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My accent was definitely influenced, all accents are; they are influenced by how those around us speak.  Mine was influenced, perhaps constructed to some extent, but not by regional influences, save in the reverse sense of being told to eschew village dialect.

 

If I had a choice, I'd happily go native, as I have never felt more at home anywhere in the world than I do in the North East, but, unlike my son, I am probably too old now for accent adaptation.  It turns out that my Yorkshire roots go far deeper than my Leicestershire ones.  Much as I retain affection for the area in which I spent most of my childhood, I have never felt at home there, despite attempting to settle there later in life. It took me a while to realise it, but the call home was from further north.  Looking back, it was the times in childhood spent with family in Yorkshire that made the greatest impression and were the happiest at the time.  Here I am in the 'debatable lands' between the North Riding and the County Palatine and it feels like coming home.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited by Edwardian
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Accent? what accent? i'm told i once could converse with Greek children but now its all Greek to me.

I arrived in Northern Ireland with the above,

I arrived in Wiltshire with the above,

I arrived in the Hebridies with the above.. oooh Arrr,

I never learnt the Gaidhlig.

I was (or my Dad was, attached to the army).

I got the bland ish army sound..

I joined the RAF I go t the airmans accent for that..

I've been many places since , the longest I've lived anywhere is in Norfolk now 18 years. But There are very few Norfolk speakers left So

I haven't learnt that..

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Rubbish app, i’d say.

 

It thinks that I come from Effingham, Datchet, or, most likely, Bruton in Somerset.

 

All wrong, Bruton spectacularly so. I’ve only been there once, for an evening.

 

Edit: I gave it a second chance, going much more carefully, and it was much warmer that time.

 

Edited by Nearholmer
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1 minute ago, Nearholmer said:

 It might help if the survey at the end, where it asks where you really come from, worked properly, because I assume that it is attempting to calibrate itself on that basis.

 

Presumably it was working fine until The Q answered the survey!

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What fascinates me is the wide variations in such small areas. Cumbrian, Scouse, Mancuian, Yorkshire and Geordie all in the North and no doubt, Durham, Northumbria have their own. In the West Midlands both Brummie and Black country showed regional variations within their patches. Living in the borders I could spot differences between West ,South and North Welsh. In Cardiff I came across fluent Welsh spoken with a Chinese influence.

Like others I have picked up bits in our various moves. When we went to Birmingham, Marion's fellow workers found her north Hampshire/Berkshire border rural accent hilarious yet 18 months later we moved to Shropshire where it attracted little comment.

 

Don

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2 hours ago, Donw said:

Geordie all in the North and no doubt, Durham, Northumbria have their own

When I lived (in ireland) with Americans they were amazed that I could distinguish where people were from in the north east to an accuracy of within 10 miles or so (there are clear differences between newcastle, pitmatic northumbrian, tynedale, blyth/tynemouth, south shields, sunderland and Teesside to me).

On one occasion I met someone in the back end of Dublin who when asked said he was from newcastle (generally my answer when asked and I'm in a foreign land), no you aren't, I replied, where are you really from? Just north of newcastle he replied, I again queried where, eventually narrowing it down to him having lived 800 yards from where i lived until the age of 10.

My own accent isn't too strong (never has been), I suspect because my parent's isn't.

 

I once had a quite disturbing conversation with a new zealander working in b&q, until I realised he was actually asking if I was interested in decking in the garden...

Edited by brack
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Not quite the same as Brack’s, but in Ireland, outside a pub in Killarney, a youngish chap who I didn’t know from Adam came up and said “You’re Mr Nearholm, aren’t you?” (Remaining pseudonymous). “Yes” says I, “how the dickens do you know that?”. “You look so much like the headmaster at the school I went to that you could only be his brother.”. Which I am.

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2 hours ago, Edwardian said:

Just replayed your last line in a Kiwi accent; wine-spitting-out-with-hilarity moment. Sorry!

True story: some friends in Auckland were slightly taken aback when their new neighbour invited them to see his deck...

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Born and bred in Norf Lunnon, when I moved to Scotland some folk thought I had an Australian accent - which, given where I now live, is quite interesting.

 

It's not only accents either - I have picked up various words that are specific to some of the locations where I have lived. For example, only when I am in Scotland, or with Scots friends, do I say "outwith" and "forbye".

