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Local & Dialect Words

Regional accents are all part of the fun :) Honest. Though in some places (take Middlesbrough - please!) the accent is thick and fast enough to feel as though you're in a totally different country.

My own accent (Co. Durham via Dorset to the Tees Valley) is odd enough. Long "oo" for book, cook etc, with a tinge of geordie(ish) all slowed down so I could make myself understood in Weymouth. Got a real shock when I asked for a bottle of "Newky Brown". The lid! What is that! :shock:
 
Witchflame, you seem to be from Yorkshire, or thereabouts (no offence ;) ). The 'posh' accent you are talking about is RP, received pronunciation, and it has no native region, it is adopted by and taught to aspiring posh folk, and spoken naturally by old money and the jolly well educated. You can generally spot the difference between the two groups because the former tend to 'over-correct' and say things like 'cashan' for cushion (which doesn't follow the rules like other 'u' words), and make daft grammatical errors like 'this happened to my husband and I' - they are also buggers for the 'haitch' thing.

It doesn't do to confuse RP with the raft of southern accents it sounds a bit like to our untutored northern ears .... quite a lot of them southerners are common too, you know ;)

Think Hugh Grant rather than Grant Mitchell and repeat after me:
'The working class
Can kiss my arse'! :D

One of the things that annoys me is the word 'fuck'. When a southern journalist wants to portray the gritty credentials of a northern pop star or whatever swearing they invariably spell it 'fook'. Why? We actually say 'fuck' up here, like it is spelled ... it's you weirdos with yer 'fack's that can't do a proper bit of profanity ;)
The theoretical north/south divide between people who say 'fack' and those who say 'fuck' is reckoned by sociolinguists to be creeping up the country at a rate of something like 1 metre a year, incidentally. All these things are changing constantly. Very few people around here now would tell you to 'put wood i't oil'* as my grandmother did. She would also have said 'father' without the long ar vowel, used thee and thou for you, pronounced 'poor' as 'poo-er', 'coal' as coil etc etc, as did I as a child.

This is mainly accents thoiugh, not dialect.


*put the wood in the hole - close the door
 
aye. a no wot put wood in 't oil means me duck. ;)

Yep, Im a professional northerner. But I dont speak like the above. I think my accent's fairly neutral really. I think you understand what im getting at anyway.

The 'Hyacinth buckets' of society are the ones that seriously annoy me. The ones that over pronounce words, just like you describe, do the 'H' thing etc...
I certainly dont have a gripe with people who are Southerners and its the area they come from. As I've said before, its the people who live 'next door' (not literally), that suddenly try to speak in their self engineered posh way. Which makes them sound like a complete tit!! With highly exaggerated glaaaaarsss and baaaaaaaarth :roll:

By what you have said, you clearly understand and know the types. :)
 
My colleague is one of those blighters who insists on saying haitch. It makes me wince when she keeps saying it. I'm not aware that any other people I know do it, just her. It's one of the many intensely irritating things about her.....
 
myf13 said:
My colleague is one of those blighters who insists on saying haitch. It makes me wince when she keeps saying it. I'm not aware that any other people I know do it, just her.
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If it makes you feel any better, then yes, lots of other people do it. It's the ones, like witchflame says, that are pretending poshness who tend to be the culprits. You know the kind - people who you "I" instead of "me" because they don't think that "me" sounds quite right. Sorry everyone, but saying "He spoke to you and I yesterday" isn't just incorrect, it makes you appear a total knob.

Dialect and accent-wise, I'm kind of a piggy-in-the-middle. Although I was born and have always lived in the Birmingham area, I'm decidedly middle-class (there, I've said it!) and have always spoken in a fairly neutral Londony type of accent. People usually find it hard to place where I'm from - some Americans have thought I was Australian, which was amusing.
Oddly, when I tell folkwhere I'm from, they often stick two thumbs up and bellow "Orroit?" at me. Most strange...

