The accent and dialect changes every 20 miles or so, so this is obviously a bit vague.
We can’t even agree on what to call a bread roll [0] never mind how some words should be pronounced [1].
My mother was brought up in Liverpool, but her (Irish immigrant) mother hated the Bootle accent so much that she taught her, and her older sister, to speak something closer to RP.
That washed off, and like her I got bullied at school in North Derbyshire for speaking “too posh”. Yet locals in my new home of London clearly place me as being from the North but can’t place where. To be honest neither can most Northerners. I think I’m broadly “South Pennine”, so a bit of High Peak, a bit of Manchester, the odd spot of Lancashire or even West Yorkshire - reflects where I grew up, went to Uni, lived, and socialised with. My partner has a similar accent despite growing up in a part of Manchester with a distinct accent and dialect of its own.
The point is, it’s complex and it’s changing. And it’s not just the UK. It seems to have sped up in recent years. When I hear Canadian voices from 70 years ago, I can hear Scottish tinges. Likewise the US East coast of the mid-20th century had more West Country in it than today.
It was only a friend’s grandfathers generation that could tell what street someone grew up on from their voice alone, and today we are increasingly homogenised - I wonder what “English” will sound like in 200 or 500 years.
I'm from West Yorkshire, the dialect is slowly fading. My grandfather would speak with a strong accent and with spatterings of Norse words. I notice now that, yes, dialects in the UK are becoming homogenised but there is also some American influence seeping in. The American way of pronouncing a double t as a d "better" => "bedder" is increasingly more prevalent in the UK, it's slightly saddening.
When I was staying with a friend in Norway once we visited his mother, and to me she sounded like someone with a broad Durham/Newcastle accent (my mother is from there) speaking German. A lot of north east words are germanic, or Scandinavian. My grandfather was a farmer near Durham and pigs were swine, children were bairns.
As for American influence, my youngest daughter picked up a lot of that from Youtube at one point, and I once interviewed a girl from Gravesend with such a strong US accent I assumed she'd grown up over there.
Exact same thing is happening in Australia. I'm guessing it's from watching streaming video, Netflix, TikTok, etc. where American accents predominate, and any non-American accents are flattened enough to be sure it's easy for Americans to understand them.
There really isn't one 'west yorkshire' accent, nor one 'north yorkshire' accent, there is much much more variety than that. A leeds resident sounds different from a wakefield or dewsbury resident, and even then there can be variation where some people exhibit less of their locale accent than others, depending on how much they rebelled against sounding 'local' in their teens.
I may be completely wrong, but I think one direction of evolution in pronunciation is the gradual shift to that which takes less physical effort to pronounce.
"Bedder" is less physical work, less effort, in the mouth than "better".
I'm not familiar with the Brits so can't comment on the specifics there.
However, as a kid, I had a similar experience in a completely different country when we moved cities. My accent wasn't "posh" or "higher class" in any way, it was just from a different region. Kids would give me a hard time for it. But the exact same would happen in reverse form in the other region.
I grew up in France, from white parents, classical music professionals, catholic practicing. With what I now recognize as a posh french accent, that they consciously learned as a way to climb the social ladder.
I went to the town school where 80% of the students were descendent of North African immigrants, mostly from Algeria.
Most of those kids lived in projects city, and part of their identity is a specific accent differentiating them from the outside of the project city. This accent is not really related to Arabic; it is distinctively different; with what I can only describe as a palpable aggressivity in tone.
I ended up under police protection after a few broken limbs.
This was more than 25y ago. Sometimes I wonder what those kids have become. If they sometimes regret.
As recently as a couple years ago, a white posh accent kid at the same school got bullied and almost suffocated to death with a fire extinguisher. By the next generation of those immigrants.
I am now an immigrant in the Bay Area. Nobody cares about my accent here ;)
> Isn't it fascinating that people judge accents harshly? After all, if we can understand one another, what's the problem?
Two populations in close proximity separated by social differences will develop accents and use those accents to differentiate themselves. It's not a bug, it's a feature.
When I first lived in Italy, this was mind-blowing for me as an American from the west coast. I went on a bike ride with the local team I had joined and they stopped for espresso in a nearby town, and the guy who ran the place was like "oh, you're from Padova" when he heard them speaking. An identifiable change in the dialect over a distance you could easily cover on a bike was a huge "wow!" moment for me.
