Northern British accent?

Guest   Sun Aug 10, 2008 5:31 pm GMT
Hello,

I've been listening to different English accents for a few years now, and after focussing on American English for a while, I decided to study British English.
I especially like the Northern accent for some reason, and I wanted to know if someone could help me write down the specificities of Northern British English.
I noticed that the sound that you found in 'pub' or 'shut' often sounds more like the o of the word 'book'.
Apparently, there's also a tendency to drop the h in certain circumstances and to do the same with the th and to lengthen the 'long a' sound.
However, I'm sure there are other things that give away a Northern British accent. That's why I need your help because there are probably native speakers from Great Britain here :)

P.S.: I'm asking this question for listening comprehension purposes mainly, since around a third of the programmes that I watch on a regular basis are shot somewhere in the North.
Guest   Sun Aug 10, 2008 5:49 pm GMT
I can respond more fully at a later time but before ah has to go aht t'poob wi me mairts I just wannt to tell thee that thurr be several kinds of Northern British accents, including Scottish if you'll allow me to be pedantic.

Do you just mean Northern ENGLISH accents? Just to complicate things even further, there are variations there too! Lancashire - Cumbrian - East Yorkshire - North Yorkshire - West Yorkshire - Geordie - Scouse......
Very noticeable differences in them all really, but the main feature is the flat letter "A"....a commonality there I reckon.
Guest   Sun Aug 10, 2008 7:45 pm GMT
Haha, I love your answer!
Yes, Northern English accents will do. I know that there isn't one Northern accent. I'm most interested in the first new 'Doctor Who' accent and generally Lancashire / Great Manchester / Cumbrian accents because that's where the programmes I watch are shot or that's the city of origin of the actors.
You nailed something here. I had that doubt about the 'I', so I've not been dreaming, it's in fact sometimes said as 'a'.
It'd be great if you could describe me the accent(s) you're familiar with. I don't want to get all mixed up with the different Northern accents because I don't think that would help me with understanding them more.
I'm also keen on learning some regional dialect / slang :)

Thank you!
George   Sun Aug 10, 2008 9:04 pm GMT
The British Library site

www.bl.uk/soundsfamiliar

is quite interesting to have a look at. Really it's impossible not to get 'mixed up' with the different accents; there's no one accent in the North, the accents are more geographically specific than that and there is too much variety within them. The author of the 5.49pm post seems to be writing as someone from Yorkshire might speak. There are also a fair few non-standard words which are used to, including different verb conjugations and other grammatical structures and, of course, vocabulary. I'm not from the North, but I learnt a few once, but have now forgotten the interesting ones (!). Hopefully someone else might post a few, or I can find out some from my friends later.

One question I would like answered... I've been told the pronouns like thou and thee, which still are used in some dialects, aren't used exactly as they used to be in standard Early Modern English. Can anyone give a grammar for their usage? I've never managed to find this elsewhere on the internet.
Damian in Edinburgh   Mon Aug 11, 2008 7:04 am GMT
The "Guest" who responded at 5:49pm 10 Aug was me - I forgot to add my handle. George referred to the type of accent as spoken by someone from Yorkshire - that's the Northern English accent I'm most familiar with as I was at uni in Leeds, West Yorkshire and heard it in all its glory, which is why I replicated it as best I could - that's about the way I heard so many of them speak. The use of "thee" and "thou" is STILL used in the context of the local Yorkshire accent but as far as I could tell (as an exiled Scot for the duration) it is pretty much restricted to certain groups - particularly by older people.

For instance, you only have to go a short distance from Leeds and you are up in the Dales (very rural hilly areas) - Wensleydale, Wharfedale and all the other Yorkshire Dales, and you only have to sit in the public bar of a village pub in the Dales and you hear the old guys saying things like "Ah, thee's best be goin' oop on t'roahd to Skipton, lad, and thee's on tha' weh to t'best sights in England, and the beer's the best in t'land as well, tha'can be sure of that".

It seemed to me that they used "thee" more often that they did "thou" but so strong is the accent among some of the the older people in particular that you can't really be sure whether they are saying "thee" or "thou" as grammatical rules don't really apply all that much.

The main feature of the Yorkshire accent (and the Lancashire accent as well) is the way the definite article is reduced to just the initial letter "t" so that "the pub" (totally unlike the Southern English English version) comes out like "t'poob" to rhyme with the vowel sound in "foot" - short and sharp.

From the west of Leeds, on a clear day, you can see the Pennines - a mountain range running up the backbone of Northern England, from the Peak District of Derbyshire all the way up to the Scottish border, and forming the barrier between Yorkshire and Lancashire on the way. The Wars of the Roses comes to mind here - the red rose of the House of Lancaster (Lancashire) and the white rose of the House of York (Yorkshire).

West of the Pennines, in Lancashire, there are very clear differences from "Yorkshire speak", especially in the enunciation of the "ou" sound in words like "out" and "about" in Lancashire. In fact it's fairly similar to the Canadian pronunciation of this sound, which is the main clue to the Candadian version of the North American accent.

