I think as an immigrant, I might actually more qualified than Americans to answer that. And broadly speaking, yes. The accents will vary; the conversation isn’t rehearsed so there are a lot more uhms, ahs, and interrupting one another; witty banter is less prevalent; stuff like that that is the usual differences between a script and real life. But the cultural differences? They’re there. Most US media is incredibly grounded in their reality. I caught myself befuddled in many situations because it felt surreal, like I was in a TV show. I couldn’t believe what I watched on the TV was real and not just something contrived to drive the plot where the writer wanted. But it was real.

You can answer that just by asking about your local tv/movie/cartoon feeds and how they talk. It’s scripted and embellished for their intended audience. It’s not “real” but it’s not fake either.

Some good material on hollywood: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXeHnvImcMk

A lot of media is a midwest accent which is considered the most plain. Many movies have various regional accents depending on location. california, southern, boston, chicago, etc. regions and cities and areas of cities have accents but the city ones especially can be a bit rare unless your in a pretty specific area. Heck I did not even know about the northern middle country thing that sounds more canadian until fargo.

That question covers a huge amount of media, land, and people. There are likely hundreds of accents in the US.

Generally for media depicting fairly modern times, the accents are accurate. For example, Superbad, Clerks, and the TV show Reservation Dogs all depict different people and accents in the USA accurately IMO.

Movies from the 1920s to the 1960s seem to have more artificial accents, such as the Mid-Atlantic accent.

Newscasters speak differently than normal, probably so they can be understood more clearly.

Same with game show announcers and reality show narrators.

Its a big question and it depends on the media.

No. People interrupt each other, stumble over words, and sometimes need time to think before speaking. None of that happens when the dialog is pre written and rehearsed.

As in an “American equivalent” to the “anime voice” type thing? Um no… Not that I’m aware of except maybe cartoons do that.

Or do you mean like the overall speech including word choices and how sentences gets put together? I think TV is just way too polished. Irl is more like a police bodycam footage, or a random street interview thats unscripted (i mean even those street interview youtube videos are kinda overedited/polished compared to off camera conversations).

I mean as in lots of filler words and awkward silences. Lots of: “um…” “so…” “like…” wait…" “you know…”
Lots of colliqualism you dont really see on TV.

(btw I type exactly like how I would speak irl)

But on the other hand, idk if all the Breaking Bad type of “talking like a gangster” thing even is real either cuz I never been in those circles but when i was in K-12, like in highschool, I overhear lots of those “yo” “whatup” “fam” “dude” “bruh” a lot between classmates, and these are the most “gangster” looking kids (I mean as in they are the disruptive ones in class) so maybe the “yo” thing is actually what gang members use, or maybe its to show that they dont use formal speech and use heavy colloqualism to imply that “these people dont have college education”.

So yeah police bodycam footage (theres lots of those from the US due to Freedom of Information Act) captures lots of those IRL moments of awkwardness, even without a stressful factor like being in proximity of a cop, lots of those awkwardness really does happen with average conversations.

-Hi from Philly :D

I think that the question is really, really broad. “Netflix” covers a lot, and “Americans” covers a lot, and “how someone talks” covers a lot.

Movie scripts are going to have more time spent on them than text that someone comes up with on-the-fly. They have carefully-crafted one-liners. They have professional actors, who are often going to be, say, better-looking and more-suave sounding.

On the other hand, relative to English in whatever country you live in, there probably is slang and any number of things local to the US that does show up in Hollywood movies more than in your country.

So I think that any answer pretty much has to be “yes…and no”.

If you can narrow your question down to a very specific, like, oh…“do people actually say X in the US in real life”, you might get a more-meaningful answer.

TVTropes has a whole list of things that people do on phones in film, for example, that typically aren’t reflective of real life. To choose one, people on one end of a phone call repeating what the remote person has said so that the audience can hear it. People don’t do that in real life; it’s a technique to help storytelling in movies.

Or another one of my favorite quirks — I like a lot of military history. Often, you’ll have war movies where very-expert characters, like General or Admiral So-And-So, will basically be explaining big-picture things in very basic terms to each other on some kind of pretext. That’s for the benefit of the audience, so that the characters can basically act as narrators for the audience. That wouldn’t be done by those characters in real life.

But that doesn’t mean that real American culture and mannerisms aren’t present in movies.

for the most part americans talk like the people surrounding them growing up. if they intentionally want to change their speech, they may choose someone on tv to sound like, but generally speaking that’s rare. southerners sound like they’re from the south, no matter how much tv they watch, bostonians sound like they’re from boston, same for new yorkers, minnesotans, cajuns, etc

edit: if you want to hear a fantastic minnesota accent, check out that movie Fargo

The actors definitely play up their charisma and more confident and skinnier than 80% of Americans. Most Americans are polite but not just jumping into conversation spontaneously anymore. Depends on the content, really.

Actually, I’m a linguist from Prussia (in Germany, not Pennsylivania) and coincendentily I have studied this in detail. During my research I have discovered that Hollywood uses a arsinal of “speech drugs” - substances that alter speech! Tablets, injections, all Chemical stuff to modulate the voices of the actors, so that they are more becoming to the audenices. So, for instances Clooney has a voice which is several octaves higher than on the screen, he sounds like a barmaid after inhaling laughing gas. And Signorey Weiner has a raspy Bariton. Tom Cruise has a voice more in line with his pint-sized bodily built. Jennifer Aniston screetsjes like finger nails running over blackboard. Only Adam Sandler has a hallway acceptable voice, but he happens to be a jerk.

In a way. Photographic and video expression have molded they way Americans express themselves over time. People very much tend to express themselves according to the examples given in popular media.

Depends on the film, and I believe the same can be said for a lot of places (just my opinion).

Like, you’re bound to have Hollywood films more representative of life in America, however it will of course have some theatrics added.

There is also the elephant in the room: how bloody massive the US is. I’ve travelled through a bit, stepped foot in 39 States (if I’m honest I travelled around only about 25-28 or so), and it was easy to see a good variation in the way people talk, not just the differences in slang.

In a lot of cases the representation of a character would be based on the influence of a real person, however the amount to which the impression is exaggerated depends on the film or show.

I would not say my friends and family remind me of any film to a great degree, yet there will be some aspects within. However the same can be said about here in the UK.
We all know a bit of a Rodney, etc.

But in my experience I’d say no, I’ve rarely met someone who genuinely behaved fully like a TV or movie character whilst visiting and living there, unless they were trying to make an impression of the characters.

Hope this made sense.