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Saturday, September 12, 2020

A PROPOS ACCENTS

 I spent a long time convinced that the GEICO gecko is Australian until I read a knowledgeable and definitive analysis that revealed that he is Cockney. Accents can be tricky.

3 comments:

Michael Llenos said...

To me the GEICO gekko sounded like Martin Freeman (Bilbo Baggins of Peter Jackson's The Hobbit). Seeing that the distance between London and Australia is around 9k miles and the distance between Australia and New Zealand (Middle-Earth) is around 1k miles, I think we both hit not far from each other in mistaken guessing! Pretty good guessing anyway. Also, Freeman was born 32 miles southwest of London, so he is not a Cockney--although, Jake Wood (the real voice actor) was born in London--is a Cockney (I assume). I think matching an animated/or digital voice to the actor in real life is very difficult. All these years I thought Captain Planet was Tom Cruise. He actually originally did six episodes but David Coburn was put in to do the re-recordings.

Carl said...

It's a gecko. Gekko is the villain in "Wall Street."

RobertD said...

A Cockney accent is from the East End of London, and is, at least traditionally, a distinctively working class accent.

I have not seen the Hobbit, so have no idea what Martin Freeman sounds like in that film, but I would be surprised if playing an eccentric Victorian gentleman, for so Bilbo surely was, he used a Cockney accent.

That said, southern English English generally has adopted various features over the past few decades that would at one time have been considered Cockney so I would not be surprised if my great-grandmother would have thought Freeman sounds like a Cockney!