Cycling UK Forum

I'm from Suffolk... We don't often use the word.

Say the following poem out loud, and listen to yourself:

Father's car is a Jaguar, and it can go quite fast.
Castles and farms and draughty barns, we go charging past.
Arthur's cart is far less smart, and can't go half as fast,
But I'd rather ride on Arthur's cart than my papa's fast car.

The radio, and more recently telly have gone quite some way towards standardising our speech. When I was 9 we moved from Leeds to Castleford - a distance of perhaps a dozen miles - and it was almost a different lingo. Apart from that, I remember two ways of pronouncing the name of our capital city. We said Lundun but people like John Snagge on the BBC Home Service said something more like London. As I spread my wings as a teenager, I found that many of the people who lived there said something like Laarn'n. I seem to remember Hudderfield lad, the Rt Hon H Wilson, saying he was twenty before he realised that Bradford had two d's in it.

thirdcrank wrote:The radio, and more recently telly have gone quite some way towards standardising our speech. When I was 9 we moved from Leeds to Castleford - a distance of perhaps a dozen miles - and it was almost a different lingo. Apart from that, I remember two ways of pronouncing the name of our capital city. We said Lundun but people like John Snagge on the BBC Home Service said something more like London. As I spread my wings as a teenager, I found that many of the people who lived there said something like Laarn'n. I seem to remember Hudderfield lad, the Rt Hon H Wilson, saying he was twenty before he realised that Bradford had two d's in it.

Regional accents are now "in vogue" on the TV. So much so that Mrs MWS who has some minor hearing impairment can't understand what some of the presenters are saying! Especially the Northern Ireland and Geordie accents. I had a Glaswegian neighbour some years ago who liked to pass the time of day. I probably only understood about 25% of what he was saying. Fortunately watching a couple of series of Rab C Nesbitt, educated me sufficiently to able to converse with him. In America, I had real trouble understanding some of them, especially the hispanics.

I suspect there are now few people speaking with a regional accent in England, at least, whose accent and dialect are so strong as to be unintelligible to other reasonably competent speakers of English. That's another way of saying most of us now speak pretrty much the same language, with regional accents. They do say that the first time regional accents - not dialects - were acceptable on the beeb was during WWII when people like Wilfred Pickles were recruted as news readers to counter a supposed Nazi plan to use their own news readers, with posh English. AFAIK, that was also when BBC news readers began to introduce themselves by name at the start of the news for the same reason.

I don't "professional" Yorkshiremen - Parkinson being one example. There's somebody who does the voice over on Big Brother. I'd be interested to hear from somebody from that neck of the woods if there are people who talk like that. I presume that the accent is contrived.