I know right? Lot of squinnies on here bemoaning the accuracy but I’ve spent my whole life being told my dialect is just half cockney, half bristonian by the rest of the country. I feel so seen.
I don't live there anymore but I was at Victorious festival a few years ago watching an American band (can't remember which). The front man told a story of when they recorded their first album in Portsmouth. Someone in the crowd lifted up their pint and shouted "Yawrigh' mush!". And the screen ads said "Don't be a din - put it in the bin". Those words feel like they're from some dreamworld until you hear them again in person.
Those words are used, but a lot of people on the island use a massively watered down version of the dialect now. When I was a kid we said "baw" for "ball" "vis,va' 'n fing" for "this, that and thing" and "dinny/din/dinlo" (simpleton/idiot), "mush/musty" (a person, you may know, but don't want to name - a bit like "mate"), "kark it" (died), "lairy" (as in cheeky, obnoxious, pushy - hard to describe.), "lakes" (originally "cool" but started to be ironic), "wew X" as an emphasis ("wew" being "well", so "wew smar'" (really "smart", as in really good), "wew lairy" (really "pushy/cheeky/whatever it means"). "Giving i' aw va'" ("Giving it all that", being lairy/trying it on.) "kushty" (great/good). And much more. I can't write down everthing unfortunately.
As I said, you still here all this when Parkies speak, but on the Island it is a lot less heard these days.
Thanks for the info! Kark it, musty and lakes I haven't come across. As kids we used lairy to mean aggressive or confrontational. Mush, dinlo/din/dinny and squinny are I think truly Pompey, tho it hasn't always been that way. Mush and dinlo are actually Romani words; you sometimes hear them in other areas with regular traveller populations. There's an old episode of Steptoe and Son where the son uses mush, so I think it was common in inner London at one time. Squinny I don't think is Romani. I used to think it was a Pompey oddity but I recently found out that someone from near Birmingham used it growing up.
I'd say a lot of the letter changes (v/f for th, w for l, dropping t's) are fairly standard estuary accent, e.g. the kind of accent Danny Dyer has.
Yeah - but they were there when I was a kid in the 70's and 80's so predates the notion of Estuary English. They come more from the fact Portsmouth had a big influx of dock workers from East end of London at one point. The vowels are completely different. Where london would take "town" and make it "taahn" (like a long ah sound) we say "teihn" (to rhyme with plane, but not pure, more breathy, hence my h) - it's not a pure. I would "oy" like in "boy". The vowels are very Hampshire.
There are two sorts of Essex, the countryside version that straddles south Suffolk and the London imported one that has become the stereotype, that appears to be estuary on the map. Both have massive crossover depending whether you're in town or village. A rather difficult mapping task!
Yeh it’s strange it includes cockney so prominently. It isn’t really very present unless you spend time around the various gentlemen frequenting sports pubs and pie and mash shops in east London, or if you take a black cab very often. I’d say the “roadman” dialect, mixing cockney and Jamaican patois, plus grime vibes, is FAR more common. I’ll hear it everyday wandering around South and east London. I guess it’s a London dialect so it’s in that umbrella,… but how come cockney gets such a fat slab of land?
You used to be able to get pie, mash and liquor round me in the Bexley area until about 10 years ago, but the ones I knew have closed now and I don’t know where the nearest place is.
Not sure if you can still get Jellied Eels in Eltham, which would be a shame if you can’t.
> Do people really speak Kentish in most of Kent? Or is it a mix of Modern Estuary,
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.
"RP", by the definition it was originally given, doesn't really exist any more in anyone under 70 or so. What you may now think of as "RP" is usually called Standard Southern British, or SSB.
You just need to listen to the various generations of the royal family to see that RP is effectively dead.
I read somewhere that accents “move” up the social hierarchy over time. Aspects of speech which are widely working class will eventually become traits of the upper class - while meanwhile the working cm lass have moved on.
I had the same feeling. I've lived in Sussex for most of my life and I can't say I've heard a Sussex accent for a long time. Maybe I'm on the wrong side of an urban/rural split?
According to this I am from one of the smallest Dialect regions (Coventry)- I really wonder why it could be a dialectical enclave; I am aware that the Forest of Arden divided Coventry from Birmingham and the Black Country making them distinct, but I had no idea that it was such an isolated dialect.
Too specific for this map but there's also an intriguing case of town in England called Corby, where people speak mainly with a Scottish accent https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-28225325. Pretty fascinating.
