With such a mind bending headline we hit the streets to see what the average North American thought about this oddity.
First we interviewed a woman who wouldn’t allow us to publish her real name. So we will call her Fran. Fran asked, “So we had one foreigner talk like another foreigner? That’s what I would call a push. We still have one foreigner, no matter how you look at it. And they still talk like a foreigner so nothing has improved.”
‘Tom’, our second interviewee, asked, “But, was either accent thin enough that a self respecting North American might be able to understand her words? Or did she speak slowly enough in either accent so that she was rendered understandable? I have questions!”
Our third interviewee, ‘Murray’ asked, “Does it make a difference? One mumbo jumbo accent for another. Clearly she has no plans to be acceptable in America. So why should we care? America is number one!
Our next interviewee, ‘Trixie’ asked, “Who cares? Now if she changed from some foreign accent to the North American accent, that would be something. I’d be the first person to congratulate her. You must be proud, I’d say, to have gone from being difficult to understand to listenable.”
Our last interviewee, ‘Sheila’ had a delightful accent. We told her so. She said she was Australian. We definitely wanted her point of view.
“Well going from speaking normal Australian to Irish gobbledygook is not going to earn her a lot of mates in Australia. Or let her keep many of her old mates. I’d say her best bet would be to ship off to Ireland. There she could relate to the people better.”
But most North Americans we interviewed, didn’t say anything of import. Most just said, “Well how do you expect me to tell the difference?” How indeed.
