To borrow a title from a Woody Allen movie about sex, and being inspired by @Ina I. Wonder in the Irish Eyes thread ........."We'll have to do a thread on England sometime, and maybe we'll get to hear your different accents too" I have started this thread about English accents and differences in dialect.
Now this is what I like. Having pride in ones country is healthy for all of us. To be able to get insight of other places by those that actually live there is much different than what we get to read in travels pamplets, or even books on the countries history. And a little levity help others see the country as seen from those indiginus to the area. Good start Terry, maybe our other English members will enjoy telling us some things that they see of interest on England.
Perhaps better to say British @Ina I. Wonder ...we're 4 separate countries within the British isles..Scotland, England , Northern Ireland and Wales.. although I live in England I am Scottish Born and Raised.... In Scotland the Accents are just as diverse as they are in England...but my non British friends say they can't tell the difference between our dialects all they can hear is a ''British accent'' ..although they Dilaects are very diverse and very obvious to all of us British , as I'm sure all different USA Dialects are very obvious and different to you.. BTW I can tell a lot of American accents are different...I know a Bostonian accent, a new York accent, and a Texan accent..when I hear them..
Accents and dialects can change over a very short distance. For example, Newcastle and Sunderland are only about ten miles apart, but the accents are completely different. You can even have different accents in one place - when I lived in Oxford, I'd say there were three distinctly different Oxford accents. One was "town Oxford" with elements of London estuary English. Another was "rural Oxford" with a slight country burr. Finally, there was "posh Oxford" which is probably self explanatory. Accents change over time. I have a friend from Reading, a town around 25 miles west of London. He is the about the same age as me and his accent is much more of the London estuary type I mentioned. His late father, however, born and bred in Reading, had a noticeably rural burr to his accent.
Same here @Tom Locke , we are just 20 miles north of London in a rural area, and many of the indigenous farming families still speak with an 'artfordsheer 'edge'og accent''...while many are incomers from London and have brought a more ''refined'' (RP) accent to the area...
There was a very interesting programme on BBC a few years ago. Someone had discovered some old recordings in a vault in (I think) Berlin and they turned out to be British POWs from the First World War. The programme makers tracked down some of the descendants of the prisoners and they were able to hear the voices of their relatives, which must have been a strange experience. What was really intriguing was how accents had changed. I can't recall all the places these people were from - there were about four or five families - but I remember one family from Aberdeen and one from Swindon. The modern-day speakers clearly had different accents to their predecessors. I remember the family from Swindon being amused at how West Country their relative's accent was. They sounded a bit "country" but this chap really sounded "ooh, aah, yuzzem"!
Glancing through this thread, I'm mildly amused that the only person who is actually English is Terry, though of course Holly lives in England and I lived in various parts of England for several years. So many things influence accents and dialects. People move around a fair amount and even TV programmes can affect the way we speak. Australian soap operas are surely responsible for that trait of making a statement sound like a question, whereby the tone becomes higher in pitch at the end.
I am now aware that England is in fact four countries, so what make them unique onto themselves in their differences. I mean there are thing that are totally Texan, totally Alaskan, or New York. There are things and sites that you can only see and hear in these particular; areas. I'd like to know about your four different areas.
Tom, I noticed that too and I don't know enough about the different words used by the Brits so I have been sitting back observing and waiting for those in the UK to teach and entertain me
I already learned a few words I'd never heard before from the Ellen Video (and the others) that Terry posted. All 5 of them were hilarious too. But I don't even know what to ask…I'm just not around it.
@Tom Locke this is in reply to your post. Thanks. Uncovered: lost British accents from prison camps of first world war Podcast 42: Prisoners Of War
One of the places in England that I lived in for a few years was Newcastle, in the north-east. So, here's some Geordie...
Yes as Tom said accents vary over just a few miles and they can get easily changed by influences such as TV programmes. I know most English accents and can mimic some, but when it comes to Scottish, Irish or Welsh ones I am not so good, I can differentiate a few Scottish ones because I spent a lot of time there on vacations. American accents I am aware of but simply the ones I have observed in movies such as the Southern drawl and a few others but I am pretty much lost on any locations. It's interesting to note that Lisa not being a native speaker of English, cannot differentiate between American and English accents, nor which class of society the accent comes from in England, except by the type of grammar spoken.