Accent identification questions
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There have been a few questions of late asking for help identifying accents of TV and movie characters. This one about Downton Abbey got 7 upvotes and 0 downvotes, but was closed as "too localized". This one about Inglourious Basterds is still open as of now. This much older question about various actors was voted +5 and received two upvoted answers. Should we accept questions asking about the accents of fictional characters? How about the accents of real public figures?
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3 Answers
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I think that they're fine. The Downton Abbey question is probably NARQ for being overly broad as it asks for the identification of an entire cast of characters. The Brad Pitt question is fine, IMO. Ideally though, both these questions should have provided a link to a sample of the accent. That said, I don't think either question would be out of place on movies.stackexchange.com which accepts questions on both movies and television programs.
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Pronunciation is on-topic, so accents probably are. I see nothing wrong with asking about the accents of public figures, or even anonymous "vox pop" interviewees if there is an example to listen to1. However, asking about portrayals of fictional characters is probably off-topic: that would be a question about the actor's interpretation. A well-known example would be Dick van Dyke's "Mockney" [false Cockney] in Mary Poppins. In the specific case of Downton Abbey, or indeed any dramatic production, the actors are portraying how things might have been said in their particular setting, and even then they are only making an attempt to do so (which might be more or less successful). To attempt to regularise that here is out of scope: the question should be directed to the production team as only they can provide an authoritative answer. 1 Care needs to be taken with copyright: a link to a clip on a broadcaster's website should be fine.
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This is one of those areas where I'm likely to find myself more concerned with how the question is asked than what the subject is about. In other words, a question about accents wouldn't necessarily be out-of-bounds by default, but I'd hope it would be carefully crafted and somewhat researched. I'm not a big fan of the Inglorious Basterds question as it is now:
I'd be more accepting of the question if the O.P. at least at mentioned something about the character and the accent – for example, where is this character supposedly from? (This information is readily found here.) It might also be helpful to include a link so that those unfamiliar with the accent could have a listen. Also, it's not very clear what the question is really asking about. What is the accent? It seems like any of these answers could be considered correct to some extent:
But I figured that out just by reading the character's description in an IMDB database, and listening to 25 seconds of a YouTube clip. It might be better to ask something more along the lines of:
or, if the O.P. has something different in mind, be more specific about the question.
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