saying 'fries' instead of the more British 'chips', revealing that he is Belgian.
  • However, the actually British would know that although they say chips more often than fries, saying fries would be perfectly acceptable, making this clue useless.
  • Hilariously he is played by real Brit Charles Shaughnessy
• The character Cliff Clavin from Cheers originally had a very broad Boston accent; over time, the actor John Ratzenberger let it fade out, reverting to his normal speaking voice. The only remnant is the accent on his catchphrase, "Here's a little known fact..." It's odd, however, that Cliff is the only member of Cheers who speaks with any sort of regional accent!
• Early seasons of Get Smart feature Don Adams' using his signature accent (known as "Glicking") far more than in later seasons. Adams commented once that he learned fairly early how little Glicking he could get away with while still getting the idea across.
• There are numerous American movie or television shows in which a character has tried and failed to do an Australian accent, often to the point where she doesn't even realise it is meant to be Australian until someone else points it out. Notable for its bad Australian accents is the show Lost, with over five different accents being called "Australian". Only Victoria native Emilie de Ravin does a genuine Aussie accent (and even then, some viewers complained about how "fake" her accent sounded).
  • Sayid seemed to fall into a strange British accent a lot in the 6th season. It certainly wasn't Naveen Andrew's usual Cockney, but it was also not Sayid's usual voice. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that he died, and the voice change was intentional.
  • Alan Dale, who is from New Zealand, plays Charles Widmore, who is English, on Lost. When his accent slipped in "There's No Place Like Home," many Americans didn't notice, but Brits and New Zealanders did.
  • It slipped earlier than that too, towards the end of "The Shape of Things to Come", prompting some on Lostpedia to wonder aloud if there was an actual, plot relevant reason for it.
• In one episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus, Eric Idle plays a U.S. politician with a truly painful-to-listen-to Fake American accent.
  • This goes for everyone from Monty Python any time they try to do an American accent. Except Terry Gilliam, of course, but he's been in England for so long, he has some British inflections that make his natural voice sound like a fake American accent.
• Felicite de Jeu in Waking the Dead may have done this once. She could have been putting on a more French accent than her real one.
• Every so often in Firefly, Jewel Staite (a Canadian from Vancouver) would let a Canadian "ou" (i.e. aboot) slip into her Wild Western accent. Nathan Fillion (also Canadian, from Edmonton) also did this, probably most notable in the beginning of Serenity where Mal is in the cockpit with Wash. Of course, all the characters on the show come from various planets where many dialects of English and other languages have evolved over centuries.
  • But Lower Mainlanders don't do the Canadian "ou"...
    • Summer's English accent (and dialect) in "Shindig" is also terribly unconvincing. The fact that Badger falls for it challenges willing suspension of disbelief.
• On Castle:
  • Nathan Fillion and Stana Katic both drop a little Canadian raising here and there.
  • One episode of has an In-Universe example—a self-help guru who's a Harvard MBA from California but affects a Laotian accent and pretends to be an immigrant because "people want that Horatio Alger crap". When they start grilling him over a murder, he gets flustered and the accent disappears.
  • "Almost Famous" has a male stripper named Hans von Manschaft, who speaks with a German accent...which he drops immediately upon learning his rival's been murdered. Castle immediately hangs that lampshade.
• More or less every character in Power Rangers after the tenth season. The characters were always American, usually Californian. The actors were predominantly from New Zealand and Canada. The accents were invariably transient.
  • Averted in Power Rangers Mystic Force with Xander, who was from Australia, allowing the actor to use his own speech pattern.
  • In Power Rangers Dino Thunder, Conner's kiwi accent could reassert itself at a moment's notice, especially if the character had to sound annoyed.
  • Notably, in Power Rangers Operation Overdrive: "Once A Ranger", the rangers lose their morphing powers, and this for some reason also seems to deprive them of their "American" accents.
  • The greatest ongoing battle in Power Rangers RPM is "Flynn McAllistair" versus "Scottish accent".
  • There was a notable case even before production of the series moved to New Zealand with Kat, the second Pink Ranger, who as an Australian was the first non-American ranger. This trope was averted with the casting of legitimately Australian actress Catherine Sutherland, who used her native accent. When the rangers were de-aged for several episodes by the villains, however, the American child actress who played the younger Kat couldn't get the accent right despite her best efforts to emulate Sutherland's native accent. She would typically alternate between an overplayed stereotypical Aussie accent and her own native American accent (sometimes going back and forth 3-4 times within a single scene).
    • This seems to be especially noticeable whenever there's a kid actor on the show: In particular, in Power Rangers Samurai, whenever Jayden and Antonio appear in flashbacks, the kid actors simply cannot hide their accents. Particularly notable in that present-day Antonio is played by Steven Skyler, a Thai-German American (seriously) who (usually) succeeds in affecting a Hispanic accent—though even he occasionally slips up from time to time.
• Lucy Lawless (another Kiwi) suffered serious vowel slippage in what was, presumably, supposed to be a Fake American in Xena: Warrior Princess; in all fairness to Lawless, though, that was hardly the greatest of the series' anachronisms.
• Watch the Torchwood outtakes where Jack's in hysterics for one thing or another and he usually just gives up on holding *any* particular accent altogether.
• At the start of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Deanna Troi spoke with a pronounced Eastern European accent that softened over time to an approximation of her real, English accent. Her mother, Lwaxana Troi, has no such accent. After Marina Sirtis called the producers on this, they decided she must have been using her father's accent. Then, in a later episode, an illusion of her father shows up sounding nothing like her either.
  • Or else actress Martina Sirtis, a Londoner born to Greek Cypriot parents, was recoursing to a very specific Eastern European accent - as Greece and Cyprus are both at the eastern end of the continent and all she would have needed do is speak English as her wider Greek family spoke it...
  • Explained (or lampshaded) in a later episode where Lwaxana laments letting Deanna spend so much time with her nanny as a child, because the nanny's accent rubbed off on Deanna.
• As many of the actors in Band of Brothers were British, there was a chance for accents to slip. In episode 3, "Carentan", one can hear Rick Warden's (who plays Harry Welsh) natural English accent slip through quite noticeably on several occasions.
  • Damian Lewis can be heard using the British pronunciation of "lieutenant."
• The X-Files canon has it that Mulder was born in Massachusetts, but David Duchovny plays him without any real accent. Which made it even more amusing to have heard Agent Mulder once lapse into Duchovny's own New Yorkese when he was angrily calling someone "stoopid".
  • Ditto Gillian Anderson. She was born in the U.S. but lived in England until she was in her early teens, and didn't try to shed the accent until she was out of high school. In the very early episodes she'll slip occasionally. In the 2008 movie it can get quite noticeable in Scully's emotional scenes, as Anderson moved back to England after the show ended in 2002, and had to re-learn her American accent all over again for the film.
  • The CSM is a government operative from somewhere in the US. One episode speculated that he was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, although this was never confirmed. Diphthongs, though, frequently show up William B. Davis' Canadian background.
• In the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "The Doomsday Machine", James Doohan (Scotty) noticeably lapses into his native Canadian accent at one point.
  • It's the words "Thirty seconds later, blammo" as he's explaining to Kirk how he's wired the Constellation to self-destruct for the climax.
  • Of course Scotty's accent isn't exactly what one might consider 100% authentic anyway...
• Eastenders featured the character of Vicki Fowler, an English - born teenager who had grown up in the USA and spoke with a Fake American accent that kept slipping. By the end of her run on the show, the accent was dropped entirely and she spoke in the same Cockney dialect as the rest of the cast.
• Both Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel have Angel affect a somewhat inconsistent Irish accent during flashbacks. Notably, in a later episode in which he loses the memories of everything since before he was vamped, the writers had him speaking in American dialect (and being confused by it himself), because his Irish accent had an American accent.
  • Fred on Angel's Texas accent also kind of came and went at random. It seemed by season 4 she had given up on it altogether.
    • While impersonating Fred, though, Illyria went all out with y'alls and aint's. It almost seemed hilariously fake.
    • Amy Acker is actually from Texas herself and said that she was happy about being able to use her native accent on the show.
    • In first season Angel, Irish actor Glenn Quinn was accused of having a poor Irish accent when playing the character of Doyle. In reality, he was asked to affect an American accent on words the editors thought were difficult to understand when spoken in his natural Irish accent.
  • Season Three's "The Prom" has Wesley's usually-excellent accent crack on "Thanks for that" when Giles tells him to ask Cordelia to dance.
  • "Teacher's Pet" in season one features a person-sized "she-mantis" played by a South African, but speaking with an American accent. For the most part, her accent is impeccable and it's difficult to say where she gets it wrong, but there's something about her r's. Also, her vowels.
• Actor Dominic West (born in Yorkshire, England) played a Baltimore detective in the HBO series The Wire. He is supposed to have a stylized Baltimore accent, but he lapses into his British accent in the second-last episode of the first season during a conversation with a district attorney. Stranger still, at one point during the show's second season, his character (Jimmy McNulty) attempts to speak like a British man to impress his fellow detectives, but ends up speaking in a highly exaggerated tone that is nothing like his original accent. Near the end of episode 3.4, as well, West blatantly slips when asking "You ever been down the ocean?"
  • And fellow Brit Idris Elba's accent (as Stringer Bell) slips a few times, most noticeably in the very dramatic scene where Stringer admits to Avon that he murdered Avon's nephew.
    • Look for this in Idris Elba's run on The Office, too. Charles Minor sometimes becomes distinctly British (especially when angry).
  • Irish Wire actor Aiden Gillen (Carcetti) mostly stays in accent except for one scene where, in playing Battleship with his daughter, he calls out "Haitch-six".
• House stars English actor Hugh Laurie as the American title character Dr. Gregory House. His American is so good (if a little creepy) that when his audition tape was viewed, executive producer Bryan Singer, unfamiliar with Laurie's nationality or previous work, singled him out as an example of a "real American actor." Laurie has gone on record that after a long shoot his accent drifts towards something more "French sounding." (Note that he tries to keep his American voice all day long even when he flubs a take)
  • In an interview, he mentioned that words such as "coronary artery" are extremely difficult for him to pronounce in an American accent. Good job he doesn't have to very... oh, of course.
  • Similarly, it seemed rather cruel to name an important character "Amber" when a Brit and a New Jerseyian would pronounce those very differently.
  • Interestingly, in a brief scene in which House impersonates a Brit on the telephone, Laurie uses not his natural accent, but the same sort of stereotypical, over-the-top "British" accent that a typical American would put on!
• An episode of CSI has Roger Daltrey playing a long-missing mob boss who's come back to kill his old crew. For most of his appearance, he affects a pretty convincing American accent... but then the character has a heart attack, and after that, he's pretty much speaking in his native accent.
  • Louise Lombard's British accent slips out quite frequently as Sofia Curtis. You have to wonder why the producers didn't bother just making her character British.
• Stuart Milligan, playing American stage magician Adam Klaus in Jonathan Creek, had an accent that notably veered into English on certain long vowels.
  • Ditto Anthony Head, in the few times he played the same role.
    • It was later revealed that Adam Klaus is a Fake American (he's actually Scottish) so this is excusable.
    • Although Stuart Milligan isn't; he's genuinely Boston-born.
• In Wishbone episodes where the literary figure Wishbone plays is English, Wishbone's voice actor, Larry Brantley, attempts a bad English accent which he tends to keep slipping out of.
• Kevin McKidd kept slipping in and out of his native Scottish on Rome.
• In the first few episodes of season one of Heroes, Mohinder has an Indian accent which has been replaced by something resembling a British one. Neither of those are the actor's real accent, which is American. Amusingly, Sendhil Ramamurthy had a guest appearance on Psych where, instead of doing the full Mohinder, he tried to go with an accent about halfway between Mohinder's British one and his own natural "California Valley Dude" accent. Instead it just seems to slip between one and the other throughout the episode from scene to scene.
  • Whenever Sendhil is using his natural accent, like on Psych, there are people complaining how "his fake American accent" is so unconvincing, and he should stick to "his natural British accent". He's from Texas.
  • In fact, Sendhil has admitted to doing an intentional Ooh, Me Accent's Slipping on Heroes because the producers changed their minds about what accent he should have after they'd already filmed the pilot.^[2] So for the first few episodes, he attempted to gradually transition from "Indian" to "British."
  • And then there's Robert Knepper, who puts on a truly fascinating trainwreck of an accent which slips around various American and British tones with every other word.
    • According to Knepper in an interview, he admits that the slip-ups are deliberate to make Samuel more "worldly."
  • If you're Danish, his last name is a source of never ending hilarity.
• In one Whose Line Is It Anyway?, they play "the German edition of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?", and Greg comments, "und if my accent slips to another country, you may call me on zat."
  • This happens quite often any time a player is required to fake an accent. Other players would often take notice and point it out, lightly disrupting the scene. In some cases, a player's accent may shift multiple times in a single game.
  • The most memorable example of this was in a game of "Hollywood Director" where the performers were all playing Spanish characters. Ryan forewarned that his Spaniard "had a bit of Italian in him", Kathy's Spanish maiden was more French than anything else, and Wayne's Zorro was a stereotypical Mexican. "Funny how we all come from a different part of Spain!" observed Ryan.
  • Ryan had another moment of hilarity regarding his accent while playing a game of Whose Line. Despite playing Louis XVI, Ryan spoke mostly in an Italian accent, which he quickly justified by saying that while they were on vacation in Italy, he picked up the language. Once the game was over, he proved he could have spoken in a French accent if he wanted to, but claimed "it was more fun in Italian."
    • In the same skit Colin lampshaded his slippage beforehand with "I'm so panicky that I'm sure my accent will go all over the place."
  • You'd think that with all the times Ryan has been told to do a specific accent but used Italian instead, telling him to do an Italian accent would mean he could finally do it correctly. Wrong. Danish.
  • In one skit, Ryan lampshades the cast's track record with accents and declares at the start that he's Not Even Bothering with the Accent. As always, the Rule of Funny applies.
  • It was lampshaded again in a game of Scenes from a Hat: Celebrity Endorsements Doomed to Fail.