So, although I'm almost Brummie by definition, I look upon Birmingham speech with a combination of fondness and amusement. But any regional accent has got to be far better than someone feigning poshness and getting it hopelessly wrong.

Sorry, we're straying off dialect here, but the whole subject of why people talk the way they do fascinates me.
 
My bloke, who's from Liverpool, says haitch and I have to admit it grates a little.

I have a mixed background - Mum's family are from deepest, Welsh speaking North Wales, my late Dad's folks were Aberdeen Scots.

I was born and brought up in north Cheshire, in Ellesmere Port, which, due to a big influx of Midlanders in the 50's, has a strange native accent - lots of Liverpool influence, but with a Birmingham vowel twang on some words.

I've lived in the home counties, Bristol and Norfolk, so I've noticed lots of dialect (Bristol - "where's that to?" for "where's that?" Norfolk - "she then looked as if she'd faint" with the "then" where it is instead of where most people would put it, at the end of the sentence. )

I have a fairly "flat" accent, but it's getting more and more North Wales the longer I'm here. But I use dialect in my speech from both sides of my family. I'm more likely to say "you suit it" if you have a new haircut than "it suits you" - apparently that's the Scots side. I still say "barth" and "glarss".

But the worst thing I think I do is pick up accents, especially Scots. If I'm speaking to someone with a Scottish accent, mine veers towards the way my dad spoke. If I talk to someone who speaks RP, my pronunciation changes to theirs. I always wonder if people think I'm taking the piss - if I'm aware I'm doing it, I'll explain about my dad and hope they don't take offence.
 
I don't know what my colleague's excuse is for haitching her way through everything, but considering the rest of her speech, I'm pretty sure it's not an attempt at poshness. I do wonder whether my aitches bother her as much as her haitches annoy me.
She also tends to say pacific instead of specific (or at least that's what it sounds like), and unindated instead of inundated. We used to have to order something at work that had tamper-detection things called adulteration strips - for some reason she insisted on referring to the damned things as adoration strips. Nearly drove me up the bloody wall, that did. :evil:
 
I remember two Wolverhampton girls, both bright and attractive, where I used to work with the most inpenetrable Black Country accents I've ever encountered. Unless you looked at facial nuances and got into the rhythm it was literally foreign to my ears. I even understood a Geordie ex-girlfriend who'd say 'Dinnae drop yer dottle on the proggie mat' (Don't put your cigarette out on the carpet).

Living in Yorkshire now I still can't get used to 'while' for until (monday while thursday). Another fave word is 'sniving' (Derbyshire - sneaking or hanging about).
 
I had a training session the other day delivered by someone with a very strong Black Country accent. Not even the Brummies could understand him! It wasn't just the accent but also the rather odd grammar going on.
 
liveinabin1 said:
I live in East Anglia now and am married to a man from the Midlands
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How come you and your brother grew up so far apart?

Arf Arf :lol:


Sorry ;)
 
Sounds Familiar? Accents and Dialects of the UK.

Do you call a ‘bread roll’ a cob, batch, bread cake, barm cake or scuffler? How do you pronounce the words cup and plant? And are you sitting or sat at this computer? The UK is a rich landscape of regional accents and dialects, each evidence of our society’ s continuity and change, our local history and our day-to-day lives. This site captures and celebrates the diversity of spoken English in the second half of the twentieth century.
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LOL at Triplesod

There is a word I forgot to include but heard someone use it today.

'On the huh'

which means not straight, on the piss, on the skew, skew whiff.
 
I overheard (yet another) terrible misuse of the English language the other day. The perpetrator was on her mobile 'phone. The conversation, verbatim, as follows :

"I was like yeah, an' he was like nah it isn't, an' I was like it is you know, an' he was like nah it ain't, an' I was like....."

It was tempting to beat her to death with the 'phone.

That kind of thing is much worse than any accent or dialect.
 
