al_yrpal wrote:I'm a mixture of SW Essex and Cockney. When I say " thats as black as Newgates knocker", it sounds like "thats as black as Newgits knocker" . Common as muck!
Al
Having lived and worked in Essex for 10 years, I know exactly the accent you mean. Lots of people in rural Essex knock it as having been 'exported' from the East End when they built the new towns (e.g. Basildon), but I like it & find it generally easy to understand.
The only problem is that the next generation have not learned proper enunciation in school and they slur all the sounds together. That lack of distinction in that accent between 'e', 'a', 'i' and almost any soft vowel can make it difficult to understand. Some of the younger folks I worked with, would've said something closer to 'thasa blackza Newgits knockuh'. there was a young lady who worked in the petrol station at Wickford (I often bought fuel there) who did this so badly, I completely could not understand her. She'd say how much, and I'd look at the numbers on the till. One day, after I'd been going in there fairly regularly for a few years, she something after I'd paid. It sounded like 'weh?' She said it a few times, and finally gave up and said I didn't understand. Someone else there, laughing at me, said 'She just asked how you are!' It seems it was a variant on the ' are you alright?', which often becomes 'ahrigh?' or just 'righ?' That itself took me a few months to get used to when I moved there. 'weh?' just didn't have any meaning for me, until it was translated!
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