Accents

I always think Liverpudlians sound like they are spoiling for a fight! "Calm down, calm down........"

Redrobin - I can never be accused of trying to speak "posh"
(will now retreat back to my corner!)

When I was young we lived in Nigeria and came back to the UK to live with my grandmother in Yorkshire when I was 5. My father spoke RP and my mother who was German also spoke RP without an accent. I was sent to the local school, and I was told that I talked like the BBC! I soon learnt to adopt the local accent at school and reverted to RP at home!

I think it depends very much on who is speaking, I love Eamon Holmes speaking voice but find Christine Lampard's a bit grating, although I do think she seems to be a perfectly lovely girl. The Scottish accent is so varied , some lovely to listen to, some not so, especially when they pronounce i like a u (e.g. Wull instead of Will). And they do seem to say Eeehm a lot!!! My own accent is London, not Cockney, just nothing special, but I hate with a vengeance this faux South London Accent that so many kids use nowadays, with all the wivs and finks etc. I will say that I always liked a Northern accent, but as long as their diction is clear I can tolerate most, just don't mumble!!

I had a complement the other day. We have returned to live in SW Wales. I have an Estuary English accent from living in the Home Counties for 60 years.
Walking aound Carmarthen , a tour bus stopped. One of the ladies who alighted asked me where M&S was. When I told her she said ' You have a lovely soft Welsh accent' . Made my day

Wolverhampton accent, which I do have but fortunately not too broad. I found it quite interesting when visiting Scotland recently a lot of people could pick up on our accent actually being from Wolverhampton. Most places in the south of England get it mixed up with the Brummie accent.

I was brought up in Yorkshire & still have traces of my Yorkshire accent despite the fact that I lived in Middlesex (Surrey) for 23 years, longer than I lived in Yorkshire. For work I had to speak clearly so my accent became "well spoken", I later moved to Somerset & now Devon, I love the West Country accents.

Where I was brought up the accents varied from village/town to the next village/town. I love hearing dialect which is not lazy speech

When I was working one of my Bosses asked me to ring a client in Scotland as he couldn't understand the accent. I was expecting a broad Glaswegian until I dialed the number for Edinburgh & spoke to a lovely man with a soft Edinburgh accent.

I do have a slight problem with Brummie accent but not so much with the Black Country accent as there are similarities to Yorkshire dialect

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!

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 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.

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 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 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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.