Here’s an amusing lesson from Tracy Goodwin in how (not) to speak English with a British accent which has become a bit of a mini-hit amongst language students on the web. Keep listening to the end … it gets worse!

And now a video reply pointing out how hopelessly wrong Tracy’s attempt is. One of the things I find interesting here is the way in which this particular YouTuber is responding in a quasi-dialogic way with Tracy’s video. YouTube is being used increasingly as a medium of comment – which, in a curious way makes it almost conversational.

Students who followed the ‘Language in Society’ unit in Level 5 will recognise Tracy’s unusual use of ‘dialect’ here – we would use ‘accent’ to talk about the features she’s demonstrating. They’ll also recognise that she really has produced a mashup of different geographical and social features of English which nobody, on this island at least, actually speaks.

It is funny and it has garnered numerous funny responses – including this parody. But what if she’s successful? If she actually teaches hundreds, or thousands, or hundreds of thousands of North Americans to speak with her variety of British English? In a cruel irony of cultural globalisation could we find ourselves in some distant future importing and appropriating an accent which now, in 2010, we’re deriding?

Maybe not. Maybe it’s time for a coff-eh instead.