Analysis Task off Jay Baruchel’s Accent on the “CONAN Show” (eBook)

Scientific Essay from the year 2019 in the subject American Studies - Linguistics, grade: 2.0, University of Potsdam (Anglophone Modernities in Literature and Culture), course: English at Work, language: English, abstract: The paper discusses accounts of faked accents that carry linguistic meaning.

Although many do not want to acknowledge it, it is covertly clear that every human being possesses an accent, which he/she uses in his/her day-to-day life. However, in many of those described situations, people are still asked to conceal their accent in order to reach a wider audience or to comply with the set ‘standard’ of the English language, being ‘General American’ (GenAm) and ‘Received Pronunciation’ (RP). As one can imagine, this only leads to further reinforcement of the idea that everybody’s language repertoire, concerning the choice of an accent, should be allocated to one of the two already-mentioned standardized English ‘norms’, being GenAm or RP.

To illustrate the thought process of one being demanded to adapt his accent to a more American audience as well as to simultaneously conduct my analysis on the phonological features of the Canadian Accent and to perform the register analysis, I
needed a matching sample. Therefore, I chose the example of the actor “Jay Baruchel” talking about his role of the protagonist “Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III” in How to Train Your Dragon on the talk show “Conan”, which is hosted by the comedian “Conan O’Brien” and his sidekick “Andy Richter” on the channel “TBS”.