Thanks. I am Scottish originally and understand a lot of Scots. I guess I said 'virtually' since Gaelic is probably the only 'official' other language in Scotland but I agree Scots and Doric should be recognised as such.
I rented a room for a few months, from an elderly couple in the countryside outside Aberdeen. It took a solid week before I could do more than nod politely at whatever the heck they were on about.
This is good but it’s not diverse enough for North West England. In ‘Wigan’ (as shown on the map) you’ve got the Oldham/Bolton accents (book - bewk; first - fussed) which are similar but as distinct as Brummie/Black Country.
In Merseyside you’ve also got Wools/Scousers, each with different patter and pronunciation. Not to mention Warrington and its accent further East.
Is that true? I think a dialect needs to have at least some of its own words.
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.
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.
I'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.
I 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?"
I used to work for a networking start-up and when we were in the US trying - without success - to sell the company we practised over and over saying "roWter" for "router" (English pronunciation like "rooter").
As a Canadian I read that as "rOATer" for a moment, because the word row rhyming with ow is quite uncommon here -- the row I know is in a boating or a data context.
Having 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:-)
Some time ago a few people from the UK kept calling/referring to someone as a nonce. It took me awhile to say something, but I finally asked because I simply couldn't understand or wrap my head around why they kept referring to this person as a single use random number (mostly for authentication in my case). It was so confusing.
There was a cartoon in Private Eye a couple of weeks ago that suggested the reason why Millenials and Gen Z could never be reconciled is that they can't agree whether it's pronounced "Generation Zed", or "Generation Zee", as the younger generation themselves would call it.
I 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".
This is a bit of a myth. A glottal stop is a full consonant sound which takes effort to produce. It's not really any 'easier' to produce than an alveolar stop in any objective sense.
Exact 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.
It'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).
Thanks! 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. (^_^);
When 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.
There 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.
I 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.
Yeah, 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.
My 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.
When 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.
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.
I'm not familiar with the Brits so can't comment on the specifics there.
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.
In the UK people from Liverpool and Manchester are rivals until they meet someone from London when it becomes a North Vs South thing. That all changes again when they meet someone from Glasgow when it becomes England Vs Scotland and yet again when the British meet someone French. There is always a more foreign foe.
The concept of the everchanging {in-group vs. out-group} is especially present in Japanese culture. It strongly affects wordchoice, too. Within a family, father might be chichi or, in more formal families, otousan, but it speaking of fathers to someone outside your family, you might refer to your father as chichi, and any other father as otousan.
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 ;)
> school where 80% of the students were descendent of North African immigrants, mostly from Algeria.
Ah, the Colonial power structure. A gift that keeps on giving. But tribalism runs deep too.
> in the Bay Area. Nobody cares about my accent here
For the most part in the modern US, money=caste. Tribalism still runs deep (see: US politics) but how people pronounce isn't such a factor as it can be in the EU and in the UK.
As you are probably aware, French in Canada is also a many-caste system.
> 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.
I'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.
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.
The thing is, this sort of thing can never be represented with borders.
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.
I think something important to explain about British English dialects is the class factor.
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).
> This is the case throughout England at least. Brits take this for granted but it's not the global norm!
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?
There was no error there, maybe he doesn't know if class is a major factor in Scotland or Ireland? That could make sense since England as the center of power that class would be more of a factor there for dialects, but I am not sure.
The great thing about LLMs is we don’t have to argue about language any more, a machine can do it for us. Here is is explained:
“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.”
I didn't get the impression that bjackman was confusing England with the UK. They are two distinct statements, one applying to England and the other to the UK. Appeal to LLM isn't going to convince me otherwise!
Yes exactly in fact I was specifically thinking of my belief that class is signalled less strongly in many Scottish dialects. But the general concept of class being closely related to accent is something that people will instinctively understand throughout the whole of Britain (and probably Ireland too), even if it's not that big an effect in their own local dialect.
Glad you find it hilarious, but if you think that the rest of the UK spends great amounts of time considering England I would encourage you to visit some of these places.
>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).
The whole thing about MLE is that it's multicultural, i.e. not stratified along ethnic or racial lines. I do not think I would be able to judge the ethnicity of a Londoner aged under (say) 30 in this way.
