Senator Barack Obama's accent
Former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair also adapted his mode of speech to suit the audience before him, a wee bit like a chameleon. For instance, when addressing the Parliamentary House of Commons at Prime Minister's Question Time or delivering a Labour Party Political Broadcast on TV he was spot on, word perfect, with his standard English English RP accent, even verging on the "posh" (even though he is in fact of Scottish heritage and went to school here in Edinburgh).
Yet when he addressed a group of students at an English university, or spoke among a similar group of young people assembed in a park or a sportsground somewhere in England, or spoke at some kind of Campaign for Youth event somewhere in England, again, - he broke out into a form of youthfully fashionable "Glottal stop Estuary" and was dropping his "Ts" left right and centre - sorry, I mean - "lef' roi' an' cen'nah!" It looked like a case of "mixing in with the in crowd of the moment" or perhaps "If you can't beat them, join them!"
Somehow it just didn't suit him - he just looked and sounded plain stupid!
Damian:
What's funny is that most Americans agree with you: the Inland North accent (characterized by the Northern Cities Vowel Shift) is notoriously quite unconscious, and just as much so to those who speak it as those who hear it. I remember being struck in the early 1960s by how oddly my Michigander cousins talked, though at the time I didn't understand the exact mechanisms, but they themselves thought they talked like everyone else.
JTT:
The New York accent isn't really different in different boroughs of New York; it does, however, alter with social class (the lower, the more features). But it is *not* tending to disappear, still less to spread -- it remains closely confined to New York City, parts of Long Island, lower Westchester County, and a small strip of New Jersey, and is still strong in those areas. (Note that it's basically confined to whites; the AAVE and AAVE-influenced accents of New York City are pretty much the same as in other American cities.)
Like other accents of English, the NYC accent is changing: in particular, the famous there/dare, thin/tin, and NURSE/CHOICE mergers have been abandoned almost completely, but the characteristic raising of THOUGHT, the universal dark /l/, the bad/lad split, and the resistance to common American mergers such as Mary-marry-merry, cot-caught, and hurry-furry continue to be distinctive.
The sociolinguist William Labov famously called New York City "a vast sink of negative prestige", and it's true: surveys have continued to show that most Americans look down on the accent, including the people who speak it.
(I grew up in New Jersey just outside the accent line, but moved to NYC when I was twenty, have lived here for thirty years, and don't expect to leave except feet-first. I've picked up some NYC accent features, but remain firmly rhotic in all contexts.)
Obama definitely peppers his speech patterns with artificial affectations:
It's most noticeable with words ending in "y".
Conspiracy -> "Conspira-seh"
Democracy -> "Democra-seh"
I noticed in the last debate that he turned this "off" ... mostly, but normally, it's "on".
I find it annoying, because it sounds fake, and clearly it is fake.
That, and the wagging finger (and thumb) in our faces.
It's very hard for foreigners to distinguish from amongst local accents.
On BBC, Americans are nearly always played as "New Yorkers" and though sometimes well done, something subtle just doesn't ring true (literally), and I can usually tell that they aren't authentic.
Americans are equally bad at performing in RP (if not worse!).
For Americans, London has two accents: Upper-class and Cockney
For Brits, America has four accents: NYC, Regular, Southern and Black
For the Brits, Americans and Canadians, Oceania + South African have 1 accent
For the French, British English, Canadian English, Australian English and American English all sound the same.
I think only Canadians and Australians/New Zealanders are unbiased (with their accents) enough to actually accurately pick-out and distinguish the correct accent from the correct country.
<Mostly General American, as he grew up mostly in Hawaii.>
Do Hawaiians speak General American? I know one guy from Hawaii and his accent is noticeably different from General American.
He has somewhat of a black accent
Why does anyone care?
And why doesn't anyone bother to ask this of Mr. McCain?
Mr. Obama --raised by a white mother and white grandparents, raised in Hawaii, educated at Harvard ---speaks very well.
David
I disagree. Though some aspects of the NY accent are falling into disuse, such as the NURSE/CHOICE and THIN/TIN mergers, the There/Dare merger still exists to an extent...rather than disappearing the "th" and "d" sounds have merged to form a dental stop that is a blend of the two.
Non-rhoticism has receeded considerably, though. Most of the final R's in words are kept, however the consonant-preceeding R still tends to be dropped alot, even among younger speakers. Nowadays names like Peter are becoming rhotic, but Marcus is still pronounced in a non-rhotic fashion.
And AAVE DOES retain a considerable amount of NYC influences when spoken in the region, such as the "aw" sound. NY dialect influences on AAVE tend to vary from borough to borough and neighborhood to neighborhood, depending on the ratio of Whites to Blacks. I'm Black and my speech is a mix of NYC dialect, AAVE and some lesser Caribbean influences.
His accent is relatively standardized, though, like many politicians, his accent may change slightly depends on to whom he is speaking...
McCain's accent is pretty standard (he's from the southwest).
<<*Would Bronx or Brooklyn be the equivalent of what was, in the past, Cockney in London?>>
Actually, in some ways yes. The New York Accent was, before WWII occasionally referred to as "cockney" (i.e. "Queens cockney," "New York cockney"). It's not entirely hard to see why, since the broadest New York accents (particularly Jewish New York) and the broadest Cockney accents have a few similarities:
--Both have a back onglide in KITE words (e.g. "tide" is [tAId] in both).
--Both feature something of a tense-lax split of the /{/ phoneme--more complex in New York.
--Both often feature both raising and glide reduction in the /au/ phoneme ("round" becomes [r\{@nd] or [r\{:nd] in extreme cases.
--Lowering of the onglide for the /eI/ and /oU/ phonemes (i.e. "day" [d{I] and "coat" [k6Ut].
--Dipthongization of /O:/ (although in cockney this is part of a split, where open syllables are pronounced [O@] and closed are pronounced [OU].
--Dentalization of voiced "th" words (although unvoiced "th" is treated differently in each accent--NYC [t_d] vs. Cockney [f]).
I want to be clear than I'm not talking about more moderate NY English or Estuary--I'm talking about the strongest of the strong urban dialects of the two cities. One theory about this is that both East London and New York were heavily populated at the same time with the same two immigrant groups (Eastern European Jews and the Irish), but many of the things I mentioned above are also applicable to Philadelphia, South Jersey, and the English Midlands, so these features may be more part and parcel of a common phonological shift than indicators of shared immigration patterns.