One of the funniest things to me is when, in American movies, a British character is introduced, usually played by an American actor who’s doing a “British accent.” Such scenes always make me laugh, though Britons are more likely to be annoyed by it.
It’s because there’s no such thing as a “British accent.” Ignoring the fact that Great Britain includes Wales and Scotland, England itself has many different accents. These nuances are lost on American actors as they chew an amalgam of various English accents and spit out a generic “British accent”!
Looking at things this simplistically is quite common. An outsider looking at Saudi Arabia, for example, might also think that there’s such a thing as “Saudi accent” in Arabic. But I got confused when I first started hearing that term, since there’s no uniform Saudi accent. For such a relatively small population, the accents are surprisingly diverse. Someone from the western region, e.g. Makkah has a different Arabic accent (one with some Egyptian influences) than someone from Dammam, which is influenced by the neighboring GCC tongues. A person from the central region, like Riyadh, has a markedly different accent from someone from the South, like Abha.
Knowing that even Britain, which is much closer culturally and shares the same language with the US, is not immune from these mess-ups, you can of course imagine how badly American movies do Arabic accents. Many times it’s some generic “non-English” accent that sounds Mexican or Russian with a vague mix of Arabic. Personally, I’ve given up trying to find many good representatives of Arabic accents in Hollywood, especially since even well-known historical facts and incidents are regularly butchered or misrepresented, no matter how many times we’re told the film is “based on a true story”!
There are bigger issues, of course. Someone might point out that the horrible representation of Muslims and Arabs in Hollywood is a more important subject, but that is a daunting task to tackle. The negative image of Arabs is as early as Hollywood itself, starting with 1921’s “The Sheik,” a silent movie which got the stereotype ball rolling as it presented Arabs as thieves and murderers. Since then things got only worse and Hollywood has been working diligently to scare Americans of Arabs and Muslims.
Changing a century of toxic brainwashing is tough. That’s why this particular ambition of mine is small: I just want to see accurate Arabic accents in the western media. Is that too much to ask?
By Ibrahim Al-Ammar
Check out this montage of terrible British accents on YouTube:
