Accents

Oh and I’m always really irritated when a programme is set in East Anglia and the actors speak with a West Country burr......

I have a Norfolk accent which I will never lose.

When I started to teach in a London the children would ask me which foreign country I came from. ?

EllenVannin says we can’t hear ourselves speak. I have, often, on family videos or recordings. I think it can be quite a shock, because not many people sound as they think they do. My voice was rather lower and rather posher than I expected.

I'm hopeless at pinpointing accents, I either don't even notice or if I do, I rarely know where it's from.

Accents change, though. I grew up in Kent but moved away in my 20's. When we go back now, we rarely hear anyone who sounds like us, or hear the accent of our youth, except in older family members who still have the old Kentish accent.

If the program was based in Glasgow, I would expect the accent to be Glaswegian. But that can vary from totally incomprehensible to the only very light. On a national tv program, I would expect it to not to go more extreme than almost universally comprehensible.

DD used to be a television subtitler. She was trained to subtitle news and current affairs programmes where she had to listen and then speak the words into a computer. Her first time on live, she got the Ulster local news. No problem with the news reader, but then there was an interview with a farmer with a really intense local accent, who in the Ulster fashion hardly moved his lips as he spoke, so lip reading was impossible. She said she had to admit defeat and the farmer's words went out without subtitles.

Hmmm. Which sort of Welsh accent? I knew the minute I wrote that I would be in trouble! I think I am talking about the one that some people love. There is a particular lilt to it that either is very pleasing to some people but which I find grating. The stresses sound wrong to my ears.

I can understand any accent that's thrown at me. I don't mind them at all.

Although close to Liverpool I haven't got their accent, probably adopted the Cheshire one with just a hint of Lancashire in the odd vowel. We can't hear ourselves speak

I can remember after staying with relatives in Keighley,North Yorks. I spoke very far back like the relatives did and at 10 years of age when returning home kids used to laugh at me speaking. I never knew why at the time.

Gabriella you are a 'one off' .
Another aspect - one of my uncles, now sadly no longer here, he died about 10 years ago aged 99, was a sheep farmer in the Borders. He was a tenant farmer to the Duke of Northumberland. I was with him once when he went to the office in Alnwick and met the Duke by chance. My uncle spoke to the Duke with a very 'posh' accent. At other times I heard him chatting to the local shepherds in broad rural Northumbrian .

My father came from Wirral, across the Mersey from Liverpool, and he couldn’t understand the Liverpool accent at all!

I too love accents but our local Lesta really grates as it's not an accent, more a really lazy way of speaking.

There are plenty of accents in the Home Counties, nanasam! It's just that the people who live there don’t realise they have an accent. Does Kent count? One of the strongest accents I have ever heard was that of a young woman from Kent. Like the worst of London.

Anniebach I agree! There is no such thing as a national accent.

I'm afraid growing up in the HomeCounties I didn't hear too many accents. This has made it very difficult for me to fully understand many people when they talk. For example, I get confused when I speak to call centres, I can't tell whether they are Scottish, Irish or Indian, let alone when I hear the broad Brummie, Scouse or Liverpudlian people talking. I have to pass the phone over to my husband. It's so embarrassing having to keep saying "pardon?"

Which Welsh accents Lois , North, South, South West, Mid ?

Wales is a country and like England not all accents are the same. North Mid Wales has a Shropshire accent

I too love accents it’s the plummy posh ones I find grate on my ears (the Jacob Reece Mogg type) I m not over keen on Brummie or South African otherwise they are all so much more interesting than plain English and not only the sound of the words but I love learning all the different words for various things which can be quite different even a few miles away

Oh dear! I'm not keen on Welsh accents or Geordie or Black Country, but I love Irish and Scottish accents. I once spent a whole evening in a pub with a Glaswegian , he couldn't understand me and I couldn't understand him! It was a perfect evening.

It was set in the North East, Annie.

Coming from South Wales I find fast spoken accents impossible to understand.

Sorry , no idea where the drama ‘when the boats come in’ was suppose to have taken place but didn’t follow it because of the accent, couldn’t understand what was being said

I love accents ,I have a friend who speaks in Doric and its wonderful ,if you're in Aberdeen listen in to conversations abut quines and loons and all in a great muddle of fast spoken words.I'm a weegie and I wouldn't say I have atypical accent but I haven't lived there for over 50 years and I love getting together with the fast spoken banter filled sarcastic humoured relatives who stayed put in our home city .I've never had any problem with any accent .

not keen on Brummie accents, or Mancunian accents, and I definitely don't like hearing Yorkshire accents ( my own!)

My love of accents is definitely people related, my beloved
gran was a “Devon maid” so love Devon accent, my drop dead gorgeous son in law is from Newcastle and I love to
hear him talk, he has been down south for twenty years now, but still retains his accent, we have lots of fun with
barth and baath etc ?

Fennel
No, not particularly.
I have the 'flat' vowels of a Northerner but no discernable accent according to anyone who knows me.
In my professional life, clients and colleagues used to assume I came from Durham ...as they said I had a posh Durham accent which is no accent at all.
It's a place I've never lived in or visited.

Love and am fascinated in all accents - in several languages, and pick them up easily. Never ever have been able to come anywhere close to imitaing Geordie- just can't do it.

Grammatical mistakes are often an indication of the old languages used locally, whether Danish, or Saxon, etc, based.
Used to take a small group from the local estate to visit gardens and castles a few times a year, and just loved their 'propa Lesta' and the use of 'I were' and 'you was'. Always amazed at the amount of snobbish people can display re accents.

At the inaugural lecture when I started my teacher training as a mature student- the Dean went on re the need to get rid of a local accent if anyone wanted to succeed and quickly climb the ladder. He had the thickest South African accent.

Where I live now, I am VERY close to the French border - and the accent on either side is totally different - only in adults though.

Merwyn (sp) Bragg, in his book on the English language, explains how as a kid from Lancs, he was mocked and bullied for his accent as he went to High School and Uni - and had to acquire 'received pronunciation' accent to get on in life.

UK accents are amazingly varied - go 20 miles in any direction and they change so much. Add the whole class thing into the mix and it's so difficult really to say I dislike X or Y accent as a whole.

I don't dislike various Scottish accents at all but do admit to putting on the sub-titles when I watched Shetland. Loved Sandy's genuine Shetland accent in that series.

City accents are often harsher than those of surrounding areas.

If pushed though, I'm not too keen on a Southern accent ie Devon / Cornwall.

I love it, although, then again, the accents vary and a Plymouth accent is quite different to a Devon burr or Cornish accent.