Archivists launch campaign to save Essex accent
Archivists have launched a campaign to save the Essex accent claiming it has been put under threat by London Cockneys moving into the county.
Published: 7:00AM BST 10 Jun 2009

Martin Astell, of the Essex Record Office, said accents from the capital had been displacing Essex ones as far back as the 1880s and it was vital to preserve the "unique" dialect.

The record office has unearthed recordings of the county's dialects and accents dating back to 1906 from its sound and video archive. They have released it on CD for people to buy in the hope it will help encourage locals to preserve the accent.

Mr Astell said: "When people think of Essex they often think of estuary English or a derivative of that kind of accent.

"On the CD we have captured a much more rural sound similar to parts of Suffolk or Norfolk.

"It is a lot softer than people think and more lyrical and musical.

"Everyone takes the mick out of the Essex accent but it's important to preserve it.

"We want to provide examples of genuine voices that have already changed a lot in the 50 or 100 years since they were first captured."

David Britain, a senior researcher in Language and Linguistics at the University of Essex, said it was unfortunate an Essex accent was often associated with stupidity.

He said: "It is more of a social stereotype than a language stereotype.

"Essex is such a diverse region it is a bit unfair pick on one element and put the label of 'Essex girl' on every woman in the county.

"Certain media personalities happen to have come from Essex and have formed that stereotype."

To select material the archive team separated the county into 10 to document the subtle differences between the north and south of the county.

Deborah Peers, the Essex Archives Publications Officer, said the traditional Essex dialect was quite particular.

She said: "Old is used when referring to almost anything, as in "the old sergeant" and the "little old sweet shop" - even when things are new.

"The term 'boy' was used to refer to any male person regardless of age, so any Essex man can be referred to using the contradictory term "the old boy".

"And 'a' is a substitute for all kinds of words, including 'of' and 'would' - as in "pair a shoes" and "everyone a be singin".

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstop ... ccent.html

I tried to find a video clip of Jimmy Lawrence, ex-sailing barge skipper and sailmaker, as he has a good Essex accent. But I found nothing, although I know he's been on TV a few times.
 
Old is used when referring to almost anything, as in "the old sergeant" and the "little old sweet shop" - even when things are new.
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So it's not a confusing dialect, then. :lol:
 
i can't believe nobody has chipped in for the Irish
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To say that i'm from Yorkshire, i seem to be the only non-Irish person on the planet who uses the word 'gobshite'. It's such a super word and i don;t know why it's never taken off... i think i picked it up age 14 when i was washing bottles and glasses for pocket money in a really quite dangerous Irish club in Leeds.

The 'Hyacinth buckets' of society are the ones that seriously annoy me. The ones that over pronounce words, just like you describe, do the 'H' thing etc...
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There's sort of an opposite of that too, people who overplay their accents quite ludicrously. We have a lady who comes to our work sometimes to do first aid training, who must have the broadest Yorkshire accent i ever heard, like the sort of thing i've only heard in some of the little villages up on the moors in North Yorkshire. When i asked her where she was from, she laughed and said "From here!"
 
I used to know an Irish traveller girl who used the word 'Blackguard' in conversation frequently, to mean 'a bit of a c*nt'. Pronounced 'Blaggard' - it sounded so archaic.
 
Re: The saving the Essex accent article.

I totally agree it should be saved. I'm in mid Essex and you still get to hear it occasionally, it's rather a nice accent, quite soft and as the article points out has little in common with Estuary English which is hideous. My cousins ex wife came from Manningtree and the entire family had the Essex accent and yet about 20 miles down the road our side of the family didn't.

I have no idea what kind of accent I have, it's not estuary English, I suppose it's London without the glottal stops and dropped 'haitches'.
 