Wayne: The Whose Line guide to accents...

• • The original British version occasionally called for fake American accents (Paul Merton in particular just sounding like a Londoner in dire pain) and, at least once, for Ryan and Colin to do "Shakespeare," which was cruel.
    • Also in the British version, Colin did such a spectacularly awful Scottish accent that he wound up referencing it in the American version. Hilariously, Colin was born in Scotland and as a boy took pains to hide his accent.
• In an episode of Charlie's Angels, the girls are tasked with protecting a collection of priceless jade. Cheryl Ladd's character gets to pose as the jade's aristocratic Swedish owner, complete with a hilariously terrible accent that has to be heard to be believed. ("Ah love-ah mah yade-ah.")
  • Kate Jackson's French accent, heard in a few episodes, isn't much better.
• On Murphy Brown, Corky Sherwood would slip into a southern drawl whenever she became extremely angry.
• Sheldon Cooper displays an in-universe version on The Big Bang Theory; he once briefly reverted back to his natural accent (East Texas) after being locked out of his apartment. He's done it a couple of times since then, usually when he's upset or excited.
• An episode of Frasier required Daphne to fake an American accent, complicated by the fact that the only word she could say in said accent was, "Sure!". This is especially notable considering that Daphne's own English accent is faked by actress Jane Leeves.
  • Her fake Mancunian accent is pretty unconvincing to British viewers. Jane Leeves is British but was born in Essex and raised in Sussex—nowhere near Manchester.
    • It is, however, completely subverted by John Mahoney, who was also born and lived in England during his childhood. He pulled off a Manchester accent during a "dream sequence" episode once flawlessly.
    • Jane Leeves's weird and allegedly Mancunian accent in Frasier was developed by the actress as a generic approximation of a North-Of-England accent - ie, a British accent that would sound more palatable to American ears - despite it not being at all realistic or representative of any one geographical part of England at all.
    • Alternatively, her accent can be thought of as slipping and sliding along the North Cheshire Plain from Runcorn and Ellesmere Port right across to Stockport and back again... only at the Stockport end of the Grand Tour does it even touch on Manchester, and then on a South Manchester accent. Americans would not have liked North Manchester at all, as this touches on broad Lancashire.... tha' knows, sithee, yon Yanks'd've bin reyt up in't urr.
  • Kelsey Grammer's own natural accent is the classic loose Florida drawl (he is, after all, a Floridian) than Frasier's clipped upper-class tones.
• There was a actress in now-defunct Scouse soap opera Brookside who was meant to be from a geographically distinct part of Northern Ireland. Part of the joy of listening to the Dublin-born actress (Barbara Dreman) who played Niamh Musgrove was the way, like an Irish traveller on the road, her accent moved and wavered between the six counties of northern Ireland without once settling on any one, often in the same line of dialogue. (Again, the Jane Leeves thing of mastering a regional accent from your own country which is not your own.)
• Stephen Colbert deliberately changed his accent when quite young, and never slips back into his original Southern accent - except once (fandom consensus was that this was adorable).
  • He does always pronounce "egg" as "ayg."
• Paul from In Treatment does this almost constantly, despite there being no real reasoning for it other than that the actor is Irish.
• Was known to happen in Time Trax—set mostly in the US (although at least one episode was set in London), filmed in Australia. (And yes, they had one or two episodes set in Australia.)
• In Red Dwarf, Robert Llewellyn's accent as Kryten (which was meant to be Canadian, but really really isn't) changes to Llewellyn's own Northampton accent in one brief scene in the episode "Polymorph" ("It's here..." -- "Where?" -- "Somewhere...").
• In Deadwood, Al Swearengen's accent waxes and wanes like the moon. Unlike the real historical figure, Ian McShane plays him as an immigrant and even mentions Manchester (nearby to McShane's native Lancashire) within the dialogue. This would explain slippage.
  • In contrast, Paula Malcomson who plays Trixie is originally from Northern Ireland but her accent hardly slips at all.
• True Blood's Stephen Moyer occasionally slips into his native British accent in a painfully obvious way.
  • The same for many of the actors on the show, as most of them are not native to the American South.
  • Though one actress manages to slip into two different Southern accents and random points.
• Doctor Who had Peri Brown, who was supposed to be from Pasadena, California. However, her actress, Nicola Bryant, a native Briton, apparently couldn't pin down a California accent if she tried and instead took Brits on a linguistic tour of the United States with each episode.
  • And, it didn't help authenticity that she was told not to use American terms like "truck" or "elevator" in favor of British ones like "lorry" and "lift" because the BBC thought it'd confuse the audience.... Just as the aforementioned "Mancunian" Jane Leeves used Americanisms like "trunk" and "elevator" and "sidewalk" right from Day One, despite her character being from Manchester England and therefore being more likely to say "boot" and "lift" and "pavement". Oh, and an "alley" is a "back entry"...
  • Captain Jack Harkness's "American" accent, widely lauded by the British as dead-on, is a particularly egregious example to actual American ears. This despite his excellent acting otherwise, and decades of experience with the accent. As with Peri Brown, the writers make things worse by continually giving him stereotypically British turns of phrase.
    • Somewhat averted by the fact that Captain Jack is from the far future and never specifically claims to be American. Also somewhat averted because Jack spent more than a century living in Britain near Cardiff.
  • David Tennant, although rarely, does slip into his Scottish accent a few times, mostly on the word "creature"
    • The writers intentionally had some fun with this for the episode "Smith and Jones". The syllable "-oon" is particularly hard for him to say without sounding Scottish, so they gave him the line "Judoon platoon upon the moon".
    • During "The Impossible Planet," when they walk through the corridors and he says the line about how the base was built. It's almost entirely Scottish.
    • If you listen closely to the Doctor and Wilf saying goodbye in "Journey's End", half of what David says is noticeably Scottish. Particularly the lines "They've all got someone else" and "You can never tell her"
    • "Tooth and Claw" had a kind of in-universe example, since they were in Scotland and Ten was faking a Scottish accent (a little broader than Tennant's native one). When the Monster of the Week shows up and he drops back into the Doctor accent, the Queen calls him on it.
    • His accent drops noticeably towards the end of "Time Crash," such as on the word 'trainers'. This actually works very well, as it crosses strongly into meta.
    • He has noticable problems with the word "ood".
  • Paul McGann's Eighth Doctor has a subtle case of this. His accent travels a sort of spectrum between Received Pronounciation and Scouse. Sometimes it's more of one, sometimes it's more of the other. And sometimes it's something in the middle which is sexier than either extreme. It's mostly more on the posh side, but note how he pronounces, "I don't believe in ghosts"—his accent veers off Oop North.
    • To be fair this is pretty much Paul's standard "acting" accent - he rarely uses his natural, noticeably Scouse voice in his roles, including his extensive voiceover/narration work.
  • River Song may be an almost extreme case. Her first few lines are in some strange very light semi-african accent, then never again.
• Paul Blackthorne frequently slips into an English accent on the Dresden Files TV series, especially during the voiceovers.
  • In an amusing inversion, Terrence Mann's fake British accent slips occasionally into his native southeast US one. It's most noticeable when he pronounces names like "Lafayette."
• Leverage. Dear Gina Bellman, we'll argue about whether or not you're an excellent actress or a poor one. In some way, your power is in that argument. But, the accent, oh, the accent. Whenever you take on a non-Brit accent, it weaves like a drunk.
  • Which might be part of the point, if you really think about it. Most of her marks are American businessmen. In one episode ("The Rashomon Job,") she mentions that to Americans, all accents sound the same (during the various flashbacks, the members of her team portray her accent as Cockney, Scottish, and pure indecipherable gibberish.) It might be possible that Sophie isn't trying to sound authentic in her cons, but is trying to sound the way her target expects her to sound.
• Parodied in the Hancock's Half Hour episode where Hancock's character is a ham actor on a radio soap whose "rustic" accent keeps mutating from Welsh to Cornish to Robert Newton.
• Shortland Street at one point had an American neurosurgeon and one character's British paramour, both of whose actors started slipping into New Zealand accents after about a week.
• Battlestar Galactica Reimagined:
  • In the episode "The Son Also Rises", Baltar's defense lawyer, played by London-born Irish/German actor Mark Sheppard, fades between the character's vaguely American accent and a vaguely British/Irish accent.
  • During the same trial, English actor Jamie Bamber, who plays Lee "Apollo" Adama with a pseudo-American accent, slips up and says, "Chamallar extract," adding in an "r" sound after "Chamalla," which is a British-ism.
    • And while Bamber did an admirable job on the whole in the series, his accent in the mini-series does slip on occasion....though this is partly forgivable since the series isn't set in the real world at all but in a made-up set of planets, and his accent was faked more for the purpose of matching Edward James Olmos's than in order to sound like an actual American.
