We can’t even agree on what to call a bread roll [0] never mind how some words should be pronounced [1].
My mother was brought up in Liverpool, but her (Irish immigrant) mother hated the Bootle accent so much that she taught her, and her older sister, to speak something closer to RP.
That washed off, and like her I got bullied at school in North Derbyshire for speaking “too posh”. Yet locals in my new home of London clearly place me as being from the North but can’t place where. To be honest neither can most Northerners. I think I’m broadly “South Pennine”, so a bit of High Peak, a bit of Manchester, the odd spot of Lancashire or even West Yorkshire - reflects where I grew up, went to Uni, lived, and socialised with. My partner has a similar accent despite growing up in a part of Manchester with a distinct accent and dialect of its own.
The point is, it’s complex and it’s changing. And it’s not just the UK. It seems to have sped up in recent years. When I hear Canadian voices from 70 years ago, I can hear Scottish tinges. Likewise the US East coast of the mid-20th century had more West Country in it than today.
It was only a friend’s grandfathers generation that could tell what street someone grew up on from their voice alone, and today we are increasingly homogenised - I wonder what “English” will sound like in 200 or 500 years.
As for American influence, my youngest daughter picked up a lot of that from Youtube at one point, and I once interviewed a girl from Gravesend with such a strong US accent I assumed she'd grown up over there.
https://weather.metoffice.gov.uk/learn-about/weather/seasons...
https://twominenglish.com/autumn-vs-fall/
Now if we start saying "diaper" again instead of "nappy", you can start to worry.
Router (rooter) the thing that routes packets in a newtwork
Router (rowter) a machine tool that cuts grooves, etc., in wood or metal.
isn't English fun !
(For real though we don’t use that word for argument or whatever.)
Most have fallen out of use but e.g. 'laik' is still understood by young people.
"Bedder" is less physical work, less effort, in the mouth than "better".
Isn't it fascinating that people judge accents harshly? After all, if we can understand one another, what's the problem?
The problem is social stratification within a power structure. Here's a related BBC article from earlier this year.
However, as a kid, I had a similar experience in a completely different country when we moved cities. My accent wasn't "posh" or "higher class" in any way, it was just from a different region. Kids would give me a hard time for it. But the exact same would happen in reverse form in the other region.
Guess people just don't like "outsiders".
I grew up in France, from white parents, classical music professionals, catholic practicing. With what I now recognize as a posh french accent, that they consciously learned as a way to climb the social ladder.
I went to the town school where 80% of the students were descendent of North African immigrants, mostly from Algeria.
Most of those kids lived in projects city, and part of their identity is a specific accent differentiating them from the outside of the project city. This accent is not really related to Arabic; it is distinctively different; with what I can only describe as a palpable aggressivity in tone.
I ended up under police protection after a few broken limbs.
This was more than 25y ago. Sometimes I wonder what those kids have become. If they sometimes regret.
As recently as a couple years ago, a white posh accent kid at the same school got bullied and almost suffocated to death with a fire extinguisher. By the next generation of those immigrants.
I am now an immigrant in the Bay Area. Nobody cares about my accent here ;)
The accent is just being used a heuristic of where you're from, which is the actual judgement. Posh = not from round here.
Northerners are famously insular and protective of their communities (I love them for it but I think it can go a bit far sometimes)
When I first lived in Italy, this was mind-blowing for me as an American from the west coast. I went on a bike ride with the local team I had joined and they stopped for espresso in a nearby town, and the guy who ran the place was like "oh, you're from Padova" when he heard them speaking. An identifiable change in the dialect over a distance you could easily cover on a bike was a huge "wow!" moment for me.
I live in london also, but people cant place me. They sometimes guess Irish or German.
no bread is pictured
To me it would be more a roll than a bap or a barm, but they're almost synonyms. The weird one for me was when a mate insisted it was a teacake, and I suggested that would only apply if it had raisins in it. What I was describing, he insisted, was a fruit teacake, and without fruit it became a teacake. This is contrary to what the rest of the country believes outside of North Manchester, but has become a running joke for many years between us.
Your (Yorkshire?) teacakes are almost but not exactly like my buns.