I have no idea what my accent is at this point. I spent enough time in Oxford that I can pass as posh if I need to, moved to a part of Cheshire that had a huge scouse population, then moved to Watford and then Kent and picked up my dad’s dreadful habit of talking vaguely cockney to tradespeople. Now I live in Sheffield and me and my kids have random a mix of long and short As. I also grew up in lower-case parts of the internet and drive myself mad at work switching between that and grown up casing, so it’s not just vocal dialects anymore.
I'm reminded of Serious Klein, who is a German rapper who explicitly sounds like a native English speaker. Imo he's closet to a West Coast rapper, but even this is up to debate. He could easily be from Maryland, or any other American city.
Yeah, that seems to have been lost at some point. From memory they used a picture of what Americans might call a soft dinner roll.
To me it would be more a roll than a bap or a barm, but they're almost synonyms. The weird one for me was when a mate insisted it was a teacake, and I suggested that would only apply if it had raisins in it. What I was describing, he insisted, was a fruit teacake, and without fruit it became a teacake. This is contrary to what the rest of the country believes outside of North Manchester, but has become a running joke for many years between us.
> Do people really speak Kentish in most of Kent? Or is it a mix of Modern Estuary,
Yes, ish
For example Bermondsey(a former borough in southwark, london) is a weird mix of kent and cockney, but it is still, just about distinct. if you move more into kent, I sounds get longer. from I to Aye, to Aye-eh
In the 80s-2000s half of central london moved to the suburbs, taking the accent with them.
However the south london accent still exists in younguns, depending on parents of course. If you're second generation, and depending on which school you go to, you might get a hybrid accent. (my daughter got a proper bermondsey accent, but I suspect now she'd get, posher accent.)
but, those accents are well away from these: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5S8JR4eJAXA which sounds more related to broads norfolk when I was growing up. (but 1950s broads was different to 80s)
I think the biggest issue is trying to pin down the hard accent changes vs the gradual.
For example somewhere in Lincolnshire it goes from rural burble to hard yorkshire-eqse stops. I suspect its something to do with the fens.
Yeh it’s strange it includes cockney so prominently. It isn’t really very present unless you spend time around the various gentlemen frequenting sports pubs and pie and mash shops in east London, or if you take a black cab very often. I’d say the “roadman” dialect, mixing cockney and Jamaican patois, plus grime vibes, is FAR more common. I’ll hear it everyday wandering around South and east London. I guess it’s a London dialect so it’s in that umbrella,… but how come cockney gets such a fat slab of land?
"RP", by the definition it was originally given, doesn't really exist any more in anyone under 70 or so. What you may now think of as "RP" is usually called Standard Southern British, or SSB.
You just need to listen to the various generations of the royal family to see that RP is effectively dead.
I read somewhere that accents “move” up the social hierarchy over time. Aspects of speech which are widely working class will eventually become traits of the upper class - while meanwhile the working cm lass have moved on.
There are two sorts of Essex, the countryside version that straddles south Suffolk and the London imported one that has become the stereotype, that appears to be estuary on the map. Both have massive crossover depending whether you're in town or village. A rather difficult mapping task!
I had the same feeling. I've lived in Sussex for most of my life and I can't say I've heard a Sussex accent for a long time. Maybe I'm on the wrong side of an urban/rural split?
I think something important to explain about British English dialects is the class factor.
It's easy to forget because the classic RP accents have largely died out, but the way I was brought up to speak (actively! My parents would "correct" my speech patterns) is much more reflective of class than locality. This is the case throughout England at least. Brits take this for granted but it's not the global norm!
In many British cities there is also a major race axis to dialects too. Just like how American English has black and white accents, you could make a better-than-chance guess at a modern Londoner's ethnicity from a recording of their voice. (See Multicultural London English).
>Just like how American English has black and white accents, you could make a better-than-chance guess at a modern Londoner's ethnicity from a recording of their voice. (See Multicultural London English).
The whole thing about MLE is that it's multicultural, i.e. not stratified along ethnic or racial lines. I do not think I would be able to judge the ethnicity of a Londoner aged under (say) 30 in this way.