    • Perhaps the best example of a slip came in 2008, when the cast appeared on David Letterman's show to do the Top Ten List. Bamber's line consisted of technobabble, which he recited in an American accent in the rapid-fire manner of Adama, before clearly dropping the accent as he suddenly declared "I don't know what the hell I'm talking about". Fridge Brilliance kicks in when you realize that he probably did that deliberately, seeing as how he was breaking character.
    • Bamber has similarly slipped up or struggled to maintain an American accent (despite an overall good job) during some of his appearances on other American TV shows--Cold Case (sure enough, during a "highly emotional scene"), CSI: Miami, and 17th Precinct (an unaired pilot). Very tellingly, the latter two came after several years of him using his normal accent while on Law and Order UK, so one can assume he was simply out of practice.
  • Tamoh Penikett slips into his own Aboriginal/Inuit accent regularly in the first season and half. In the episode "The Farm" it's especially pronounced for some reason; his "Watchya doin thair Staarbuck" is a particularly good example of a Northern Native cadence.
    • His "normal" accent is more complicated: his father, Tony, moved to Canada from Great Britain in 1957 when Tony was 12, and still noticeably has an English (Sussex) inflection when he speaks, which influenced his son.
  • Micheal Trucco falls into this a lot being born in Canada and moved to the US as teen his accent tends to bounce back and forth across the border especially as he spent more time on the show. He would even pronounce words in different ways within the same episodes.
• Australian Simon Baker generally maintains a decent American accent on The Mentalist, making it all the more jarring when his "Stay tuned for our next episode" voiceover starts off "stay tyuned."
  • While usually Simon Baker has a good American accent he does slip up a lot on words like talk, walk, awkward, awesome and similar ones with the same sound.
    • It also happens when his voice is very low.
  • Castmate Owain Yeoman (a Welshman) does a very good American accent, but when he loses it, he loses it big. Not just a word here or there but a full sentence sometimes slips.
• Burn Notice gives us Fiona Glenanne, the former Irish terrorist who... can't hold an Irish accent to save her life. Gabrielle Anwar is otherwise fantastic, so after the pilot, they gave her an American accent along with the explanation "I can't very well be talking like a freakin' leprechaun now, can I?" Ahh, much better.
  • And Anwar is quite English, so her fake American is even better than that.
• Charmed was Julian McMahon's first role that required him to use an American accent, and as such his native New South Wales accent breaks through a few times in the early Cole episodes. It tends to happen on the last word or two of his lines.
• Degrassi: Marco's parents, who had quite possibly the most stereotypical Italian accents ever. It slipped in the episode where Marco came out to his father and his father talked with a regular Canadian/English voice. Surprisingly, this actually worked and made the scene a lot better.
  • Almost everyone on the show inexplicably tries to minimize their Canadian raising, particularly in later seasons.
• Comedy duo French and Saunders have a running gag where whenever they do a parody of a movie/tv show, they'll lose their accent at some point in the parody (if they bothered with one in the first place). The other one will then say "You're not going to bother with the accent, then?" which prompts the other one to try and get back into the accent by saying "how are you" in a ridiculous way that sounds more like "haaay err yew".
• Chuck (played by Anna Friel) in Pushing Daisies has an accent which seems to be almost half-assing it at times veering between American and her natural Mancunian accent.
• Though all of the non-alien main characters in Stargate SG-1 are American, two of them are played by Canadian actors: Samantha Carter by Amanda Tapping and Daniel Jackson by Michael Shanks. In most cases they manage to avoid saying any Canadianisms, but occasionally they slip. (Most often this is on the word "sorry.") Cameron Mitchell's accent seems to waver, too, although that's unclear whether that was the fault of the actor or because the writers couldn't decide or agree on where exactly the character was supposed to be from. Ben Browder was raised in Tennessee and North Carolina, but they eventually stated that Mitchell was from Kansas.
• In LazyTown both Magnus Scheving (who plays Sportacus) and Stefan Steffenson (who plays Robbie) sometimes slip into their native Icelandic accents.
  • Sometimes? Sportacus doesn't even seem to be trying to hide his accent...though this is most likely because he hails from "an island in the North Sea."
• In Spartacus: Blood and Sand John Hannah mostly manages to keep his Queen's Latin intact (despite the frequent scenery chewing), but there are a couple of occasions where his native Scottish slips through.
• On PJ Katies Farm the main voice actor, PJ Katie, occasionally had her characters randomly gain or lose accents. This is somewhat understandable considering that she did the voices for every single character and everything was done in a single take.
• On the TV adaptation of Horrible Histories, this often happens on purpose when something unexpected, weird, embarrassing or gruesome happens such as during the Dick Turpin song the words "that's lame" are in the actors normal voice but the rest of them with an altered voice.
• The Tudors. Jonathan Rhys Meyers does a fairly good British accent through seasons one and two. It began slipping a little more obviously in season three, then in season four it appeared that he'd all but given up. I never knew that Henry VIII was actually Irish.
• In Supernatural, Julian Richings - who was raised in Canada - plays Death with an English accent. At times you can notice his Canadian accent slip in, especially in the season 6 episode "Appointment in Samarra".
  • ...no, he was raised in England and moved to Canada when he was 29.
• In Switched at Birth, while Daphne's actress is deaf in Real Life it's both sporadic and due to a condition that developed in her early 20s, so she had to learn the speech impediment that someone who was profoundly deaf since they were a toddler (like her character) would have. Sometimes this "deaf accent" (her term) slips.
• Just Cause: Australian actress Lisa Lackey plays Alex DeMonaco, an American from Los Angeles, but she occasionally slips into her native Australian accent or various regional U.S. accents (particularly New York City). This is Lampshaded and Justified in the pilot when Alex tells Whit she was an army brat and traveled all over growing up, specifically mentioning Australia, New York, and East LA as places she picked up accents from.
• There's an episode of Dollhouse in which Mark Sheppard's accent slips right back to his native British on the line "What happened there, Ballard?".
• Poor Tammin Sursok can't catch a break. Since coming to the United States from Australia, where she had both an acting and a singing career, she has only had roles that require an American accent and in nearly everyone, she slips up at some point. Usually, it's pretty convincing, but she has trouble with a few sounds and you can really tell she isn't actually from the US. It's most noticeable in Pretty Little Liars and the final season of Hannah Montana.
• Deadly Women tends to get Narm-y and Nightmare Retardant when what's supposed to be trailer park trash going on a killing spree instead sounds like she sould be cleaning chimneys with Dick Van Dyke.
• Jennifer Coolidge attempts a Russian accent on an episode of Two Broke Girls. It's pretty easy to notice that she's not Russian.
• Tim Curry is usually so flawless at American accents that if you've only seen him in American roles, you might be forgiven for not knowing he's actually British. He still slips up sometimes, though. As Pennywise the Clown in the made-for-TV film adaptation of IT, he seemed to be going for a "Chicago gangster" sort of voice (or at least a parody of what a Chicago gangster is supposed to sound like) with occasional touches of Bert Lahr (the actor who portrayed the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz. However, at one point his natural accent shows through slightly. (Since Pennywise is, of course, a vaguely arachnoid, soul-devouring metaphysical freak who must necessarily be a master of disguise, that might or might not have been intentional.)
• Emma Samms, when she took over the role of Fallon Carrington-Colby, had a fake American accent that barely concealed her natural British one.
• Happens a fair bit in the Showtime miniseries of Anne Rice's The Feast Of All Saints. To get the effect of French Creole characters living in antebellum Louisiana, the cast speak English peppered with French with French accents. As with anything else, some of the actors are very good and consistent with the accent, but most slip up at least occasionally. And then there are those who don't even bother trying.
• Fortunately, Claudia Black's most notable roles allow her to use her natural accent (which is a pleasant sounding but unusual mix of Australian and British that people usually assume is a bad attempt at one of those accents anyway.) In her guest appearances on American TV shows (Hercules, Xena, NCIS, etc.) she tries to use an American accent which always slips near the end of sentences.
• Despite her moving to the U.S. as a very young child, British-born Angela Cartwright (Make Room For Daddy, Lost in Space) never managed to consistently erase faint traces of British vowel sounds from her dialogue.
• There's an In-Universe example in Oz. John Basil (Lance Reddick) is undercover, going by the name Desmond Mobay and using a Jamaican accent. None of the drug runners in Oz question the accent, but Augustus Hill catches on when it slips for just a second.