You can imagine the confusion when the children asked for a cookie, a bun, or a biscuit while in the US.
“What the hell is a chip/bacon/sausage/pastie/pie barm!?”
Essex accents had travelled well into Hertfordshire by the 1970s. Cockney has evaporated and the condensate largely landed in Essex and Hertfordshire.
Do people really speak Kentish in most of Kent? Or is it a mix of Modern Estuary, MLE (multicultural London English) and RP (received pronunciation)?
I know the author says that the map will always be wrong, I understand that, but this map is badly out of date.
Yes, ish
For example Bermondsey(a former borough in southwark, london) is a weird mix of kent and cockney, but it is still, just about distinct. if you move more into kent, I sounds get longer. from I to Aye, to Aye-eh
In the 80s-2000s half of central london moved to the suburbs, taking the accent with them.
However the south london accent still exists in younguns, depending on parents of course. If you're second generation, and depending on which school you go to, you might get a hybrid accent. (my daughter got a proper bermondsey accent, but I suspect now she'd get, posher accent.)
but, those accents are well away from these: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5S8JR4eJAXA which sounds more related to broads norfolk when I was growing up. (but 1950s broads was different to 80s)
I think the biggest issue is trying to pin down the hard accent changes vs the gradual.
For example somewhere in Lincolnshire it goes from rural burble to hard yorkshire-eqse stops. I suspect its something to do with the fens.
p-aye an mashhhh, bruv
Not sure if you can still get Jellied Eels in Eltham, which would be a shame if you can’t.
It's easy to forget because the classic RP accents have largely died out, but the way I was brought up to speak (actively! My parents would "correct" my speech patterns) is much more reflective of class than locality. This is the case throughout England at least. Brits take this for granted but it's not the global norm!
In many British cities there is also a major race axis to dialects too. Just like how American English has black and white accents, you could make a better-than-chance guess at a modern Londoner's ethnicity from a recording of their voice. (See Multicultural London English).
England and Britain are not interchangeable, unless you specifically mean that all Brits take it for granted that this is only the case in England or something like that?
Edit: for the downvoters: https://www.babbel.com/en/magazine/difference-between-britai...
Hilarious that you'd read my comment explaining British class and linguistics dynamics and assume I don't know what Britain is lol
“The common country error in that statement is confusing “England” with the entire United Kingdom.
Explanation: • The statement says: “This is the case throughout England at least. Brits take this for granted…” • It singles out England but then generalizes to all Brits (which includes people from Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland—not just England). • This is a common error, especially among non-UK speakers, where England is incorrectly used to refer to the entire UK.”
How different? What Americans call arugula the British call rocket. Because the British word is derived from the French roquette, which is from ruchetta, a word in italian dialects along the French border. But Americans got their word from aruculu in the southern Calabrese dialect, a result of immigration. The Italian word is rucola, from the Latin eruca.
Americans think "Capeesh" is an Italian word because they heard it in The Godfather. But it's not: it's Sicilian, as is much of the film.
English and Scots are sibling languages, c.f. some of the geographically close Scandinavian languages.
If you want a quick guide to languages in Britain, the site has an additional article which the original links to:
https://starkeycomics.com/2019/03/01/every-native-british-an...
One day I was waiting for the train, and there were two men talking: a vicar and his friend - both in their 50s. Clearly from that area. Even though I'd grown up in an area with a similar accent - less than 20 miles away - I could not understand a word they were saying.
Large! The thing that gets me is that, geographically, all of the UK would fit easily into the state of Oregon, but you'd have to be a linguist to describe even one distinctly Oregonian accent, let alone dozens. It's not surprising to me that a very old country would have so many accents, but it's surprising that they would still perpetuate into the present, after mass media, travel, and mass communication seems to have flattened or homogenized so many fine distinctions based on geographic isolation.
My paternal grandparents were honest-to-goodness Ozark hillbillies who spoke Ozark Midlands (also called South Midlands), which is very close to, and sometimes conflated with, Appalachian English.
I'm in the Ozarks now and at least in the region where I live, this dialect seems to be disappearing. I still hear traces of it, but I don't think I've heard anyone really speaking it in years.