> This is the case throughout England at least. Brits take this for granted but it's not the global norm!
England and Britain are not interchangeable, unless you specifically mean that all Brits take it for granted that this is only the case in England or something like that?
There was no error there, maybe he doesn't know if class is a major factor in Scotland or Ireland? That could make sense since England as the center of power that class would be more of a factor there for dialects, but I am not sure.
If you think this is dense, try Italy some time. Huge numbers of highly distinct dialects, because until the mid-1800s Italians spoke huge numbers of entirely different languages, complete with their own full literature traditions. During unification the country settled on Florence's language (the language of Dante) as the "official" language: but everyone still proudly speaks their own language. To my knowledge, Italy is regarded as the densest diverse dialect region in Europe.
How different? What Americans call arugula the British call rocket. Because the British word is derived from the French roquette, which is from ruchetta, a word in italian dialects along the French border. But Americans got their word from aruculu in the southern Calabrese dialect, a result of immigration. The Italian word is rucola, from the Latin eruca.
Americans think "Capeesh" is an Italian word because they heard it in The Godfather. But it's not: it's Sicilian, as is much of the film.
Capisce, pronounced with a distinct 'eh' at the end ('capeesh-eh'), would be standard Italian for 'he/she understands' or 'you (polite) understand'.
But 'capeesh' tends to be used differently in American mob films, meaning either 'Got it, pal?' or 'Yeah, I got it' ("Capeesh? Capeesh."). Those would be different in standard Italian: capisci ('capeesh-ee'), and capisco ('cap-is-coh'), respectively. It's that final example that makes it obvious that the mobsters aren't speaking standard Italian - there is no 'sh' sound in capisco, so eliding the final vowel wouldn't get you to 'capeesh', but to something more like 'cap-isk'.
However, the corresponding forms in Sicilian are capisci and capisciu. Eliding the final vowel yields the observed 'capeesh' in both cases.
It makes perfect sense that the mobsters would be speaking Sicilian rather than standard Italian. Italian immigrants in the US were overwhelmingly from Italy's south, which is generally poorer than the north. (The Mafia, in particular, is an organization with its roots in western Sicily.) Most of these immigrants came before the advent of standardized/centralized schooling in Italy, and so were never taught modern standard Italian. Instead, they spoke their native Romance languages, generally dialects of Sicilian and Neapolitan.
Even today, most Italian-Americans will be able to tell you which 'dialect' their grandparents spoke.
[Capisce is] borrowed from the spoken Sicilian and Neapolitan equivalents of Italian capisci, the second-person singular present indicative form of capire (“to understand”).
No, it is not. When they say "capeesh" in the movie, they're trying to say "do you understand?" (second person singular). In Italian, that would be "capisci" (pronounced "ca-pee-shee").
Additionally, capisce ("does he understand?") in Italian, is pronounced "ca-pee-sheh".
I rented a room for a few months, from an elderly couple in the countryside outside Aberdeen. It took a solid week before I could do more than nod politely at whatever the heck they were on about.
I had a really interesting situation a couple of decades ago when I was studying. I grew up in a rural part of the UK in the South West. The nearest train station was just over the county border, around 20 miles away.
One day I was waiting for the train, and there were two men talking: a vicar and his friend - both in their 50s. Clearly from that area. Even though I'd grown up in an area with a similar accent - less than 20 miles away - I could not understand a word they were saying.
The names of dialects aren't super useful to people who aren't from the UK. Also, dialects often are continua, so drawing borders without any sort of hierarchy to indicate closeness is quite pointless.
What would be cool if one could click on each dialect/region and hear a few words spoken in that dialect.
In my view many of these small regions (that blend into one another) could be combined to give a much more useful map with more sharply distinct accents.
Such a map may be less precise, but far more useful to most.
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We can’t even agree on what to call a bread roll [0] never mind how some words should be pronounced [1].
My mother was brought up in Liverpool, but her (Irish immigrant) mother hated the Bootle accent so much that she taught her, and her older sister, to speak something closer to RP.
