Fred Armisen Is Really Good At Accents
This is super entertaining if you just want to see how nuanced accents can be and how talented Fred Armisen is when it comes to imitating them, but I also thought it was really interesting how he described his own accents while he was doing them. For example, when asked to do Hamburg, he explained that "Berlin is a little more like loud and confident" while Hamburg is "more educated" and therefore they are "more conservative," hence the difference in their accent. He may have said this for comical reasons, but definitely pointed to how language can index social meanings, and perhaps how social meanings can also contribute to how we consider the sound of accents.