Professional Wrestling

• Hilariously lampshaded in an episode of WWE Raw. The Ghanaian-American Kofi Kingston has been portraying a Jamaican character, complete with the stereotypical accent. In the episode in question he inexplicably speaks in his American accent during a promo, and the ever-Jerkass With a Heart of Gold Triple H just had to call him out on it.
  • Doubling as Hypocritical Humor and Hilarious in Hindsight as Trips originally tried a French accent earlier in his career, failed and settled on just being New England though the intention was to flesh out Kofi.
• King Booker uses an obviously put-on fake aristocratic British accent and returns to his Booker T-ish way of speaking when sufficiently riled or angry.

Theatre

• The Broadway production of the musical Spamalot plays with this—the usually good British accents are sometimes dropped for comedic effects on certain lines, like "you are so gay" after Lancelot's angry outburst in the castle.
• In On A Clear Day You Can See Forever, Daisy's British accent fades when she stops recalling her previous life in 18th-century England.
• When popular West End Elphaba Kerry Ellis transferred to the Broadway production of Wicked, she seemingly could not decide if she was playing an American or a Brit, her accent wavering seemingly every other sentence.
• The Broadway Cast of The Secret Garden seemed to have had a good dialect coach and try very hard, but unfortunately can't really carry the Yorkshire accent. Those attempting RP have more success.
• The newest English cast recording of Les Misérables featured factory workers who seemed to wander from Cockney to 'generic northern accent' to Irish in the same phrase. Fortunately it only really happens in At the End of the Day.
• In Vanities, Mary and Kathy both drop their Texas drawl for generic accents in the third act. In some productions, Kathy acquires a New York accent. In the HBO version, they kept their accents, although less strong than before. In the added scene of the musical, Joanne may lose her accent as well.
• In a Carnegie Hall performance from 1962, Julie Andrews and Carol Burnett sing a cowboy-themed duet called "Big D (Dallas)"; Julie's attempt to sing with a Texas draaaaawl is arguably just as embarrassing as the fake-Cockney that Dick Van Dyke would do a year later in Mary Poppins.
• Gamila in Pilgrims Musa and Sheri in the New World slips between an American accent and her native Arabic accent. Justified, as she attended an American school in Egypt.
• In the Donmar Warehouse production of Cabaret (as seen in the 1993 TV movie), Adam Godley is a very American Cliff Bradshaw. Until he gets upset. Then he's a very Irish Cliff Bradshaw. Made even stranger by the fact that Adam Godley isn't even Irish to begin with.

