VisitBritain’s New Online Accent Game Challenges Users To Speak Like Proper Brits

The United Kingdom’s national tourism agency, VisitBritain, has just launched a new online game, available on mobile devices, as part of its latest international consumer campaign in the U.S. and Canada, anchored by the slogan ‘Fake (Br)it Till You Make It’.

The promotional campaign spotlights the U.K.’s astounding regional diversity (here, specifically, the linguistic aspects), through which the DMO is able to effectively break down a single well-known destination into an array of unique areas for international visitors to explore and appreciate.

The relatively small geographic area that the U.K. occupies in comparison with the U.S. belies the astonishing amount of cultural and linguistic diversity that distinguishes its various regions. Over the centuries, every area of the country—down to the county- and sometimes even city-specific level—has developed its own distinctive version of the English language.

Encompassing England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, the U.K. is perhaps unique among nations for its incredible number of regional accents, which were also historically influenced by the additional layer of a long-held social caste structure. These varied vernaculars feature not only wide-ranging approaches to pronunciation, but also countless local phrases, idioms and ever-evolving slang expressions that make the speaker’s origins almost instantly identifiable.

The ‘Fake (Br)it Till You Make It’ campaign and accompanying online accent game get consumers playing with the fascinating notion that the U.S., Canada and U.K. all share a common tongue; but, that single language has produced almost innumerable location-specific permutations, ranging from the subtle and nuanced to the blatantly obvious and almost unintelligible.

The new online game uses machine learning to test players as they attempt to reproduce some of the island nation’s regional dialects and rate their levels of success, afterward sharing links to area-specific information to drive visitor bookings. It also features the built-in capability of sharing your results to social media channels, so you can easily invite friends to beat your score using the hashtag #FakeBritChallenge.

“Our priority is to harness the strong recovery and growth we have seen from Canada [and the U.S.], and we are delighted to be running this dedicated and playful campaign, tapping into motivations to travel right now,” Paul Gauger, VisitBritain’s Executive Vice President, The Americas, Australia and New Zealand, said in today’s announcement. “This innovative game puts Britain’s diversity front and centre, using modern technology to engage players, tell the story of our dynamic destinations.”