According to Wikipedia, Bristol is the 10th largest city in the UK by population. I've heard it is the accent of Somerset that is particularly likely to bring up images of forks and manure in the minds of listeners from elsewhere.
RE: Afternoon Walk + Shots of The River Porvoo
You are viewing a single comment's thread from:
Afternoon Walk + Shots of The River Porvoo
That's interesting. When I was growing up there it was the 5th largest city so I hedged my bets with 5th or 6th? Yep. most people would class somerset, Bristol, Devon and Cornwall as all being forks and manure accents, hence West Country.
To those of us from those parts, they are all different, of course.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
This video by Andrew Jack, an accent coach is interesting. He briefly demonstrates the accents of Dorset, Somerset, Devon and Cornwall among many others.
I liked Lancashire.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
By the way, I found the clip of two old men speaking in an old East Anglian dialect. It should be as far from your own dialect as can be inside the borders of England. I must say I had difficulty understanding what they were saying.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
I find it hard to understand too! It's not a part of the country I've spent much time in,
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
It's got a, eh, clucking quality to it that sounds somewhat American. It's hard to describe.
England is the birthplace of the English language. Its population is over 50 million today so it's a large community of speakers, and has always been, and the oldest. The greatest variation of anything tends to be where that thing first developed. It don't think language is an exception. If you look at Australian English, for example, there is much less internal variation it it than in English spoken in the British Isles. I believe that some of even today's linguistic variations in the British former colonies have their roots in the British Isles depending on who the original settlers were, where they came from and when.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
Yes. There's certainly a huge variety in the dialects spoken here. There are quite a few I struggle to understand when they are strong.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit
Australian English is a good example of what I mean by how who the first British settlers were may have influenced the entire dialect for centuries to come. In England, the lower socio-economic stratum tends pronounce vowels more broadly than the upper strata. Think Cockney vs. Received Pronunciation. Who were the first British settlers to Australia in the early 19th century? Deported people of mostly English lower class, administrators and soldiers. Today, all Australians pronounce vowels in a "broad" manner that may have evolved from how the 19th century (mostly Southern English) lower classes pronounced them. Cockney and Australian English of the present time are not the same but they share broad vowel pronunciation as a general feature.
Another example is the rhotic r of nearly every variant of American English. A rhotic r of one kind or another was a general feature of English in all of England and not just West Country two or more centuries back.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit