What English do you read, write, speak?

[Cyril Haearn]

I speak Oxford English, or I used to, haven't lived there for a while and I speak mostly German now, my English is not quite right any more, people notice that occasionally

I grew up in Manchester and it took me a while and a lot of effort to drop that accent. I live in Berlin now, an English speaking city , and my wife (from Singapore) tells me that under the influence of a few pils I revert to Mancunian German, which no-one understands. Mancunian English is just the same here, no-one knows what I am on about. It's hard work for me in Germany and Singapore.

Yes, a CDU politician complained that he could not get served in German, the waiters speak English, or try to

[reohn2]

......lIs there a hard divide between Lancashire and Yorkshire?

No there isn't,they try their best to sound Lancashire for obvious reasons

That's done it

[CliveyT]

For me heavily disguised Cornish which reasserts itself very quickly whenever I'm back 'ome.
The accent but not the dialect reappear whenever I have to project my voice
And I frequently swear in Finnish so 99.9% of the world don't know what I'm saying

[djnotts]

I write in standard received.....speak Stockport-Manchester altho' I left there 50 years ago. Certainly gets rougher if I'm anywhere that seems to require it! 9 years in Plymouth left me with a tendency to say "or no", but I don't seem to have picked up much else from quite a few places I have passed through.

[ambodach]

West central Scotland/ Glasgow Uni. Tho’ I can still speak Scots as spoken at primary school and later on Ayrshire farms if required.

[PDQ Mobile]

The persistence of an accent is quite an interesting phenomenon.
Indeed it is often the thing that proves the most difficult to acquire when learning a new language.
Younger people are often better at doing so but it is not always so.
Motivation has been shown to be often the most important factor in new language acquisition.
Though there is some research that suggests a Phonemic Inventory is learned young, much like bird song!

It's a philosophical thing in some ways!

The differences in some of the SAME basic sounds between different languages can be very small indeed.
A few thousandths of a second sometimes but the native speaker will hear/notice the difference.
Spanish has only one length of 'i' but English has two.
So "sheet" and "[inappropriate word removed]" are two meanings but this can lead to some problems for a Spanish speaker!!!
( sorry mods examples notoriously difficult to think of)
Think "beet"and "bit"! But not as funny!

Then there are sounds/phonemes that don't exist at all in the mother tongue. The 'th' sound in English or the aspirant 'LL" in Welsh for example.
Some language learners struggle with such new sounds and approximate to the nearest sound equivalent that they possess.
So for example, German speakers will often substitute a 'd' sound for 'th'.
English speakers struggle with the Welsh 'LL' substituting with a simple 'L'.
And more!!

It's pretty interesting and often largely ignored in many Language Schools where the focus is often more upon grammar.

I'll get me coat!

[Spinners]

I love British accents and have very often placed people to where they are from with great accuracy but also occasionally getting it spectacularly wrong. My finest hour was meeting a lady and asking her (after one minute) if she was from Sheffield simply because she sounded like Marti Caine!

My own accent/dialect is 'Swansea' and doesn't seem affected by my Mother who kept her distinctive Middlesbrough accent (not Geordie!) even after living in South Wales for 50 years.

[al_yrpal]

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

[pwa]

......lIs there a hard divide between Lancashire and Yorkshire?

No there isn't,they try their best to sound Lancashire for obvious reasons

That's done it

The best way to think about Lancashire / Yorkshire in this regard is as one area, with a patchwork of accents. The accents in Blackburn and Salford are not quite the same. The accents in Leeds and Hull are not the same. The accent in Liverpool is very different to anything elsewhere in Lancashire.

My own accent is that of Bolton, mellowed a little by spending the last 27 years in South Wales. I like my accent.

[Vorpal]

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!

[Cyril Haearn]

Is Estuary English the new RP?

[pwa]

Is Estuary English the new RP?

Not around here it ain't.

[al_yrpal]

I do know how to speak proper having been educated at SW Essex's best Grammar School on the border of Chigwell. Its just that these days I dont have to. If I get excited my speech becomes more and more Cockney although I am not a Cockney. The bombs were falling heavily when I arrived and instead of the ambulance heading for Whipps Cross to deliver me in a Ceasarian ( just about within sound of Bow Bells), it headed for Epping instead. So amongst a Cockney family, where I learned to speak I was an oddity, not complying with the essential Cockney qualification, which I still is.... As someone brought up in a Cockney family its easy for me to spot fake Cockney expressions. The most annoying one is " the old Bill ", no one ever said that, the Police were the Coppers, and that from someone with a cousin jailed with the Krays. I can spot proper Cockneys like Len Goodman by their speech, particularly the way they roll certain words.

Al

[old_windbag]

Heres a chirpy london coster monger( gus elen ) singing a little ditty, even mentions "newgit".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5VnxNBf1CRE

The first line will have the PC brigade shouting for the moderators but if you listen to the words a family day out hasn't changed much in 120+yrs. This rendition was done to record many artists acts when talking pictures arrived. They were old and near the end of life but good they filmed them for posterity.

[661-Pete]

This has to be my favourite object-lesson on talking 'proper':
[youtube]u4VFqbroi1I[/youtube]