Thoughts on Foreign American Dialects
It takes an exceptional actor to do a really good American dialect. There is a “General American” dialect that news and radio hosts and announcers practice, but it is largely nonexistent in nature. :) Most accents are regional. Even if the actors get dialect right, usually their resonance/placement is a bit off and that’s a red flag for me. It’s a bit hard to describe, but when you study accents and dialects, you don’t start with the vowel sounds but you start with what drives the differences between dialects (in English at least), which is where the speaker focuses the placement of their sounds. It’s a bit difficult to describe in text, but imagine that much American English comes from a place more forward in the mouth than British English, and Australian English is a bit like Cockney - a mix of forward and rear placement - but with more nasality. Highland Scottish is way in the back of the throat, but the lowlands are further forward.