Accents

Broad glaswegian and liverpool accent grates on my nerves, especially when the scouse jump around when speaking

I don’t mind any accent and I’m not to bad understanding them . I’ve from the Wirral across the Mersey from Liverpool . People say I have a scouse accent , I say well if you heard actual scouser you’d realise the difference . Mines probably more Birkenhead aka Paul O’Grady . We moved to Yorkshire when our eldest was small the last 3 out of 5 being born at Airedale Hospital and raised first in Ilkley then Keighley . They had very broad accents and when we moved back after 10 years there they used to get teased a lot . They lost their accents within a year . My family are a mix of Merseyside , Welsh , Scouse , Yorkshire and Slovakian .

I love all accents. It makes us individuals and more interesting but I have tremendous problems understanding Glaswegian and Geordie. More than that really - I don’t understand above one word in ten!

I, of course, have no accent - as long as I stay in Norfolk!

Paddyann - I'm from the north of Scotland and we were always told in school we had the purest accent. I have been mistaken for being Irish especially when abroad. I think it is because it is a "soft" accent.

Terribull I love some French accents too.
I could listen to Michel Barnier for hours even without listening to what he is actually saying!

JohnD, When I first moved to Norfolk I got into conversation with my neighbours father.
I did the same. Lots of smiling and nodding.
Hoped I wasn’t committing myself to anything!
I’ve got my ear in now.

People grow up speaking RP in the same ways that those in Yorkshire grow up speaking whatever their local accent is.

I speak RP because that is what my parents and relations spoke, although my grandfather, never quite lost his irish brogue, t''s were always pronounced more like 'th'.

One of the drivers I came across, came from South Dumfrieshire and the only words i could workout were the many swear words. I just kept nodding and sayong 'yes' and 'no' when he was speaking. He once caused an accident near Lesmahagow, and got away scot free, and i'm sure it was because the policeman couldn't understand his accent.

RP is not 'false'. What a ridiculous thing to say. It emanated from the accents of the Oxford/London/Cambridge triangle in the 19th Century. It's what many of the people I grew up with spoke, along with a Kentish accent, although that was more common away from the coast.

DH and I need subtitles for Rab C Nesbitt. We get BBC Cumbria and NE local news and sometimes cannot understand people who are being interviewed.

Once when I rang Yorkshire Water, based in Huddersfield, the person who answered the phone had a strong Yorkshire accent which I found difficult - in spite of always having lived in Yorkshire.

OF course they say the purest form of English is spoken in the north of Scotland ..not RP though thats false

This story will have you all aghast. In a uni-prep class here in America we were told that we were to read Pygmalion in class. One boy in class named Nigel had a British mum. The teacher had him play the lead and pick which of us girls could do the best accent for the lady part. My favorite movie was My Fair Lady which was made from that play, so I was one who auditioned. Nigel chose me. We had a grand time reading it in class. Now I can imagine all of you getting the biggest laugh just imagining how we sounded.

If I like the person I like the accent! I don’t think there is any accent I really don’t like. Oh, except the actress who does a biscuit advert, don’t know what accent it is though so it’s probably just her voice that grates.
I have lived all over the UK and have no idea what my accent is.

Winifred, my husband comes from the potteries.his family think he speaks posh now.
He’s been associating with me for too long!

Went to grammar school in the Potteries in the 50s- we had elecution lessons. How now brown cow! Emphasis put on getting rid of our local accent.

Using RP or “well spoken” ( how dated that is!) is actually an accent itself. There is no such thing as no accents!
I love the variety of expression, intonation and idiom used in by people from every region in our country.

English folk think I'm Scots and Scots think I am English. My dad was in the Navy and I travelled all over Scotland and England with him as well as to Malta. I think I have a 'service' accent with Scottish overtones after 30 years back in Scotland.....but some people here still insist I am English I love the Doric which my North East grandma spoke and she left me a wonderful legacy of words and expressions. I hope to write a book about them one day.

I don’t think I have any accent but some people would say I was posh!
I grew up all over the place, parents from Lancashire so I pronounce some words like a Lancashire Lass. However I say bath and path the ‘posh’ way.
As a family we are all a little different as we settled in different parts of the country. I have nieces and nephews who speak very eloquently but with varying accents.
I must admit it it’s that I do warm to anyone with a Lancashire accent especially those from the Rossendale valley.
That hasn’t answered the question though.
I don’t think that is any accent that I don’t like it but some speakers don’t make it easy to understand them.

