Her skills would be very much in demand in a scenario where English continues to become a global language. Not to say that is either possible or preferable. How's her Cantonese?
In my opinion, her agility shifting between accents is even more impressive than the mastery of any one of them in particular. It's a two-minute video, but make sure you don't bail out early. Her "transatlantic" voice at the end is worth the price of admission (free!) all on its own. I've been watching classic films lately and her take on the generic movie star is nigh on perfect.
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Damn, wish I had a talent like that. Every time I got a parking ticket I could just fake another accent and pretend that I don'ta, uh, speaka the English well 'nuff to understand the signs.
As for English as the global language-- well, not gonna happen. I worked a brief stint in Hong Kong last year and even there, I had to go porting around a Cantonese phrasebook, and the business-suit types were all using Mandarin, which is I guess lingua-franca-izing the whole region. Compared to 5 years ago-- damn, totally different world all of a sudden.
And in Europe-- yeepers, anywhere south of the Alps, English might as well be Martian, nobody speaks a word of it anymore, at least not to any intelligible level. Even in Prague, I either had to tote a Czech phrasebook or communicate with the locals in our mutually broken German, which I guess is more or less becoming at least N/Eastern Europe's lingua franca, Germany heading up the EU and all. Heh, even here in the good ol' USA, they use Spanish as much as English out in west Arizona, they never did lose that old Mexican connection I guess.
I imagine that the crumbling dollar, recession and generalized US/UK international foul-ups these days aren't exactly helping matters, either. Maybe a good time to learn Mandarin or at least improve German, which I guess holds title now as official egghead language of the world.
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