h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I'm Canadian-American, and while I haven't got a problem with the Canadian bit, there's many good reasons why you mightn't want people to think you're American. I'm also an amateur linguist, and it's a hobby of mine to pick a place and then fool people into thinking I'm from that place. Usually it works on Americans, and more often than not I like to try out my Queen's English - well, it's not really Queen's English so much as a sort of nondescript middle class variety. It is, of course, considerably easier to pretend to be British when in a chatroom. All you have to do, essentially, is keep your grammar more or less ok, and make sure all the grammar and spelling is the *British* kind - which you'll notice I do, for various reasons of my own. Anyway, you must do that and make sure your swearing vocabulary doesn't contain traces of the American - this is actually surprisingly difficult, I find, and something I work on quite a lot.

If you keep practicing, as I do in everyday life, funny things start to happen. I was showing off my accents to a friend during some sort of school function, and the girl sitting next to me asked me, 'What part of England are you from?' I was tempted to lie and say I was from Oxford or something, but it didn't seem to me that I could hold that up very long, since my knowledge of British geography is actually quite sketchy, so I didn't. How disappointing. But I assure you, it doesn't take much, and it works!

My apologies for the wordy response.

Oh, and the sure-fire way to make Americans think you're English, whether you are or not:

'Bloody brilliant!'