Grandma70s Received Pronunciation certainly started out as a regional accent - that of the Home Counties. Since for centuries the government and the two oldest universities were based there, anybody who aspired to power and influence in England, would have been likely to settle in the area, at least temporarily if not permanently, and the feudal system and later the class system, would ensure that the ruling class would form their own little enclave within the Home Counties. Even if they could still use their original accent perfectly well, they gradually developed their own accent, brought together by a shared social background. Probably any small local community does this, but because RP was the language of power, education policy has always been to require others to learn it and use it in school so as to be able to communicate with officialdom, and to get on in society, advance in their careers etc. And RP was the natural choice for the BBC, since the intention was that everyone in Britain would be able to understand it. The trouble with RP now is that it is so indelibly associated with class that even if it is simply the accent you grew up with people will still think you’re posh, and not necessarily in a good way. I think the real difficulty with discussing accents is to separate out our response to them in terms of how they sound from the assumptions and associations attached to them, such as that some accents are lazy, or that people overheard speaking with a different regional accent are uneducated, stupid, or, indeed posh. In my first job, in a library, I was handed the phone to answer a query from a reader who’d asked to speak to ‘the lady with the posh voice’. My colleague had instantly assumed that the caller was asking for me ... and she was right! I was mortified, and wondered if I should have elocution lessons to alter my natural accent. In the end I came to terms with this - people will have to make up their own minds about me. But it did show me how little we can actually conclude about people if all we know about them is what we hear.

I cringe at Liverpudlian accents and a Birmingham accent. I am from Wolverhampton myself so can't be much better but I don't hear mine Ha ha.

I love accents, not just UK ones. I like listening to foreign languages too whether I understand them or not. If I had my time again I would love to study sociolinguistics. The only exception is plummy upper class accents which to me sound ridiculous.

I love the French accent, I have a lot of French cousins, French relatives on both sides of the family so that accent has always been special to me. I also love the Italian accent, my grandfather from that part of the Mediterranean acquired some London vowels when he settled in South London and married my fairly posh English grandmother, who was always correcting him His accent floated about quite a bit and sounded somewhat alien to my "Surrey born ears" when I was a child. According to one my French cousins his French "wasn't very elegant either" well at least he could make himself understood in both English and French......... but only just!

Other accents I like, Irish, my other grandmother was half Irish and I had a lot of friends with Irish parents at my catholic school, so again, a special accent to me.

I really like the Welsh accent, particularly love listening to Ruth Jones, although I can't distinguish the various accents within Wales, anymore than I can tell a Canadian apart from an American, I've made a few faux pas there. Also like the Australian accent and when I was in Perth the people I was staying with there were always telling me the Western Australian accent was much nicer and far less broad than the accents on the eastern coast, well they would say that wouldn't they Ok with most regional accents, bar flat nasal estuary English, especially when people leave off the final g of a verb, as in swimmin' or say 'ospidal instead of hospital. Liverpudlian of the Brookside variety not keen, there's a whine about it, but not the way the Beatles spoke, loved their accents and the absolute worst accent for me, Glasgowegian, bane of my life back in my 20s I worked for a life assurance company based in London and had to speak to the head office in Glasgow quite often and would come off the phone reeling with "well I didn't understand any of that" but then again a lot of my colleagues had the same problem.

I don't like brummie or strong Northern Ireland accents, but I do like a gentle Irish accent. I like soft Scottish accents but not the strong harsher ones. Love Geordie and Liverpool accents.
I come from East London and I've lived in Essex for over 20 years. My mother's family all came from East London, but she always corrected us if we spoke badly. I hate it when people say you done you was etc and drop their aitches. Nowadays so many people say would of could of instead of would have could have and I find it extremely irritating. So just because some of us come from East London and Essex doesn't mean we speak badly even though you may not like our accents.

My pal constantly teases me about one word. I'll open it to you all now by asking how on earth anyone looks at the combination of the letters 'murder' and utters 'muhdah'. Words fail me!

I do agree about Richard Burton's voice but think , unfortunately, far too many cigarettes were part of it.
I've lived in the SE and SW and have been told when in the SE they can hear a SW accent from me, and when I'm in the SW the reverse!