A somewhat public thank you to Donald Omand from Aberdeen University for all the work he did in documenting the dialect of Caithness - that purple-ish bit at the far top right of the Scottish mainland.
Years ago, I went to live and work in Strasbourg. My French was… rudimentary, school-level, but after a few weeks I was picking up the rhythm and following along. Then the grand chef came up from Paris. During the night out entertaining him, I asked him to slow down a bit as I was struggling with his accent. He completely lost it, insulting the locals as peasants, and claiming the accent was theirs not his. Kind of put a damper on the evening.
Obviously the Marseille “dialect” is recognisable, but otherwise, travelling throughout France, and even the French-speaking parts of Switzerland, I could understand folk.
I had a really interesting situation a couple of decades ago when I was studying. I grew up in a rural part of the UK in the South West. The nearest train station was just over the county border, around 20 miles away.
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.
Which is the accent where 80% of consonants and 1/3 of vowels are pronounced like a hard "ff"? I associate it with Manks, but I'm just a Yank so what do I really know.
The names of dialects aren't super useful to people who aren't from the UK. Also, dialects often are continua, so drawing borders without any sort of hierarchy to indicate closeness is quite pointless.
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.
182 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 212 ms ] thread“The Corbomite Maneuver“
Perhaps it was inspired by a day out to Corby?
Their ads are brilliant.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1lcuZoYiuVs
As I said, you still here all this when Parkies speak, but on the Island it is a lot less heard these days.
I'd say a lot of the letter changes (v/f for th, w for l, dropping t's) are fairly standard estuary accent, e.g. the kind of accent Danny Dyer has.
"We wunt be druv" is the Sussex motto: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_wunt_be_druv
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.
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.
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.
I read somewhere that accents “move” up the social hierarchy over time. Aspects of speech which are widely working class will eventually become traits of the upper class - while meanwhile the working cm lass have moved on.
Given how close beeer-ming-um is, you'd think they'd be similar.
The TV programme "Toxin Town" is set in Corby, about birth defects caused by mishandled environmental waste.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ckg7pvl59wxo
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doric_dialect_%28Scotland%29
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...
In Merseyside you’ve also got Wools/Scousers, each with different patter and pronunciation. Not to mention Warrington and its accent further East.
(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 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/
[1] https://www.ourdialects.uk/maps/class-farce/
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4E3aAvhUucI
isn't English fun !
(For real though we don’t use that word for argument or whatever.)
Router (rooter) the thing that routes packets in a newtwork
Router (rowter) a machine tool that cuts grooves, etc., in wood or metal.
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.
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/37256/police-in-...
It's not like they didn't already have dozens of slang terms for the police.
"Bedder" is less physical work, less effort, in the mouth than "better".
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. (^_^);
Most have fallen out of use but e.g. 'laik' is still understood by young people.
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.
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.
“What the hell is a chip/bacon/sausage/pastie/pie barm!?”
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.
Also, no-one has called me 'duck' in the last week; which just feels wrong.
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
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)
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...
https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/posh
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 ;)
Ah, the Colonial power structure. A gift that keeps on giving. But tribalism runs deep too.
> in the Bay Area. Nobody cares about my accent here
For the most part in the modern US, money=caste. Tribalism still runs deep (see: US politics) but how people pronounce isn't such a factor as it can be in the EU and in the UK.
As you are probably aware, French in Canada is also a many-caste system.
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.
I live in london also, but people cant place me. They sometimes guess Irish or German.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serious_Klein
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.
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.
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...
“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.”
Hilarious that you'd read my comment explaining British class and linguistics dynamics and assume I don't know what Britain is lol
The whole thing about MLE is that it's multicultural, i.e. not stratified along ethnic or racial lines. I do not think I would be able to judge the ethnicity of a Londoner aged under (say) 30 in this way.
https://www.wickvoices.co.uk/voices_listen.php?id=0806202309...
It would have been even more interesting to have an interactive map that also has audio files linked to it.
Actually, you don't. Strong regional accents are pretty rare compared to the UK or Germany
The article is about dialects not accents. Even just considering French accents, I find the Marseille one distinctive.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picard_language
Stronger accents are found outside France: Quebec, Africa...
> Depuis plus de deux siècles, les pouvoirs politiques ont combattu les langues régionales
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_France
Obviously the Marseille “dialect” is recognisable, but otherwise, travelling throughout France, and even the French-speaking parts of Switzerland, I could understand folk.
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.
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.
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.