Accents and dialects

[Kankurette]

We've been talking about it in the football thread and someone suggested making a separate thread for it, so here you go. It started with this initial post by - who else? - Buzby.

Yes The scouse accent influence speads as far down as Chester and Wrexham and maybe as far as Rhyl along the coast. At one time, Liverpool used to be jokingly called the 'capital of North Wales', as at weekends people from there used to come to Liverpool to to go out (my dad's best man was a Welsh miner from Point Of Ayr who met his future wife, my mum's best friend, on a saturday night out in Liverpool). Thursdays in Liverpool used to be known as 'Welsh Day', as there would be an influx of visitors from North Wales coming to do their shopping (the nearest alternative would have been Chester, which historically was not exactly welcoming to the Welsh) and visit their relatives.

In the late 19th/early 20th century there was a lot of economic migration from Wales to Liverpool - for instance, the area of Dingle where Ringo Starr came from was known as the 'Welsh Streets', as it had been built by Welsh migrants and the roads were all named after people and places from North Wales.

After WW2 the work-related migration went in the opposite direction, with people moving from the Liverpool and Manchester areas to Runcorn, Ellesmere Port, Chester, Wrexham and Deeside, and the North Wales coast became a common holiday and retirement destination for people from Merseyside and Greater Manchester.

Me:

I think Scandis tend to pick up accents pretty easily - maybe it's cos their language is similar to ours, same family. As well as Molby you've also got Tommy Myhre and Tommy Gravesen, and Peter Schmeichel and Ole Gunnar Solskjær with their quasi-Manc accents. For non-Scandi examples there's Roberto Martinez and his weird Spanish/Scouse/Lancastrian hybrid accent, and Vincent Kompany, the Belgian Manc.

As I said in the football thread, I did A-Level English Language and one of the things I found really interesting was accents. We had to do a presentation on an accent of our choice and one girl, a Newcastle fan who had Geordie relatives, did the Geordie accent. I'd taped a load of Space interviews and all four of them have distinctive accents, so I did the Scouse accent. They're all from the same city or thereabouts (Jamie Murphy is from Huyton, Tommy Scott is from Cantrill Farm, Franny Griffiths is from Everton/Vauxhall/Breck Road, not sure of the exact area, and I don't know about Andy Parle) and yet they sound different.

Also, question for autistic people on here - do any of you pick up accents without realising it? I sound a bit Scouse when I'm in Liverpool and I don't even realise I'm doing it, and apparently it's an autistic thing, though I know non-autistic people do it sometimes as well.

Some different accents on display at the meet. Madhair's newsreader voice, Drummersaredeaf's Stoke accent, my and Dr Greggles' hybrid accents (DG lives in Cambridge but I think you said you lived in Mansfield?), and so on. Couple of Yorkshiremen there as well.

[buttgammon]

Wrexham accents are fascinating - just thinking about my own family, you can easily hear the change over generations. My grandmother sounds overtly Welsh, like most of her generation, but my mother's generation have more of an intermediate accent and people my age tend to have much more of the Scouse influence (I'm an exception and people who know the area tend to think I sound like I'm from Shropshire).

[Shaxberd]

Picking up accents seems quite a widespread thing - Joey Barton going all Allo Allo when he started playing for Marseille comes to mind, and at the meet I mentioned my old mate who went to Montreal for a year and came back with a bizarre French Canadian accent.

I don't seem to have it myself. I lived in Australia for a couple of years and it didn't shift, although I did start saying 'yeah nah' and ending a lot of statements with 'eh' (not just a Canadian thing, Aussies and Kiwis do it a lot).

I don't even have much of a local accent, although given I'm from Nottingham, that's not really a loss. I like the way the old blokes speak but on most people it just sounds droning and nasal. "Ahm goin oop to Strelleh to see my nanaaaar", we're lucky this place isn't as well known as Birmingham or we'd be a laughing stock.

[The Culture Bunker]

I know I have a fairly distinctive accent, but only if you're from the same area as me. Mostly everyone just thinks I'm a Geordie - unless they're from the North East themselves. But if I sound like anywhere from that region, it's the Boro.

However, there's been quite a few times I've been out in Manchester, London or Sheffield, and a stranger has said "are you from Whitehaven?" Not even West Cumbria, specifically the town, as there's minor differences between how we speak and someone from Workington or Maryport would.

I have learned to tone it down a lot since I left home, in order to be understood, but when my parents visit tomorrow I'll click right back into the old accent in an instant. And in nearly 20 years living in Manchester, I've avoided winding up speaking like a Gallagher brother, thankfully.

[touchingcloth]

I love accents, and I'm pretty good at copying them though I don't think I do it unconsciously when I find myself in a group of people with a particular accent.