That's too bad. I love that dialect--perhaps because it was the language that my grandparents spoke.
If you're curious about it, you could listen to some of Terry Gross' interview with Ralph Stanley. He spoke Appalachian English, but it's indistinguishable to my ear from the language my grandparents spoke.
Here's the interview at NPR:
https://www.npr.org/2016/06/24/483428938/bluegrass-legend-ra...
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What would be cool if one could click on each dialect/region and hear a few words spoken in that dialect.
In my view many of these small regions (that blend into one another) could be combined to give a much more useful map with more sharply distinct accents.
Such a map may be less precise, but far more useful to most.
In Merseyside you’ve also got Wools/Scousers, each with different patter and pronunciation. Not to mention Warrington and its accent further East.
Here's a similar one from Wikipedia that includes Dutch dialects as an example of dialect continuum: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialektkontinuum#/media/Datei:... probably based on this historical map: https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/11kvga1/an_1894_ma...
Actually, you don't. Strong regional accents are pretty rare compared to the UK or Germany
> Depuis plus de deux siècles, les pouvoirs politiques ont combattu les langues régionales
Obviously the Marseille “dialect” is recognisable, but otherwise, travelling throughout France, and even the French-speaking parts of Switzerland, I could understand folk.
The article is about dialects not accents. Even just considering French accents, I find the Marseille one distinctive.
Stronger accents are found outside France: Quebec, Africa...
https://www.wickvoices.co.uk/voices_listen.php?id=0806202309...
Their ads are brilliant.
“The Corbomite Maneuver“
Perhaps it was inspired by a day out to Corby?
Given how close beeer-ming-um is, you'd think they'd be similar.
Or this MLE (Multicultural London English) one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5bqYlsXDdg
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"but I had nothing on bar me jocks"The TV programme "Toxin Town" is set in Corby, about birth defects caused by mishandled environmental waste.
"We wunt be druv" is the Sussex motto: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_wunt_be_druv
It would have been even more interesting to have an interactive map that also has audio files linked to it.
A more accurate map might be ones akin to wildlife population maps, with splodges dotted around the country. Many accents exist in the same place and depend on a huge range of factors like class, immigration statistics, and geographic isolation.
As I said, you still here all this when Parkies speak, but on the Island it is a lot less heard these days.
(Of course reality is more complicated; creoles and pidgins etc )
If people in your town use the same words as the town across the river, but you pronounce your R's and the others do not, I would say you speak the same dialect but with distinct accents.
Maybe the point is moot because any two populations separate enough to develop distinct ways of pronouncing words inevitably also create words of their own.
We have dialects in France, a few are very distinct but I would not call a dialect when someone pronounces a few things differently. I know that this is subjective, but still.
There are out course some mad places where they ("they" means, you know, they) call chocolatine a pain au chocolat (a French private joke, see https://www.legorafi.fr/2013/03/20/toulouse-il-se-fait-abatt... - in French from a leading national newspaper)
I think in France you got rid of the diversity in a lot of ways by having the French Language Academy.
It seems likely that regional languages impact accents in the "primary" language, and even if that's not the mechanism, the cultural attitude of discouraging "different" dialects might have the same damping effect on accents.
Me: "How about that James guy, huh? He's obviously fought his way past disability, what a great guy, an example to all of us."
"What do you mean?"
"Well, he's a professor at Oxford, that's quite some achievement"
"So what?"
"Well, I mean, you know, he's gotten past his handicap. You can kinda hear it on him, right?"
"He's Brummie..."
"Is that like a palsy or something?"
"No, there's nothing wrong with him, he just comes from a certain area near Birmingham"
"Ah. I'm gonna go find a rock to hide under."
A few years later, around when I got married:
"Hey Nacho, where are your in-laws from? Your mom and I tried to talk to them"
"They're from Scotland"
"What language do they speak?"
"English"
"What, really? I tried to talk to your father-in-law, I couldn't understand anything!"
"..."
Source, have lived in said area.
Interesting, but more of a measure of what has been lost in some parts of the country to change.