That washed off, and like her I got bullied at school in North Derbyshire for speaking “too posh”. Yet locals in my new home of London clearly place me as being from the North but can’t place where. To be honest neither can most Northerners. I think I’m broadly “South Pennine”, so a bit of High Peak, a bit of Manchester, the odd spot of Lancashire or even West Yorkshire - reflects where I grew up, went to Uni, lived, and socialised with. My partner has a similar accent despite growing up in a part of Manchester with a distinct accent and dialect of its own.
The point is, it’s complex and it’s changing. And it’s not just the UK. It seems to have sped up in recent years. When I hear Canadian voices from 70 years ago, I can hear Scottish tinges. Likewise the US East coast of the mid-20th century had more West Country in it than today.
It was only a friend’s grandfathers generation that could tell what street someone grew up on from their voice alone, and today we are increasingly homogenised - I wonder what “English” will sound like in 200 or 500 years.
[0] https://www.ourdialects.uk/maps/bread/
[1] https://www.ourdialects.uk/maps/class-farce/
As for American influence, my youngest daughter picked up a lot of that from Youtube at one point, and I once interviewed a girl from Gravesend with such a strong US accent I assumed she'd grown up over there.
"Bedder" is less physical work, less effort, in the mouth than "better".
Isn't it fascinating that people judge accents harshly? After all, if we can understand one another, what's the problem?
The problem is social stratification within a power structure. Here's a related BBC article from earlier this year.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwyjdyj729ro
However, as a kid, I had a similar experience in a completely different country when we moved cities. My accent wasn't "posh" or "higher class" in any way, it was just from a different region. Kids would give me a hard time for it. But the exact same would happen in reverse form in the other region.
Guess people just don't like "outsiders".
I grew up in France, from white parents, classical music professionals, catholic practicing. With what I now recognize as a posh french accent, that they consciously learned as a way to climb the social ladder.
I went to the town school where 80% of the students were descendent of North African immigrants, mostly from Algeria.
Most of those kids lived in projects city, and part of their identity is a specific accent differentiating them from the outside of the project city. This accent is not really related to Arabic; it is distinctively different; with what I can only describe as a palpable aggressivity in tone.
I ended up under police protection after a few broken limbs.
This was more than 25y ago. Sometimes I wonder what those kids have become. If they sometimes regret.
As recently as a couple years ago, a white posh accent kid at the same school got bullied and almost suffocated to death with a fire extinguisher. By the next generation of those immigrants.
I am now an immigrant in the Bay Area. Nobody cares about my accent here ;)
The accent is just being used a heuristic of where you're from, which is the actual judgement. Posh = not from round here.
Northerners are famously insular and protective of their communities (I love them for it but I think it can go a bit far sometimes)
Two populations in close proximity separated by social differences will develop accents and use those accents to differentiate themselves. It's not a bug, it's a feature.
When I first lived in Italy, this was mind-blowing for me as an American from the west coast. I went on a bike ride with the local team I had joined and they stopped for espresso in a nearby town, and the guy who ran the place was like "oh, you're from Padova" when he heard them speaking. An identifiable change in the dialect over a distance you could easily cover on a bike was a huge "wow!" moment for me.
I live in london also, but people cant place me. They sometimes guess Irish or German.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serious_Klein
no bread is pictured
To me it would be more a roll than a bap or a barm, but they're almost synonyms. The weird one for me was when a mate insisted it was a teacake, and I suggested that would only apply if it had raisins in it. What I was describing, he insisted, was a fruit teacake, and without fruit it became a teacake. This is contrary to what the rest of the country believes outside of North Manchester, but has become a running joke for many years between us.
Essex accents had travelled well into Hertfordshire by the 1970s. Cockney has evaporated and the condensate largely landed in Essex and Hertfordshire.
Do people really speak Kentish in most of Kent? Or is it a mix of Modern Estuary, MLE (multicultural London English) and RP (received pronunciation)?
I know the author says that the map will always be wrong, I understand that, but this map is badly out of date.
Yes, ish
For example Bermondsey(a former borough in southwark, london) is a weird mix of kent and cockney, but it is still, just about distinct. if you move more into kent, I sounds get longer. from I to Aye, to Aye-eh
In the 80s-2000s half of central london moved to the suburbs, taking the accent with them.
