In awe of the Queen’s English

LONDON, United Kingdom — There’s a reason Madonna’s affectation of choice — or "phony accent," as it is sometimes known — isn’t a Southern drawl. Nothing says sexy and sophisticated like a spot of Oxford English — even if you hail from Detroit.

Without the accent, after all, James Bond’s elaborate martini order sounds a lot less suave and a lot more like the jerk in front of you at Starbucks asking for his daily "double-decaf caramel machiatto with half-and-half and a packet of Splenda. Shaken, not stirred."

A British accent is also versatile. For many Americans, it can just as easily conjure daydreams of tea, sleepy hamlets and all that is quaint.

“It’s like an added benefit to the British people,” said Chelsea Schual, a senior from the University of Colorado at Boulder. “They’re so funny in the first place. Their accent just makes them fabulous.”

So when the dinner conversation among her British bosses turned to cricket, American Katie Reysiz sat in awed admiration. Between all the terribly erudite talk of "wickets" and "test matches," Reysiz lost herself in her fascination with the dialect. And she was caught off guard when one of her companions brought her in to the conversation.

"I replied in a horribly exaggerated British accent in an attempt to impersonate my supervisor,” Reysiz, a senior at George Washington University, said. “The words came out of my mouth so unexpectedly that I didn’t even have a chance to think before I said them."

“He was not amused," Reyzis added.

Greg Kochanski, a research fellow in the Phonetics Laboratory at Oxford University, developed a fascination with the British accent after watching the British Broadcasting Corp. growing up in the United States. Now that he lives in England, some of that magic has worn off.

“If Britain is a distant, exotic place, as it is to many Americans, the accent has a tinge of mystery and is that much more interesting,” Kochanski said. “On the other hand, if you live here and you have to deal with the traffic on the M25, British English doesn’t seem nearly as exotic.”

When Emerson College junior Stacey Friedberg worked in London over the summer, she noticed that along with the accent comes a gift for creative profanity, even in the office.

“Whenever something went wrong, [my coworkers] would say it had gone ‘tits-up,’” she said, dropping her voice to a whisper. “It was just so bizarre.”

But Reyzis said the right inflection can even make vulgarity sound good.

“The British accent just seemed so much softer and more elegant,” she said. “It sounds so classy and proper, even when it often isn’t.”

From a linguistic standpoint, Kochanski said there is no basis for considering the British version of English “more proper” than any American version, pointing out that 99 percent of the words in British English and American English are the same.

"Only a few differences are bigger than the differences you’d find within the U.K. or within the U.S.,” he said, as with the dissimilarities between a rough Boston accent and a slow Southern drawl, or with a sing-songy Welsh accent and the refined British of the upper class.

“We’re very sensitive to small consistent differences in language,” Kochanski said. “We use them as markers for who is from our community and who’s from another community.”

Mona Patel, the student affairs manager for Boston University’s London Programme, has experienced this sensitivity firsthand, having dealt with roughly 1,500 Americans in her two years with the program.

“They are very, very fascinated by the way I speak,” Patel said. “They think the way we speak is refined and proper. We have this cute little accent, which really is just a different accent from the Americans.”

Patel said she has seen many of her students try to force an accent out of their study abroad experience, with little success.

“I feel quite embarrassed for them,” she said. “It’s part of who you are, it says a lot about your background. You can take on words, you can take on mannerisms, but you never lose your accent.”

Bad news for Emerson College junior Stacey Friedberg, who dreamed of returning from her studies in London with more British mannerisms.

“I had a bunch of friends asking me if I came back with an accent,” she said. “They’re all very disappointed that I came back without one.”

Instead, Friedberg’s summer only served to highlight her roots. She asked a visiting friend if she sounded British.

"You sound like you’re from New Jersey now more than ever," he said.

This report comes from journalists in GlobalPost’s Student Correspondent Corps, a project training the next generation of foreign correspondents while they study abroad.