I've lived in the Midlands and North West and had lots of British Asian friends whose parents or grandparents were immigrants. I find it fascinating that they share an accent in the North and Midlands that is neither British nor Asian, but its own thing with its own regional variations. "Rubber dinghy rapids" is very much Yorkshire Asian, but it shares elements with how my Asian friends in Greater Manchester and Birmingham speak.

[Stoneage Dinosaurs]

Also, question for autistic people on here - do any of you pick up accents without realising it? I sound a bit Scouse when I'm in Liverpool and I don't even realise I'm doing it, and apparently it's an autistic thing, though I know non-autistic people do it sometimes as well.

Dunno if it's a spectrummy thing but as someone on it I've definitely had people tell me I do this. Went to uni in Leicester I came back and my parents told me I'd started talking with a bit of the weird mongrel accent that is the Leicester one, although it may be just the result of being a student and hanging out with a mishmash of differently accented people.

My natural accent is a generic southern middle class one. I usually don't realise how posh it sounds unless I hear myself back on a recording or video, or for example if I have to raise it (like at the Manchester meet when trying to be heard over the footy crowd). It's rather mortifying

Generally dialects are a big thing I pick up too, I've definitely started saying 'do one' and using 'proper' as an adverb as a result of cab

[Mr_Simnock]

The old accent in the area I grew up in has almost disappeared, old people in the 1980's used to sound far more like Hannah Hawkswell than your traditional strong Lancashire accent. Some people at grammar school (the ones with cut glass english accents due to having parents who would never allow them to mix with common local muck) used to ask me if I had ever lived in Scotland, happened a few times when I had a short holiday in Paris too, no idea why they thought that. Last time I heard it was on a walk a few years ago in the village pf Pendleton, an old woman with her dog was talking to it and it made me feel very nostalgic for a while.

Accents are always constantly changing though, best not to get too attached to them identity wise.

[Brundle-Fly]

I'm fascinated by The Speaker in hot water, Lindsay Hoyle's Lancastrian vowel sounds. He sounds like Julie Hesmondhalgh with a bad cold.

[shoulders]

Rhotastic.

He sounds like Stephen Fry doing a particularly crass impression of a Lancastrian.

[prelektric]

My accent is all over the place, Grew up in East Lancashire, lived in South Manchester for 10 years, then for the last 17 years I've lived on Tyneside. So my accent tends to modulate across all three of those, sometimes all at once, depending on the company I'm in. I'm one of those that tends to hoover up accents I've been exposed to for a length of time and replicate them subconsciously anyway. It's a fascinating area of discussion though.

[touchingcloth]

Is there anything worse than a Cockney accent? Walking round London and already stressed out by the tubes, then out of a doorway you just hear someone bleating on about lovely pucker jubblies dahn the whistle and mug.

[Shaxberd]

Not to sound like a Daily Mail reader but you don't hear full on Cockney accents that much any more compared to the milder generic London one, I find them pleasantly archaic.

[buzby]

I'm fascinated by The Speaker in hot water, Lindsay Hoyle's Lancastrian vowel sounds. He sounds like Julie Hesmondhalgh with a bad cold.

It's distinctively Central Lanacashire - I work in Chorley, and the locals all sound like him (i.e. wooly). I met Mr Hoyle when as the local MP (he comes from Adlington) he came to reopen our office after it had been refurbished. Julie Hesmondhalgh is from Accrington which is just down the M65.

[touchingcloth]

I'm fascinated by The Speaker in hot water, Lindsay Hoyle's Lancastrian vowel sounds. He sounds like Julie Hesmondhalgh with a bad cold.

Those Bolton/Bury accents are really hard to imitate, especially the vowels followed by an L. It's a bit like the Canadian vowel in "about", where saying "aboot" gets in the direction of how a native speaker pronounces it, but not really. Try saying "Burnley" in the accent of someone from Burnely, for example, and it's really fucking difficult.

[Senior Baiano]

"Hello there, I am Rhodes Boyson"

Good evening. My name is Rhodes Boyson"

"We are the Rhodes Boysons. And this is ow-er ho-ur."

[Mr_Simnock]

Those Bolton/Bury accents are really hard to imitate, especially the vowels followed by an L. It's a bit like the Canadian vowel in "about", where saying "aboot" gets in the direction of how a native speaker pronounces it, but not really. Try saying "Burnley" in the accent of someone from Burnely, for example, and it's really fucking difficult.

Burn-leh

[prelektric]

Those Bolton/Bury accents are really hard to imitate, especially the vowels followed by an L. It's a bit like the Canadian vowel in "about", where saying "aboot" gets in the direction of how a native speaker pronounces it, but not really. Try saying "Burnley" in the accent of someone from Burnely, for example, and it's really fucking difficult.

You're sort of close with the Canadian flattened vowels in "about".