However the south london accent still exists in younguns, depending on parents of course. If you're second generation, and depending on which school you go to, you might get a hybrid accent. (my daughter got a proper bermondsey accent, but I suspect now she'd get, posher accent.)
but, those accents are well away from these: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5S8JR4eJAXA which sounds more related to broads norfolk when I was growing up. (but 1950s broads was different to 80s)
I think the biggest issue is trying to pin down the hard accent changes vs the gradual.
For example somewhere in Lincolnshire it goes from rural burble to hard yorkshire-eqse stops. I suspect its something to do with the fens.
p-aye an mashhhh, bruv
I read somewhere that accents “move” up the social hierarchy over time. Aspects of speech which are widely working class will eventually become traits of the upper class - while meanwhile the working cm lass have moved on.
It's easy to forget because the classic RP accents have largely died out, but the way I was brought up to speak (actively! My parents would "correct" my speech patterns) is much more reflective of class than locality. This is the case throughout England at least. Brits take this for granted but it's not the global norm!
In many British cities there is also a major race axis to dialects too. Just like how American English has black and white accents, you could make a better-than-chance guess at a modern Londoner's ethnicity from a recording of their voice. (See Multicultural London English).
The whole thing about MLE is that it's multicultural, i.e. not stratified along ethnic or racial lines. I do not think I would be able to judge the ethnicity of a Londoner aged under (say) 30 in this way.
England and Britain are not interchangeable, unless you specifically mean that all Brits take it for granted that this is only the case in England or something like that?
Edit: for the downvoters: https://www.babbel.com/en/magazine/difference-between-britai...
Hilarious that you'd read my comment explaining British class and linguistics dynamics and assume I don't know what Britain is lol
Deleted Comment
How different? What Americans call arugula the British call rocket. Because the British word is derived from the French roquette, which is from ruchetta, a word in italian dialects along the French border. But Americans got their word from aruculu in the southern Calabrese dialect, a result of immigration. The Italian word is rucola, from the Latin eruca.
Americans think "Capeesh" is an Italian word because they heard it in The Godfather. But it's not: it's Sicilian, as is much of the film.
But 'capeesh' tends to be used differently in American mob films, meaning either 'Got it, pal?' or 'Yeah, I got it' ("Capeesh? Capeesh."). Those would be different in standard Italian: capisci ('capeesh-ee'), and capisco ('cap-is-coh'), respectively. It's that final example that makes it obvious that the mobsters aren't speaking standard Italian - there is no 'sh' sound in capisco, so eliding the final vowel wouldn't get you to 'capeesh', but to something more like 'cap-isk'.
However, the corresponding forms in Sicilian are capisci and capisciu. Eliding the final vowel yields the observed 'capeesh' in both cases.
It makes perfect sense that the mobsters would be speaking Sicilian rather than standard Italian. Italian immigrants in the US were overwhelmingly from Italy's south, which is generally poorer than the north. (The Mafia, in particular, is an organization with its roots in western Sicily.) Most of these immigrants came before the advent of standardized/centralized schooling in Italy, and so were never taught modern standard Italian. Instead, they spoke their native Romance languages, generally dialects of Sicilian and Neapolitan.
Even today, most Italian-Americans will be able to tell you which 'dialect' their grandparents spoke.
Additionally, capisce ("does he understand?") in Italian, is pronounced "ca-pee-sheh".
The "capeesh" is derived from Sicilian.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doric_dialect_%28Scotland%29
English and Scots are sibling languages, c.f. some of the geographically close Scandinavian languages.
If you want a quick guide to languages in Britain, the site has an additional article which the original links to:
https://starkeycomics.com/2019/03/01/every-native-british-an...
Here's a similar one from Wikipedia that includes Dutch dialects as an example of dialect continuum: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialektkontinuum#/media/Datei:... probably based on this historical map: https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/11kvga1/an_1894_ma...
One day I was waiting for the train, and there were two men talking: a vicar and his friend - both in their 50s. Clearly from that area. Even though I'd grown up in an area with a similar accent - less than 20 miles away - I could not understand a word they were saying.
What would be cool if one could click on each dialect/region and hear a few words spoken in that dialect.
In my view many of these small regions (that blend into one another) could be combined to give a much more useful map with more sharply distinct accents.
Such a map may be less precise, but far more useful to most.