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When I was at university in Swansea I had friends whop could tell which South Wales valley other students came from.

It is not just English which has dialects, of course. I remember when we were teaching English (American by the way!) in Kosovo one student saying to another "Speak to me in English. I can't understand your Albanian" - that being the local language, and like Welsh having Northern and Southern variants, the Southern variant being regarded as "correct" and taught in the schools, though that doesn't seem to affect how those in the north speak.

And on one occasion we had American friends who could not understand one of their number from the deep south - though we could.

Jonathan

PS Is there meant to be any connection between this discussion and railways? Just asking.

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Teddington is north of the river (just) and rather genteel - London & South Western territory, where they complained when Drummond gave his engines Caledonian hooters (he had to replace them with something a little more refined). I was at the station one evening over 20 years ago (grief!) when a SWT man came round to explain in person the delay to our train - held up at New Malden - "A fy' on the train". "A fire on the train?" "No, no' a fi', a fy'!" - the conversation went on like this for some minutes until it was understood that he meant a fight.

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As an Australian in my 70s I find it refreshing that over the last 25 years or so we have lost the cultural cringe that we had concerning our accent. Even into the 1970s our radio and TV announcers seemed to be trained to speak in a version of that received pronunciation developed in Britain as a sort of national standard. In Australia it was quite odd because the underlying Australian accent gave it a slightly strangulated higher pitch which made it sound obviously forced and unnatural.   

 

The post war Australia that I grew up in was a period of massive immigration so I grew up with all sorts of people speaking accented English and there are now pockets of locally accented English and odd word usage spoken by the children and grand children now of the post-war migrants from all over Europe and now Asia. It's actually a good thing as it more or less killed of the strangulated accent of our take on RP.

 

Some years ago I worked with a chap who had migrated from N. Ireland and when I first worked with him I found that I could understand anything he said in his distinctive accent. In the field i was working it was not unusual for people to move around and some years later he and I were working together again and both of us had got older. I must admit that I began to find his accent then almost incomprehensible - either my hearing was changing or his accent had thickened as he got older. It was quite odd really, and a bit embarrassing because he was a very pleasant bloke and I was trying desperately not to offend him because at times I couldn't understand what he was saying. Accents are like that - to the speaker they are absolutely unnoticed and it's everyone else who speaks oddly.         

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In North Queensland it's a choice between the crocs tearing people apart or Bob Katter tearing the language apart.

 

BTW I've had personal experience of the big saltwater crocs in that part of Australia while doing archaeological surveys but on balance Katter tends to worry me more :sclerosis: 

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My other half is Greek/Canadian. You can insult a Canadian by asking "Are you American?", but strangely not the other way round. My father-in-law, also Greek/Canadian, cannot understand most British accents (especially when it suits him not to do so). Regional accents/dialects everywhere, can differ greatly in any country.

 

After living in Hampshire for the last forty-five years, I have a very developed Hampshire hog accent. When I fist settled here however, I had very little accent so was considered to 'talk posh'.

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This thread does travel doesn't it?

I'm afraid my experience is very limited and I have never encountered a salt-water crocodile.

I have seen quite widely separated (ie on quite a large head) crocodilian eyes peering above the water in a West African tidal creek.

Also, on occasion, I did blame a crocodile for cutting my anchor line, or possibly eating the anchor which was quite a small one.

But that was another story.

 

The points I was going to make before being distracted by splendid survivors of the Eocene (I had to look that up), are that:

W E Gladstone was noted as having retained a Lancashire accent in the House of Commons.

G Stephenson was accused of being 'foreign' in a committee of that institution.

 

I shall ignore the fascinations of the New Model Army (red coats and all) and must start preparations for a large tour group at Locomotion (the national Railway Museum at Shildon).

We get all kinds of accents and indeed nationalities, but no crocodiles recently even GWR ones. 

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My wife went to a Girls High School which had previously been a fee-paying school, where the intention was to output "Young Ladies",  so almost her first classes were Elocution, to eradicate all the local accents. They also instilled a love of singing which she still does in various choirs, religious and secular. It's a hobby more time consuming than Railway Modelling!  

Sorry... almost back on topic there!

Edited by DonB
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