Video Games

• Wolf O'Donnell in Star FOX 64 speaks with a faux English accent until in his death throes drops it for an American one to say... "No way! I don't believe it!"
  • Similarly, in Star Fox Adventures, the American-sounding Fox has a tendency to lapse into British pronounciations of words. In the scene where he talks to Belina after rescuing her from the mines, Fox completely loses any traces of an American accent. It's just for a few lines, but still!
  • Let's not even get started with Krystal's faux British accent in Star Fox Assault.
• Most of the supposedly American characters in Heavy Rain are played by French actors, who sound convincing most of the time, but slip up occasionally.
  • "Most of the time" is awfully generous. Try a third of the time, especially for Ethan Mars.
  • Norman Jayden's voice and motion capture actor, Leon Ockenden, is from the U.K., but attempts to go for a New England accent with his character. Needless to say, it doesn't sound very convincing.
• Tim Curry frequently slips into his normal accent when playing a Russian during Red Alert 3. This adds to the scenes though, rather than take away from them.
• Carlos from Resident Evil 3: Nemesis loses his latino accent partway through the game
• Played with in Guild Wars. During EotN's hero tutorial, Budol Ironfist states that he'll try to speak like a human (as opposed to the standard scottish dwarf accent). He continually lapses back into dwarf speech.
• Conker in Conker's Bad Fur Day slips between British and American quite frequently.
• The Irish Clover Bartender from Toonstruck constantly switched from an Irish to a Scottish accent, Flux Wildly points this out.
  • That was actually an aversion of both this trope, and the Scotireland trope. Notice he's wearing a kilt, too; his accent ping-pongs back and forth because he's half Scottish, half Irish.
• In Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, a beggar with a raspy voice might suddenly perk up when you ask them about the weather. This is because only lines unique to the beggars (like asking for and receiving alms) were recorded with the "beggar voice." For any lines they share with non-beggars, like a generic response to requests for information, they simply use the normal townsperson voice.
• Ed Ivory has a cameo as the Human Noble's tutor in Dragon Age. The fact that the tutor is practically the only human in the entire Highever Castle with a noticeable American accent. However, this may be more of a Not Even Bothering with the Accent than this trope.
• Variant: Kaptain Natashikov's voice actress in Rogue Trooper: Quartz Zone Massacre can't decide if she's supposed to have a German or Russian accent.
• The voice actress for the protagonist of A Vampyre Story tries to mix a French accent with a Transylvanian one. Not surprisingly, her success is mixed as well, though she does a better job of it than you might expect.
• In Mass Effect, Mark Meer (the voice actor for male Shepard) is Canadian. He does his best to sound completely neutral in regards to accent, but it does slip through from time to time (most noticeably when saying "been" with a long E sound).
  • Similarly, in Knights of the Old Republic Bastila is voiced by Jennifer Hale, a Canadian (who also voices female-Shepard). She fakes an Obi-Wan-style "Coruscanti" (British) accent. It slips more often than the above.
• In Fallout 3, the Enclave President, John Henry Eden, is played by Malcolm McDowell; who attempts to sound like he's from the Southern US, for all of 3 minutes. Arguably justified because he's a supercomputer.
• Mega Man X4 has this horribly in Iris' voice acting during her death scene. The voice actress seems to randomly switch between standard American, British, and Texan. The end result is hilarious, in a scene that's supposed to be completely serious, even sad.
• Used in-universe in Final Fantasy VII, when Reeve accidentally outs himself as a spy for AVALANCHE (and Cait Sith reveals that he's Reeve). The former speaks with a Kanto accent in the Japanese version, whereas the latter speaks with a Kansai accent. During the incident with the Mako cannon, Reeve starts speaking in Kansai, and Cait Sith in Kanto. The English version doesn't do this; presumably if they remade the game, they would use American and Scottish accents respectively.
• Vanille's voice actress in Final Fantasy XIII is Australian, but Vanille herself can't seem to decide if she's Australian, Cockney (which is the forefather to Australian), or some oddball hybrid of various Australian and British accents. Even more unusual when Fang (I.E., Vanille's partner) is pitch-perfect Aussie. Pitch-perfect in a Paul Hogan style, completely overdoing everything when a 'normal' Australian already sounds like a cross between Paul's done-up accent and British. But that's our joke on the rest of the world and we like it, which is why Vanille sounds very odd.
  • And on top of that, unlike Vanille's VA, Fang's actress isn't Australian.
• In Mini Ninjas, most of the voice actors are trying to adhere to a Chop Socky accent, but commonly slip... into more genuine Japanese accents. Huh.
• In Dissidia Final Fantasy we have Gabranth. Played by the Scottish Michael E. Rodgers in Final Fantasy XII, Rodgers did a pretty good upper-class British accent for Gabranth in XII. However for Dissidia he couldn't be reached so Square-Enix brought in The Other Darrin, American-born Keith Ferguson, who voiced Gabranth's brother Basch in XII. Ferguson also doesn't do a bad job of making Gabranth sound British—he just can't seem to decide what kind of British to use, and quite often Gabranth slips from British into outright Cockney. This has inspired the Memetic Mutation "HATRED IS WOT DROIVES ME!"
  • Ferguson toned down the accent a bit for the prequel Dissidia 012. The problem now is occasionally it's too toned down and he slips into Not Even Bothering with the Accent.
• In Battlefield: Bad Company 2, Southern-Fried Private Haggard is played by a Canadian who puts on a fairly convincing Texan accent. However, there is one anomalous moment in the mission "Crack the Sky" in which he clearly says, "Are you sure aboat that?" in response to a query from Sweetwater.
• Wakka's accent slips briefly (but noticeably) early into Final Fantasy X on the line "A flier? My kind'o customer!"
• Revolver Ocelot's accent changes completely when Gray Fox lops off his hand in Metal Gear Solid.
  • In Peace Walker, Strangelove can pull this off around twice a sentence.
• Canadian voice actor John Ulyatt does a decent Scottish accent as Engineer Kenneth Donnelly in Mass Effect 2. However, his other big part in the game is arms dealer Donovan Hock (in Kasumi's loyalty mission) and is, to copy-and-paste from the Heroes entry above, "a truly fascinating trainwreck of an accent". It vacilitates from American to Irish to Scottish to Russian and back again, often within the space of a single sentence.
  • It was supposed to be a South African accent!
• Carmelita Montoya Fox has a different accent in each of the three Sly Cooper games, from a slight Hispanic accent in 1, to completely American in 2, to very Hispanic in 3. This is mostly caused by the fact that she also had three different voice actresses.
• BioShock (series) arguably does this intentionally to drop hints that Atlas isn't all that he seems.
  • Also occurs in-universe when a side character from the audio logs is implied to have been killed because she may have caught Atlas using his natural accent.
• Despite maintaining a decent American accent for the most part of Call of Duty Black Ops, Sam Worthington's Australian accent really does come through at times - Most notably, any time that he tries to shout or act emotionally.

Mason: Todaye is the daye we succeeyde.

• • " Reznov killed him ROIT IN FRONNA ME!"
    • "EWE FACKING SUNNOVA BAYTCH!"
• In Professor Layton and the Curious Village, Flora's first line, "well, I'd rather not say..." is spoken in a British accent, but she has a Western accent for the rest of the series. Also, from the second game onwards, there are few characters other that Layton, Luke, and Chelmey who even have British accents, despite being entirely set in England!
• Morrigan's english voice in Marvel vs. Capcom 3 slips back and forth between, British, American, and a strange attempt at Irish.
• Hydrophobia does this to no end, it seems - Kate's accent shifts so often and frequently that it's like an international tour.
• In Deus Ex Human Revolution, Adam sounds very noticeably Brooklyn when trying to talk his way into the DPD morgue.
• The Penguin in Arkham City, voiced by Nolan North, is supposed to sound like an archetypal working class London gangster. North's Cock-er-nee accent, worthy of the great Dick Van Dyke himself, varies between "not quite authentic" and "Australian". Perhaps Bob Hoskins wasn't available.
• Wheatley in Portal2 slips out of his British accent in a few places. Listen closely when he uses the extended card-games metaphor and when he boasts about reading books. Considering his character, this was probably deliberate.
  • Stephen Merchant, Wheatley's voice actor, is from Bristol, UK. So he was clearly doing it deliberately.
• In the "Crossroads" trailer for the latest Tomb Raider game, Lara seems to lapse into an American accent at several times.

Web Comics

• In-story example: Faye from Questionable Content hides her Southern accent because she believes it makes people think less of her. When she gets angry, she even stops using contractions. However, when she gets drunk, the act flies out the window.
• Anja Donlan of Gunnerkrigg Court is Romani and not a native English speaker. By adulthood, her English is so good that you wouldn't be able to tell, but in one flashback she slipped a bit while crying over the death of a friend.
• When his love interest gets stabbed, Higgs of Girl Genius starts to slip into a Germanic accent. This one is complicated, since Translation Convention is in effect: Everyone is speaking German, but its only the jaegers who are written with the accent.
  • The Jaegers all have enormous fangs instead of teeth (even Maxim, who is as close to bishonen as you can get without having your personality surgically removed), with the implication that the "accent" is more like a speech impediment caused by trying to talk around their ginormous choppers; Higgs, however, has apparently normal human teeth, so it remains to be seen exactly what the deal is with that.
  • The Jaegers are all much older than they look, suggesting their accent is really a more archaic form of the local language, raising interesting possibilities for Higgs. He remembers old Heterodynes, after all.
  • Again, its meant to represent an older accent. A perfectly human looking woman had this accent at one point.
    • Aside from which, Mechanicsburger accent/Jaegersprach is not really German; it's more Slavic-Romanian in intent. Lingua europa, the common language the story is presumably translated from, is a creole based on German, but it's nobody's native language.
• The Cuckoo princess in Gastrophobia fakes a Southern US accent. It has a distinct tendency to slip when she's not thinking about it.