Layla... Your accent is positively devious and sexual. Although I've never heard it, I think it must be. Chuckle. 8)

*Can you tell who I am yet? Oh aye.*
 
I think I know but I'm not totally sure. Have I got a restraining order out against you? That'll narrow the field a bit. :D

Back to accents......I was talking to a friend this evening about accents and she mentioned that I do have the very London habit of calling everyone 'darling' from family to friends to complete strangers. That just made me feel like Barbara Windsor because everytime I've seen her interviewed she does the same. :(
 
My accent is mostly Estuary but changes slightly depending on where I've been living the most recently.
I can 'put on' a posh accent, quite easily sustainable really, but my 'unconcious accent' is a sort of watered down South London; it makes me shudder when I hear recordings of it. I'd like to think it sounds laconic but it actually sounds nasal and dull.

*sigh*

There goes my career in public speaking.
 
Ere tis geddin proper dimpsy.

Devonian for 'i say, dusk is approaching rather quickly'.

I have no idea where the word 'dimpsy' comes from, but it's used suprisingly frequently around newton abbot for some reason.
 
Slutch, a Lancashire word that means something like slushy mud, a mixture of mud and snow, or just thick sloppy mud.

Snig - (Lancashire) an eel, one of my grannies used this. There used to be a pub in Ormskirk (maybe still is, called "The Snigs Foot")

My accent's Lancashire with the edges knocked off a bit...
 
According to the-soon-to-be-mrs-bg, I am disturbingly non accented.

Despite living in and around Plymouth since the age of seven, my mother's Force's accent (acquired when she learned English at an army school in germany) has stuck with me, making me sound a bit posh and pompous to the locals, but too common to frequent the local yachting clubs. Thankfully. ;)
 
Ana ken, you fowk dinna ken fit an accent is. Ye'd hae a gey chav if ye came up here. Am sittin here on ma dowp shakkin ma heid . If onybody says 'far are e fae? ad likely tell them 'naewy that you've iver bin'. Ma wife's aye sayin, 'fan ar e gan tae dae sumthin a eese aroon the hoose?', but I ayways say, seen enuff. I wis watchin some loons and quines the day, and they were fair tricket cause they fun a gows egg. It hid tummelled doon aff the reef, but it was gey queer it didna brack. Then this chiel says 'hey min, hoo lang will I need tae bile this'. But I telt him' G'wa and dinna be feel' ye'll be seek if ye ate that.
ach weel, its a gey sair chav for a half loaf.




For the non Doric reader

I don't know, you people don't know what an accent is (It's actually a dialect I believe) You would have a struggle if you came up here. I am sitting on my bottom shaking my head. If anyone says 'where are you from, I would likely tell them 'nowhere that you've ever been'. My wife is always saying 'When are you going to do something useful round the house?' but I always say soon enough. I was watching some boys and girls today. They were happy because they found a seagulls egg. It had fallen down off the roof, but it was very odd that it didn't break. Then this chap said 'Hey you (min is the masculine form) How long will I need to boil this?' But I told him 'Go away and don't be a fool! You'll be sick if you eat that'.
Oh well its a very hard struggle for half a loaf of bread.
 
Layla said:
I think I know but I'm not totally sure. Have I got a restraining order out against you? That'll narrow the field a bit. :D
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No, we've never met, but spoken a bit on TPCMB.

"Eyup thee! Gerrart en ginnel or al ave thi guts foh garters, yer arf arsed coil nickin git! Al it thi that ard, thi mam'll think tha'z gone wappy!"


"Hey you! Get yourself out of that passage way, or I'll give you trouble, you amature coal thief! I'll punch you so hard that your own mother will think you've gone mad!"

West Yorkshire.
 
Layla said:
I do have the very London habit of calling everyone 'darling' from family to friends to complete strangers. That just made me feel like Barbara Windsor because everytime I've seen her interviewed she does the same. :(
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Does your bra fly off when you do exercises? :lol:
 
Only when I'm wearing a skimpy nurses outfit and being chased around the bed by Sid James.
 
spellbound said:
No, we've never met, but spoken a bit on TPCMB.
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It took a few minutes to work that out, duh!! I know who you are now.....and I do have a restraining order against you. 8)
 
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