People from Bury, of a certain generation (a stones throw away from where I grew up, between Bury and Rochdale) would pronounce it more like "Burr-eh", rather than "Berry". With the slums clearances in Manchester, and the overspill estates that housed the displaced people that popped up in Bury, Heywood and Rochdale in the late 60s and 70s, it led to a softening of that East Lancs accent in certain areas, becoming a bit more Manc.

[Brundle-Fly]

Those Bolton/Bury accents are really hard to imitate, especially the vowels followed by an L. It's a bit like the Canadian vowel in "about", where saying "aboot" gets in the direction of how a native speaker pronounces it, but not really. Try saying "Burnley" in the accent of someone from Burnely, for example, and it's really fucking difficult.

Reminds of when Councillor Alf Roberts in Coronation Street used to announce himself as the 'Myrrh' of Weatherfield.

[touchingcloth]

You're sort of close with the Canadian flattened vowels in "about".

When a native Canadian says about, the vowel sound is halfway between the British pronunciation of the the vowels in "about" and "boot", I think, in a way that I can hear but not replicate. Saying "aboot" is a bit like those people who "imitate" a Yorkshire accent by not changing their own accent before saying "by 'ecky thump as like. Colliery."

Burn-leh

Closer in some ways to Born-leh.

[touchingcloth]

I do love those accents though. There's something pleasingly round to them, like the speaker has a mouthful of grapes.

[Mr_Simnock]

Closer in some ways to Born-leh.

my mum's from burnley, I'm just putting it down as she says it

[studpuppet]

Is there anything worse than a Cockney accent? Walking round London and already stressed out by the tubes, then out of a doorway you just hear someone bleating on about lovely pucker jubblies dahn the whistle and mug.

Yes, there is. The NE London/Essex borders accent. I can imagine accents from opposite ends of a large dialect continuum being grating to the ear or difficult to understand, but I'm not sure there's another accent that sounds so awful to people from, say ten miles away.

Are there others? Does Scouse sound terrible to Lancastrians or vice versa?

[studpuppet]

"Centres of Excellence" and "Standards of Accountability"

[Brundle-Fly]

Not to sound like a Daily Mail reader but you don't hear full on Cockney accents that much any more compared to the milder generic London one, I find them pleasantly archaic.

I lived all over London since the mid-eighties and have rarely heard proper Cockney accents or a 'Landahan' accent. Well, certainly not in the last thirty years.  My Nan was a genuine Cockney and I loved her accent.

You're more likely to hear the cliched accent in Essex, Kent etc

[touchingcloth]

Yes, there is. The NE London/Essex borders accent. I can imagine accents from opposite ends of a large dialect continuum being grating to the ear or difficult to understand, but I'm not sure there's another accent that sounds so awful to people from, say ten miles away.

On the latest Adam Buxton podcast, Fred Armisen gave a tour through the various boroughs and corners of New York City in accent form, and talked about how they'll vary within a five minute walk if your ear is enough in tune.

Teessiders will bristle at being called Geordies, and people from the wider Merseyside region - St Helens, Wirral - don't always enjoy being called Scousers.

I'm joking about Cockneys really, and there isn't an accent from the British Isles I don't enjoy, with the exception of when an advertising executive has decided that the best way to hawk their wares is with a Yorkshire accent reading out some dogshit poetry.

[Mr_Simnock]

"Centres of Excellence" and "Standards of Accountability"

carefull now

[Kankurette]

I've been mistaken for Brummie and I don't know why. I don't sound Brummie.

[tookish]

My parents sound properly Gloucestershire to me now, even though their accents were never as strong as my grandparents'. Oo arr, ciderrrr, etc. The Hot Fuzz accent.

I notice it in particular when my mum gets heated.

I was teased at school for sounding like a farmer, even though I just sounded normal to me. Anyway, with a lot of effort put in I sound generically RP posh-ish southern I think, though I've not completely lost the Gloucester, and I've started picking up a couple of Manc vowels here and there.

[tookish]

On the latest Adam Buxton podcast, with the exception of when an advertising executive has decided that the best way to hawk their wares is with a Yorkshire accent reading out some dogshit poetry.

When times are tough
And life gets rough
Tetley's the best you can get
Ee, that's a proper cuppa, pet!

[touchingcloth]

I've been mistaken for Brummie and I don't know why. I don't sound Brummie.

Brummie might be the most misunderstood and conflated accent in the country.

When I moved to the North West after a few years in the Midlands, I had a very mild Brummie accent - things like "coin" being two syllables got the absolute piss ripped out of me (28 years old oi was).

People I know from when I first moved there will still regale me with hilarious stories about how I would say "you'm goys alroight?", but I've never said you'm, yam, or yowm, because I've never lived in the fucking Black Country.