Web Original

• In early episodes of Yu-Gi-Oh the Abridged Series, Yugi's accent in particular had a tendency to wander, most notably in the episode where he meets Mako Tsunami. It's gotten quite a bit better since, though there are some telltale signs if you're paying attention (notably, over-pronouncing the letter "t" and enunciating the "g" at the ends of "-ing" words).
  • That is probably Hypercorrection due to the fact that British accents often drop or slur those sounds and so he over-emphasises them to sound more American, even if they're not actually emphasised that much in American.
  • Perhaps a bit forgivable because Little Kuriboh plays almost every character and each of them has a different, equally ridiculous voice and "accent". If you listen to the first episode with the original voices and the first episode with the newer, redone voices, they're remarkably different.
  • Lampshaded in episode 48. Yugi has a flashback to his accent slip-up in the Mako episode, referring to it as the time he inexplicably started talking in a British accent. Naturally, flashback!Yugi's speech degenerates into a list of stereotypical British terms.
  • And again in the Alternate Episode 6.

Yugi: Remember when Li'l Kuriboh could barely voice-act? That's what's 'appenin' now gov'nah

• In The Slayers Abridged, Zangulus has some New England dialect that can slip, and Vrumugun's French accent slips constantly. projectshadow99 himself has admitted that he can't really do accents and he really regrets giving Vrumugun a french one.
  • In the revised versions of the first few episodes, Zelgadis was going to have either a British or Irish accent, simply because ps99 wanted to try one. This was dropped when he realized he couldn't do those accents either.
• Just for the hat trick, Tenchi in Tenchi Muyo Abridged slips into British a lot. Eventually he just got comfortable with it, and it's part of their version of the character. The fact that the dialog has British shibboleths doesn't hurt either.
• In Corrupting the Classics With Contemporary Crap episode 3, when the contestants on Project Playwright threaten to leave, Heidi Klum says "But you can't go!" On those last two words, Gwenevere Sisco's natural American accent reveals itself. Probably done intentionally for comic effect.
• Deliberately done, to amusing effect, with Applejack in My Little Pony: Camaraderie Is Supernatural.
• According to one fan e-mail, Strong Bad of Homestar Runner supposedly had a slight Mexican accent in his early SB Emails, which has disappeared gradually over time. This is parodied when Strong Sad predicts how Strong Bad's accent will sound several years in the future, showing Strong Bad talking with a very succinct and somewhat awkward way of pronouncing words.
• Tobuscus is a man of many voices and accents, as evidenced throughout his work. Too bad he seems incapable of remaining in them for very long. He has also been told by genuine Aussies and Brits that his imitations of their accents are awful.
• "I teach potion to Herry Podder" (at 4:15)
• Chester A. Bum serving as The Nostalgia Critic's 'engineer' during his Star Trek: The Motion Picture review. He briefly tries to put on a Scottish accent to do the 'I dinnae have th'powah' gag... it goes about as well as you'd expect.
  • The Critic himself had his accent fade out whenever he was doing positive stuff, letting Doug's real voice come through. He got much better though, and now the only time Doug drops the voice (in-costume) is for bloopers.

Western Animation

• Linka of Captain Planet and the Planeteers had a tendency for her "Eastern Europe" accent to slip all over the place.
  • Gi had a vague Asian accent that slipped on and off for the first few episodes, but was then basically abandoned.
• Regular Show's future Mordecai and Rigby talk with fake British accents up until they begin panicking; at which point they talk in their normal voices.
• An episode of King of the Hill featuring guest star Alan Rickman as a Renaissance Fair owner, after he's slapped with a lawsuit he goes to a fake Texas Accent.
• G.I. Joe character Destro has always been Scottish, but when it comes to G.I. Joe: Renegades, it seems nobody noticed that Clancy Brown was actually doing an Irish accent all the way through the first season. Realization seems to have come about for the finale, where Brown suddenly started adding an exaggerated Scottish inflection to some sentences, and spent the whole episode oscillating back and forth between the two accents.
• Example without really using accents: Andrea Libman voices two characters in My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic, energetic Pinkie Pie and soft-spoken Fluttershy. When Fluttershy has a musical number in the episode "The Cutie Mark Chronicles", Libman apparently has trouble keeping the character's voice consistent when she's supposed to be very excited, with the end result that she sings the second half of the song basically as Pinkie Pie.
  • Which is a bit odd, since she doesn't do Pinkie Pie's singing voice, only Fluttershy's.
  • Tabitha St. Germain voices Rarity and Princess Luna. In "Luna Eclipsed", while Princess Luna normally sounds very royal and high standing, there are a few lines that make Princess Luna sound almost exactly like Rarity. Although, both characters happen to be Large Hams. Even stranger is that Rarity doesn't even appear in the episode at all, as her scene was cut.
    • Rarity's accent slips occasionally too. In this case it adds to the effect, since it's that high-classy sort of American accent that doesn't actually appear anywhere in nature, and it adds to the impression that it's another thing she's doing as part of her "image" as a fashion designer, but hasn't quite got the act down yet.
  • Same goes for Ashleigh Ball (the voice of Applejack and Rainbow Dash) during the "At the Gala"-Song in Season 01, Episode 26 ("The Best Night Ever"). She seems to have problems singing in Applejack's heavy southern accent, as well as getting Rainbow Dash's rough voice and her singing together at the same time.
  • One-time character Pipsqueak, a young colt celebrating Nightmare Night for the first time in Luna Eclipsed, is introduced with a British accent, but by the end of the episode seems to lose it.
• The Tom and Jerry cartoon "Robin Hoodwinked" has Tuffy speaking with an ear-bleedingly bad English accent.

---

Subverted and/or Played With

This may also sometimes be played to allow the character to speak with their actor's actual accent.

Film

• In the B-Movie Werewolf (featured on Mystery Science Theater 3000) both the love interest Natalie and the antagonist Yuri gain and lose multiple accents throughout the movie. This—and the the dialog's bad grammar—culminates in the riff:

Tom Servo: (imitating Natalie) Paul! You is a waar-wilf!

• Wedge was played by Scottish actor Denis Lawson throughout the original Star Wars trilogy, but for the first film, he was voiced by American David Ankrum. In The Empire Strikes Back, they used Lawson's own voice with a Fake American accent, and in Return of the Jedi, he used his native accent.

