Sociolinguistic Artifacts

In this video we have people on the streets of Great Britain trying to do their best American accents. The accents revolved around "Southern," "Californian/Surfer," and "Hyper-Metropolitan" accents. The words included by those speaking generally reflected stereotypes involving surfing and smoking weed (for the Californian/Surfer), eating cheeseburgers, shopping, and gossip (Hyper-Metropolitan), and drinking beer and shooting guns (Southern). The participants were not asked to do a specific kind of "American accent," either, they merely did an accent that they deemed to be what is "the American accent." How Americans are perceived by these participants was evident in their style of speech and words chosen to reflect typical American conversation along; one could also possibly argue that this reflects that some British people group all of the American identities into one conglomerate identity which they deem to be wholly "American." Thinking about this more outside of the video, I feel that this could be true in terms of how Americans think of other cultures as well, like how Americans think of the British identities.