A question to Southerners though,
can you tell the difference between Northen accents? ie: can you tell if someone is from Yorkshire,Cheshire,Lancashire,Manchester, and (an easy one) the nort east?
Or do all the Northen accents sound similar?
Because when I went down to northampton and Peterborough, to be honest they sounded very similar to London aceents, i could only really identify if someone is from the South-west of england, or the south east...
Any thoughts?
I think you have to be British to tell the difference. When I was in England last, I could tell the difference usually between one general area in England, but never between towns like my cousins can do. One of my cousins whose hobby is the English language and culture, can tel you what town a person comes from just by listening to the accent.
Londoner: erm... great propaganda of our City...
Robert, it's fairly easy to tell the difference between all the Northern accents, they're all quite different and easy to recognise
i would imagine they are easier to recognise than places in the South but living here all my life i find it easy,
for eg all these places can be picked up by accent, obviously some more than others..
Portsmouth, Slough, Reading, Surrey, Kent, Essex, Swindon
they all have people that speak mostly the same but older folk speak the strongest regional dialect which i think is easy to tell
My message "aye, aye, Clark" was in response to your statement about most people who don't know their geography being Americans. Very amusing, accurate, and frank indeed.
All right; why the question mark? I still do not get it?
well do you think it is easy to tell the difference (in accent) between someone from Stockport, and someone from Manchester?
It's much easier to recognise the accents of your own area than the others in your country. I could recognise a Londoner, and someone from the South-West, but after that I'd be guessing which town they came from. But come further North and I'd be able to tell the difference between someone from Barnsley and someone from Leeds or Manchester. Newcastle and Liverpool are very easy ones to distinguish. The lancashire and Yorkshire accent sound quite similar, but you can tell them apart! :-)
It's also weird how Manchester is classed as Lancashire, but the accent is nothing like Lancastrian (ie:Burnley,Bolton,Blackburn,Oldham).
The Manchester accent is more similar to the Cheshire accent (ie:Macclesfield,Crewe,Stockport)
And the Stopfordian accent is basically a softer version of mancunian, without the slang.
It's also weird how Manchester is classed as Lancashire, but the accent is nothing like Lancastrian
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Yes it is,
Anyway, Didn't Manchester used to be part of Lancashire.
Manchester part of Lancashire? Suppose it did at one time. Betty used to make a lancashire hotpot in the Rovers Return!! It's now has it's own county Manchester doesn't it?
This is not so wierd (Manchester/Lancashire) because if people outside of London speak with London accents it's by affectation and not natural developments.
What about Mike Reid (Frank Butcher)? Can you imagine him in Reading or Brighton?
Take the big American cities New York, Los Angeles, Washington, San Francisco, Chicago etc. Are the accents traditionally associated with these cities similar to those found in their rural hinterlands?
Yeah London was once London, Middlesex, bits of Essex, bits of Surrey. It was great then - Now it's greater. Greater London.
erm....thanx for the advice, mate...