Live-Action TV

• In an episode of The Nanny, Fran Drescher's character loses her trademark nasal voice after eating a lot of wasabi. Though the effect is only temporary, it allows the audience to hear her real voice.
  • It's not quite her real voice- Fran Drescher literally has to talk a lot slower to sound less Fran-ish.
• Also in an episode of Six Feet Under, Nate has a hallucination that Brenda is speaking undecipherable Australian slang in an Australian accent—which is actress Rachel Griffiths' real accent.
• In the Doctor Who episode "Tooth and Claw", the Tenth Doctor affects a Scottish accent in order to blend in as a native of the Scottish highlands. Later in the episode, he forgets to continue using the accent and is caught by Queen Victoria. Notable for the fact that David Tennant, the actor playing the Doctor in the episode, is in fact Scottish, and normally affects an Estuary English accent when playing the role.
  • And for the fact that the Scottish accent the Doctor affects isn't Tennant's regular one.
  • There was a very specific reason that the producers didn't use Tennant's regular accent, which was that Eccleston had used his regular accent, specifically a north England accent...which turned into an in-series joke. ("Lots of planets have a North!!!) The original intent was to use Tennant's normal accent, but the producers wanted to avoid turning Doctor Who "into a tour of the U.K.."
    • Of course, the Doctor's had a Scottish accent before - 7th Doctor Sylvester McCoy used his normal speaking voice in the role.
    • The 8th Doctor as played by Paul McGann speaks in a much more generic English accent than McGann himself, whose true voice has a distinct Liverpool lilt.
  • In "The Faceless Ones", the alien duplicate of Jamie has Frazer Hines' real-life English accent.
• In Buffy the Vampire Slayer season 4, the English vampire Spike twice tries to fake an American accent. In this case, however, actor James Marsters wasn't using his own accent - just doing a good imitation of a poor imitation of one.
• Most American actors in Game of Thrones do an excellent job of mimicking British-sounding accents, but sometimes an American twang can slip through, especially when they are angry. Peter Dinklage tends to get the most criticism in this regard.
  • Similarly, Prince Joffrey occasionally slips into an Irish brogue.
• One episode of the US version of Life On Mars sees Irish actor Jason O'Mara (who is playing New York born Sam Tyler) go undercover... as an Irishman, allowing O'Mara to use his own accent. Of course, there's the inevitable scene where his "Irish" accent is shown to slip-up and become "American" again...
• On Burn Notice, the hero's ex-girlfriend Fiona is supposed to be Irish. After making the audience suffer through Gabrielle Anwar's extremely poor job at faking an Irish accent in the pilot episode, the creative staff decided to face up to the reality that she simply couldn't pull it off. Voila, episode 2 of the show has Fiona announcing that since she was living in America, she was going to work on 'faking' an American accent, and the horrible faux-Irish speech went over the side.
  • She's still faking it. Gabrielle Anwar is English.
  • When Michael went undercover as a American arms dealer while also playing an Irishman he almost sounded like he was about to slip back into the Irish accent a few times, despite the actor being American.
    • While Fiona's brother believes he is an Irishman, when he does he natural show voice, the brother gives him crap for it not sounding natural.
• On Dark Angel, Bronx-born Alimi Ballard played his Caribbean immigrant character Herbal Thought with an accent so thick fans complained about not being able to understand his dialogue. For the second season of the series, Herbal began speaking something closer to standard English, claiming that his wife was making him do it so he could get a better job. Dark Angel was canceled, but Ballard now plays sharp, well-spoken, highly literate FBI agent David Sinclair on Numb3rs. Apparently the advice of Herbal's wife paid off for him!
• In one episode of The Riches, Wayne and Dahlia, played by Eddie Izzard and Minnie Driver, affect British accents for one part of a scam. Both Izzard and Driver are British, and use fake American Accents (in her case, a rather thick Hillbilly drawl.) Then you remember that they're playing Irish Travellers, and you get even more confused...
• In a particularly bizarre example, in one episode of Alias, Sydney and Vaughn are portraying a French couple with requisite over-the-top faux accents—which is odd when one realizes that Michael Vartan is French-born. However, in the same scene, Vaughan speaks to their mark in perfect French, no trace of the false accent.
  • Even more impressively, though, Vartan in those scene when he speaks English with a French accent sounds exactly like a French person speaking English with an accent would. (Take it from someone with a degree in French and who has a foreign exchange student from France one summer!)
  • Jennifer Garner, on the other hand, fakes multiple accents over the course of the show, and does a terrible job of it. This is forgivable when Sydney isn't trying to pass as a native speaker of the language in question, but when she is, it's flat-out cringeworthy - her Russian and Japanese accents in particular.
• On Chuck, Yvonne Strahovski uses her natural Australian accent when impersonating a scientist in one brief scene. She also spoke Polish (which is her actual first language) for a single line in an earlier episode. She's said the American accent gives her the most trouble on the word "girlfriend," but she slips very rarely.
  • Her accent slips noticeably on the word "orange." Unfortunately, her character Sarah Walker works in a frozen yogurt shop called Orange Orange.
• The Polish actors in Spellbinder spoke with their original accent, to reinforce the general parallel universe thing.
• Nearly every time Samantha Bloom from Undercovers has to go undercover as someone other than an American, especially when she's blantantly turning on the sex appeal, Gugu Mbatha-Raw breaks out her original English accent.
• Alyssa Milano is an interesting case. She was born and raised in Brooklyn, and so had the aforementioned accent, but she worked diligently to get rid of it in order to have a successful theater career. As a result of this, when she landed her big role on Who's The Boss?, she found it somewhat difficult to get the Brooklyn accent back. On the show, it's very inconsistent until they dropped it altogether.
• 21 Jump Street has a glorious example: a polish exchange student speaks with what sounds like a badly done french accent. Since french and polish accents sound nothing alike, the result is not so much a slipping accent but an accent that is already crumpled around the actresses ankles and forces her to scuffle through her part.

In-character examples:

Comic Books

• In Preacher (Comic Book), Cassidy poses as Jesse and temporarily hides his thick Irish accent under a shoddy Texan one. Once his captors find out it's just a ruse and he's not the man they need, the Big Bad quotes this trope. Later on, after Jesse rescues him, he's quite upset at the poor quality of Cassidy's 'Texan'.
  • Ironically, you can occasionally catch Jessie Custer slipping out of his native texan accent into writer Garth Ennis' Irish one. "Give it here" as opposed to "give me that."
  • Ennis does it in his run on Punisher, too, with New York-born and bred Frank Castle saying "I've news for you" and "You passed out straightaway". Granted, this was during the "Kitchen Irish" arc, so maybe Ennis subconsciously got caught in a rut.
    • Also, it's lampshaded in the comics in a conversation between a disfigured IRA bomber and his partner in crime, an American gun runner of Irish descent (who fakes an Irish accent when talking to the IRA guy). The bomber literally has to tape what's left of his face in place. When the gun runner asks him if it slips, the bomber responds "Like your accent?".
• It also happens here and there in Transmetropolitan—various City-born characters bust out with turns of phrase or sentence structures more suited to Warren Ellis's English origins.
  • This can be excused by the fact that, although The City is essentially American, it's portrayed as a conglomeration of many different major metropoli; with a highly international population, mixed and matched over many many years from the present. It quite obviously incorporates a considerable amount of London, as well as New York and Paris; with a fairly idiosyncratic location (it seems to be a coastal port city, with a close proximity to a major mountain chain). Many of the characters have what appear to be deliberately mixed accents.
• In her civilian guise, Empowered affects a patently false Southern drawl. Also the villain Rum, Sodomy and the Lash (formerly a trio) who Emp describes as an "underinformed anglophile doofus".

Film

• The James Bond film For Your Eyes Only (see top quote). The title of this entry comes from Silent Hunter misremembering the line from it. Lisl is actually a Liverpudlian lady pretending to be an Austrian countess. Bond still sleeps with her.
  • Well, of course he does. He's James Bond, ferchrissakes.
• Inverted in Casino Royale 1967: Agent Mimi, played by the Scottish Deborah Kerr, impersonates M's widow, but upon witnessing the prowess of David Niven's Bond, doesn't lapse back into a native French accent, but starts singing his praises in orgiastic French.
• In Shadow of the Thin Man (1941), high-class prostitute Claire Peters usually spoke with a pronounced "posh" British accent (or at least what sounded like one to Americans). But when frightened or angry, she would slip into a lower-class New Yorker accent.
• In Cromwell, King Charles (Alec Guiness) disguises his Scottish accent, until one scene where he memorably loses his cool. Of course Charles's father was Scottish so it seems reasonable his son might have picked up traces of it despite spending the vast majority of his life in England and being surrounded by people actually born there.
• Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street: When cornering Todd, Pirelli switches from an Italian accent to an Irish one. Pretty good considering that neither is Sacha Baron Cohen's natural accent. Then again, he is known for doing fake accents.
• The British Michael Caine played a Maine doctor in The Cider House Rules. In case his accent slipped, the director justified it by having the doctor mention his mother was an immigrant.
• In Gosford Park, Ryan Phillippe plays a character who is supposedly Scottish, but the actual Scottish main character (played by Scottish actress Kelly Macdonald) recognizes it as fake immediately.
• Layer Cake has this with Eddie Temple (played by Michael Gambon), that's a combination of this and the first type. Gambon's character often speaks with a plummy English accent, and the director's commentary mentions his complaint about difficulty holding the accent. The director told him to let the accent slip at will any time he felt like it, which fits the character well, a London Gangster who has moved into high society and taken elocution classes. In particular, his posh accent tends to slip when the character is angry.
• In Velvet Goldmine, Toni Collette plays an American woman who moves to England and subsequently develops a British accent. In flashbacks, her accent slips when she's upset; in scenes taking place in the present, she doesn't bother.
  • This is actually a positively uncanny imitation of Angela Bowie, who is American but either absorbed or intentionally adopted a faux-British accent during her then-husband's glam rock days. It's especially prominent in the opening to Ziggy Stardust: The Motion Picture, for example, when she comes backstage to chat with the band.
• Johnny Depp's Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland normally speaks in a soft, lispy English accent, but when the character's madness switches from the amusingly harmless to the deadly serious and potentially violent, his accent becomes a Scottish burr.
• A deliberate regional-American-accent example occurs in The Wizard of Oz, when the fortune-telling huckster speaks to Dorothy in the tones of an educated East Coast man, then slips into a rustic vernacular to talk to himself after she's left.
• Dead Man On Campus has the two main characters repeatedly trying to recruit a suicidal student as their roommate, since according to their school's bylaws they will be compensated academically for emotional damages if a roommate dies. They think they've found their man when they befriend a surly, miserly Goth student with a British accent, but soon begin to suspect that he's not as "dark" as he appears. One of them challenges the Goth by calling him a "fucking poser", causing the other guy to lose his temper and shout "I am not a fucking poser!" in a perfect American accent. He then catches himself, but it's too late. ("You're not even British!")
• In Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny JB when falls prey to the street gang that is a Shout-Out to The Clockwork Orange. Its members speak with mocked-up British accent and when one of them utters a phrase with actor's natural accent, he is promptly punched to the chest by the leader and returns to the mocked English.

