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The accent and dialect changes every 20 miles or so, so this is obviously a bit vague. We can’t even agree on what to call a bread roll [0] never mind how some
by PaulRobinson 2y ago
The accent and dialect changes every 20 miles or so, so this is obviously a bit vague.
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.
[0] https://www.ourdialects.uk/maps/bread/ https://www.ourdialects.uk/maps/bread/
[1] https://www.ourdialects.uk/maps/class-farce/ https://www.ourdialects.uk/maps/class-farce/
- franticgecko3 2y agoI'm from West Yorkshire, the dialect is slowly fading. My grandfather would speak with a strong accent and with spatterings of Norse words. I notice now that, yes, dialects in the UK are becoming homogenised but there is also some American influence seeping in. The American way of pronouncing a double t as a d "better" => "bedder" is increasingly more prevalent in the UK, it's slightly saddening.
- joeross 2y agoI agree, it’s very sattening
- NikkiA 2y agoThere really isn't one 'west yorkshire' accent, nor one 'north yorkshire' accent, there is much much more variety than that. A leeds resident sounds different from a wakefield or dewsbury resident, and even then there can be variation where some people exhibit less of their locale accent than others, depending on how much they rebelled against sounding 'local' in their teens.
- rwmj 2y agoPronouncing zed as "zee" is particularly annoying (as in "Gen Z").
- hermitcrab 2y agoI find Valley speak, where people say 'like' every third word, infuriating.
- rad_gruchalski 2y ago“Literally”!
- 1659447091 2y agoanytime I hear someone use "zed" for Z(ee) the next thing I hear in my head is "Zed's dead, baby"[0] Pulp Fiction and I just can't help but chuckle [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4E3aAvhUucI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4E3aAvhUucI
- dave333 2y agoI emigrated from the UK to USA in 1980 and my first code review at Bell Labs I spent about 30 mins explaining my code and then asked if there were any final questions and someone hesitantly asked, "What is this variable 'zed' you keep talking about?"
- dave333 2y agoHaving posted the above a few days ago, last night I (originally from the UK) was in the car with my wife (US born and bred) following and reciting map directions on my phone like "0.8 miles left on San Antonio" which I say as UK standard "nought point eight miles left on San Antonio." After a while she asks "what is nought?" Here we just say "point 8 miles" or "zero point eight miles." We've only been married 42 years and are still learning each other's language:-)
- 2y ago
- casenmgreen 2y agoI may be completely wrong, but I think one direction of evolution in pronunciation is the gradual shift to that which takes less physical effort to pronounce. "Bedder" is less physical work, less effort, in the mouth than "better".
- trollbridge 2y agoExact same thing is happening in Australia. I'm guessing it's from watching streaming video, Netflix, TikTok, etc. where American accents predominate, and any non-American accents are flattened enough to be sure it's easy for Americans to understand them.
- d_burfoot 2y agoIt's weird that the mainstream TV execs think audiences want boring American accents. To me, one of the best things about the White Lotus (hit HBO show) is that it highlights a distinct array of accents (including Australian).
- IIsi50MHz 2y agoThanks! Now I'm inclined to watch it. I do love when shows make a point of keeping distinct accents. What with having moved a lot as a bairn, I feel that accents in many places are fading away. And also, I tend to sound like whoever I've been talking most to for the last two hours. It's a bit weird, that…makes people ask why I'm speaking with x accent. (^_^);
- HK-NC 2y agoNorse words?
- mhandley 2y agoBeck, meaning stream (small river), is one I remember from growing up in the north east.
- smh 2y agohttps://www.viking.no/e/england/e-yorkshire_norse.htm https://www.viking.no/e/england/e-yorkshire_norse.htm Most have fallen out of use but e.g. 'laik' is still understood by young people.
- kevin_thibedeau 2y agoIt may alleveiate the epidemic of th-fronting among young men.
- fsckboy 2y agoi fought like you for many years but i fink it's just part of the accent now
- simonh 2y agoWhen I was staying with a friend in Norway once we visited his mother, and to me she sounded like someone with a broad Durham/Newcastle accent (my mother is from there) speaking German. A lot of north east words are germanic, or Scandinavian. My grandfather was a farmer near Durham and pigs were swine, children were bairns. 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.
- thom 2y agoI have no idea what my accent is at this point. I spent enough time in Oxford that I can pass as posh if I need to, moved to a part of Cheshire that had a huge scouse population, then moved to Watford and then Kent and picked up my dad’s dreadful habit of talking vaguely cockney to tradespeople. Now I live in Sheffield and me and my kids have random a mix of long and short As. I also grew up in lower-case parts of the internet and drive myself mad at work switching between that and grown up casing, so it’s not just vocal dialects anymore.
- fnord77 2y ago> the bread pictured here no bread is pictured
- PaulRobinson 2y agoYeah, that seems to have been lost at some point. From memory they used a picture of what Americans might call a soft dinner roll. 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.
- pbhjpbhj 2y agoWhen I asked for a bag of scraps in the chippy tonight the lady asked if I wanted "any breadcakes luv" showing me they were an 'outsider' (from about 30 miles away I reckon). Also, no-one has called me 'duck' in the last week; which just feels wrong.
- ljm 2y agoThe general unawareness of what a barmcake (barm) is outside of Bolton/east lancs, particularly in London, never ceases to amuse me. “What the hell is a chip/bacon/sausage/pastie/pie barm!?”
- deanishe 2y agoTo be fair, it was nearly 50 years before I knew what the "liquor" Cockneys put on their pie and mash is.
- ninalanyon 2y agoMy wife was from Orkney and we spent a few months in the US. So we had US biscuits which are not the same as UK biscuits, US cookies which are not Orcadian cookies, West Country English buns which are definitely not US buns. 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.
- heresie-dabord 2y ago> I got bullied at school in North Derbyshire for speaking “too posh”. 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. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwyjdyj729ro https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwyjdyj729ro
- mr_toad 2y ago> Isn't it fascinating that people judge accents harshly? After all, if we can understand one another, what's the problem? Two populations in close proximity separated by social differences will develop accents and use those accents to differentiate themselves. It's not a bug, it's a feature.
- switch007 2y ago> if we can understand one another, what's the problem? 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)
- Ichthypresbyter 2y ago>Posh = not from round here. Perhaps the best example of that is that, as one of the linked maps [0] says, both British people who rhyme "scone" with "gone" and those who rhyme it with "alone" think that the other pronunciation is the "posh" one. [0]https://starkeycomics.com/2024/05/10/eight-british-and-irish-accent-maps/ https://starkeycomics.com/2024/05/10/eight-british-and-irish...
- heresie-dabord 2y agoWould you say that the usage of "posh" has drifted significantly to the third meaning? https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/posh https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/posh
- vladvasiliu 2y ago
- andai 2y agoIt'll sound like whatever the Amish speak! Apparently their population grows exponentially, while the rest, not so much.
- fecal_henge 2y agoI was born in the peak district but never quite gained the accent. Didnt sound either like a townie or a sheep shagger. I live in london also, but people cant place me. They sometimes guess Irish or German.
- 999900000999 2y agoI'm reminded of Serious Klein, who is a German rapper who explicitly sounds like a native English speaker. Imo he's closet to a West Coast rapper, but even this is up to debate. He could easily be from Maryland, or any other American city. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serious_Klein https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serious_Klein
- davidw 2y ago> dialect changes every 20 miles or so 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.
- hermitcrab 2y agoAn Italian told me that he married a girl from the next valley and was asked by an elderly relative, 'why did you marry a foreigner?'.