Literature

• Bizarre in-universe example with recurring villain Padan Fain in The Wheel of Time. The Fain seen through most of the series is actually a composite being of the original Padan Fain and the ancient, undead Evil Chancellor Mordeth, who attempted a Grand Theft Me on him and only partially succeeded. The resulting being tends to switch back and forth between Fain's and Mordeth's accents, almost always unwittingly and sometimes in the middle of a sentence. This generally creeps out anyone who talks with him for an extended time, to greater and lesser extents.

Live-Action TV

• When Baltar on Battlestar Galactica Reimagined is accused of making up his background of growing up a poor farmboy on what was considered the most rural and backward colony, James Callis switches his cultured English accent for a rougher, more rural one (Yorkshire, in fact) in telling his story about leaving home and learning to speak in a more upscale manner.
• In 24, everyone associated with Dana Walsh's past has a typical Deep South accent, but she usually doesn't. When she's especially rattled, however, her original accent slips out. (Her actress is originally from Oregon.)
• Phoebe's British accent on Thirty Rock. Her actress, Emily Mortimer, actually is British, making her a Brit-playing-an-American-playing-a-Brit.
  • Liz tries to pull off a Jamaican accent on the phone with Kenneth. She begins to call the other person "me lad", Kenneth whispers that she's slipping into Irish and to cover she quickly proclaims, "Cool runnings, mon. Bobsled" and hangs up.
• On Bones, intern Arastoo Vaziri's Middle Eastern accent is faked, and slips completely when he gets irritated at Dr. Saroyan. He was faking being "just-off-the-boat" so he fellow lab workers wouldn't make fun of his genuine Muslim religious beliefs.
• Similarly, on Castle, a money-making guru named Johnny Vong fakes a just-off-the-boat Chinese accent to make his fake Rags to Riches story that much more plausible.
• Agent Mulder of The X-Files is from Southern New England—but sometimes David Duchovny's New York roots show through.
• Emilie de Ravin in Roswell ends up letting her Australian accent slip through in a couple of places in her first appearance on the show.
• One Friends episode had Ross inexplicably starting to teach a new class in a horrible British accent. His attempts to "gradually phase it out" as he "adapted" to America made it even worse.
  • Similarly, in the episode "The One with Ross's Tan", Jennifer Coolidge's 'Amanda Bufamontisi" is an American who has lived in England for long enough to convince herself she has an English Accent. It epitomises Bad English Accent humour. So much so that Lisa Kudrow could barely make it through filming without laughing hysterically.
• There is an episode of True Blood where Eric Northman, a Norse vampire (yes, really) played by a Swede with a neutral American accent, pretends to be a human with a Southern accent. The result is horrifyingly hilarious (and very obviously bad on purpose).
• Edie of Last of the Summer Wine puts on a ridiculous fake posh southern accent out of social-climbing ambitions, which has a tendency to vanish and be replaced by her natural salt of the earth Yorkshire accent at times of stress.
• David Tennant's use of his own Scottish burr in "Tooth And Claw" has been detailed above, with The Doctor "pretending" to speak with a Scottish Accent; but Rose's attempt also bears mention here:

Doctor: I've been chasing this wee child over hill and dale. Ain't that right, you...timorous beastie?
Rose: ...Och, aye, I've been oot and aboot!
Doctor (under his breath, to Rose): No, don't do that.
Rose: Hoots, mon!
The Doctor: No, really, don't. REALLY.

• In the Law and Order: Criminal Intent episode "Chinoiserie", Goren and Eames immediately identify a supposed British lord as a fake by his atrocious accent which keeps jumping around the UK. The outraged impostor, an actor unknowingly hired to play the part as part of a con, keeps insisting that it is "a perfectly valid British musical hall accent".
• On Jessie the titular character is from Texas but doesn't have an accent except for a few occasions when she slips into one.

Web Comics

• This page of Gastrophobia:

Mockingbird princess: Besides, they're useless if they starve to death.
Mockingbird guard: Your fake Southern accent is slipping again, princess.
Mockingbird princess: T'ain't fake! Ah jest, ya know, plumb ferget Ah got it... sometimes.

• Faye from Questionable Content is from the South (in a strip set in Massachusetts). For the most part, she tends to assimilate her accent, but it can be heard (er, read) when she's been drinking or very angry.

Web Original

• An odd, non-aural example occurs in Survival of the Fittest. Maxie Dasai speaks with a notable accent, however, this tends to vary from topic to topic as the handler forgets older verbal patterns or comes up with new ones. Funnily enough, it isn't that noticeable.

Western Animation

• In Transformers Animated, Shockwave speaks with a slight David Warner-esque British accent, but his alter-ego of Longarm has an American accent.
  • Shockwave's voice actor is well known for doing a range of different voices. You might also notice that the Transformers Animated Shockwave sounds exactly like his G1 cartoon counterpart - because the same voice actor from the 80s cartoon came back to play him!
• In The Simpsons episode "Life on The Fast Lane", Jacques speaks in a faux-French accent which slips when he yells at the bowling alley waitress for more onion rings.
• On Word Girl, Tobey always speaks with a fake British accent during his evil plans, but it dissolves into an American accent when his mother shows up to stop him.
• The Legend of Korra: Mako has only a slight Brooklyn-ish accent around people he doesn't know personally (Korra, Butakha), but it gets heavier when he talks to Bolin or other street kids.

Real Life

• The astute listener to CBS News could always spot when a particular breaking story had been going on too long: during Election Night 2000, for example, when Dan Rather's assumed Network Standard accent began seriously slipping out of his control and revealing his Texan roots.
• Similar to the above, Jared Padelacki and Jensen Ackles, who both talk in a generic Midwestern American accent on screen, lampshade their own tendencies to slip into their native Central Texan accents win they git tahrd.
  • Another strange case from Supernatural, Lauren Cohan. She was born in America but went to school in England, and her natural accent is a mix of the two. She went full British as Bela Talbot, and had one scene where she went full American as a reporter.
• Lyse Doucet, a reporter and presenter who has been with the BBC News servicefor quite some time, was born in Atlantic Canada. She has a very distinct way of annunciating that, when she's reporting for an American or Canadian audience, tends toward US/Canadian news TV standard; sounds more Estuary when she's on the BBC; and is nothing like the accent she grew up speaking or tends to when she visits her home town in New Brunswick.
• In the Japanese language, they have what are called "loan words," which are basically words from other languages that are integrated into Japanese when no equivalent exists. For example, the English word "computer" is a loan word. However, because they have a specific phonetic structure, you have to say it like "konpyūta" for them to understand it. So, even when using English words, they won't understand your accent unless it's Japanese. This is an easy way to tell native and non-native speakers apart.
  • Also, they tend to say "Pasokon" (Persocom), short for "Pāsonaru Konpyūta" (Personal Computer), or just "Pī Shī" (PC), which might add to the confusion if you just say "Konpyūta" to them.
  • Other words that get this include "chocolate" (chokorēto), "orange juice" (orenji jūsu) and "ice cream" (aisu kurīmu). Note that some of these are a bit ridiculous; the orange, for instance, is actually native to East Asia and was known to the Japanese well before the global influence of English came along.
  • They've been at it for centuries. "Tempura" is a loanword from Portuguese ("tempora", time of year, referencing e.g. Lent), and others can be found here. The Portuguese influence dates to the 1500's.
• People who move around often as a child—for example, people whose parents are in the military—often pick up fragments of different accents. No personal examples, please.
• The British synth-soul group Alabama3 tends to affect southern US characters for their stage personas. The monologue at the beginning of the original version of "Woke Up This Morning" (better known, remixed, as the theme to The Sopranos) features lead singer Rob Spragg doing a very strange accent—a slightly exaggerated African American accent with painfully British enunciations. The way Spragg comes so close and fails to nail it has to fall into the Uncanny Valley.
• The novel Room is written by an Irish author, but the main characters are meant to be American. While the author gets most of the basic stuff right (boots are trunks, lifts are elevators), her American idiom is still pretty off in many places.
• Similarly, the mid-1990s-vintage Crossover fanfic A Wolf in Crisis by Barry Cadwgan, about a Shadowrunner transported to MegaTokyo. The shadowrunner and his familiar are supposedly from Seattle, but their speech is littered with Australian slang and idioms, because the author is Australian.

1. ↑ What makes Strahovski's ability so impressive is that English isn't even her first language. She grew up speaking Polish, then learned to speak English perfectly (with an Australian accent), and then learned to speak English with a nearly flawless American accent. In a few episodes of Chuck, she has also convincingly spoken in a Southern accent and a British accent.
2. ↑ This would certainly explain why Hayden Panettiere has a slight Texan inflection when playing Claire to begin with (she and the Bennets live in Texas) that soon disappears.