Another peculiarity of the Lancashire accent is the way some of them, again older people, emphasise what they have said by repeating some of it, much like that old guy Fred did in "Coronation Street" - set in the Manchester area. As in something like "I'm off down the Rovers I say, I'm off down the Rovers!" The Rovers being the pub, of course - properly known as The Rover's Return".
AJC   Mon Aug 11, 2008 9:23 am GMT
In broad terms, the accents of Yorkshire, Lancashire and Cumbria have most in common, while the North East differs in some significant ways and Merseyside is very specific to itself. But there's a lot of variation even within the one area. The pronunciation of "pub" with [U] is common across the north, for example, but you'd need to be careful that the words you *expect* to have [U] in still do. For instance, "book" is more likely to be pronounced with a vowel like that of "goose", in contrast with the vowel in "buck", which would have the "foot" vowel. You can often pin an accent down to a fairly precise location by which words this is true of, for example "look" is pronounced like "luck" in most of the north, but like "Luke" in some very specific areas.
Guest   Mon Aug 11, 2008 11:00 am GMT
Thank you very much for your answers.
They are really interesting and you've really helped me. I also watch Coronation Street from time to time, and I'll pay attention to those features.
Northern accents are really interesting :)
Damian in Edinburgh   Mon Aug 11, 2008 4:06 pm GMT
***For instance, "book" is more likely to be pronounced with a vowel like that of "goose"***

That is so true, particularly in the Lancashire accent, and the age of the speaker is irrelevant - they all speak that way. It's quite funny to listen to if you are not from that area or region of Northern England.

For instance you could hear someone say: "Luke - you can look at my book if you want to learn to cook", and all three of those words with the "-oo-" all rhyme with the Lancastrian way of saying the name Luke - not as rounded as the Southern English way, or as short and sharp as the Scottish way - the Lancashire way is more of a diphthong really, as if they are saying: "Luke, you can luke at my buke if you want to learn to cuke". It's difficult to describe in words - you really have to listen to it. Maybe that famed BBC UK Voices website has a typical Lancastrian accent somewhere on the map.

There is definitely an east-west split on the Northern English English accents - it's those Pennines that split the differences straight down the middle, as I said. Travel the M62 motorway up from Lancashire and the Manchester metropolitain area, across the Pennine range, over Moss Moor and Rishworth Moor and across the border into Yorkshire, down into the Bradford, Huddersfield and Leeds metropolitan area, and you are in a totally different world accent wise.

Not quite as graphic as driving from France to the Flemish speaking area of Belgium, which we did not so long ago, a mate and I. We had lunch in Armentieres, a throughly French speaking town with that fantastic church with the crowning golden Madonna (now replacing the one totally destroyed, along with most of the town, in WW1) shining all golden across the city and visible for miles across the flat plain of Flanders. Travel 4km along the road through the outskirts of the town and you come across the huge "Belgique" sign on the usual blue EU emblem with the golden circle of stars all along the rim of the circle. It's the Franco/Belgian border - one side of the street is in France and the other in Belgium. Suddenly all the parked cars with the "F" sign on the blue EU circle and the French registration number plates give way to the "B" on the emblem and the Belgian registration number plates.

The French roadsigns give way to Flemish absolutely. About 7km further along the road we enter the outskirts of the town of Ieper, which is the way the former town of Ypres is now officially called. Or as the British Tommies (soldiers of WW1 who sadly died in their gazillions in the area on the Somme and the Ypres Salient battlefields at the time 1914-1918) used to call the name of the town - Wipers is all those poor blokes could manage in their British way.

Walk around Ieper and you will hear practically no French at all - it's all Flemish and all signs are in Flemish. All in a matter of about 12km or so from French speaking Armentieres, home to that lovely Mademoiselle so beloved by those Tommies.

Ieper was wiped off the map in that terrible war, but is now a very beautifully restored town with a fantastic Cloth Hall, Museum, cobbled streets, fantastic cafes - and a magnificent Menin Gate bearing the names of many thousands of British Tommies who perished in the cause of freedom for Belgium, the other Low Countries and France, and who are remembered without fail in a ceremony at 20:00hrs each and every day of the week inside that great archway which is closed to traffc for the duration of the ceremony.

The only "war" in Belgium these days is a linguistic one, which is so interesting.
Trawicks   Tue Aug 12, 2008 6:03 pm GMT
Here are the basic features of a Northern accent:

--KITE-lengthening: The /ai/ dipthong is lengthened so that 'time' is pronounced [ta:Im].

--the STRUT-FOOT merger, as mentioned often.

--COT-CAUGHT quality-merging: traditional /Q/ and /O/ phonemes are usually only distinguished by quality (eg. 'pod' [pQd] vs. 'pawed' [pQ:d]).

--BATH-TRAP merger: both are pronounced with [a].

Of course there are a number of regional variations:

--the GOAT dipthong has a fairly large variety of pronunciations, even within the same city. Liverpool typically uses [OU], Manchester is typically [ou], Sheffield and Leeds are typically [O:] (with the latter city known to occasionally front this vowel to [8:]).

--Liverpool's vowel inventory is similar to Manchester, but it's distinguished strongly by its consonants, which are heavily influenced by Hiberno-English. Final plosives often become fricatives ('back' [bax], 'kit' [kIts]), 'th' is often dentalized and like Dublin English, 't's are often elided at the end of words (eg. 'doing it' [du@n @]). Also, Scouse differs from other Northern dialects in that final 'y' is tensed (eg. 'daily' is [deIlE] in Manchester, but [deIli:] in Scouse.

--Sheffield is somewhat different as well, perhaps due to its proximity to the midlands. MOUTH words are often monophthongal (eg. 'town' [ta:n]) and /a/ is usually backer--hence 'tide' is often pronounced [tA:Id] (rather than the more common Northern [ta:Id]) and 'cart' is usually [kA:t] is in Southern England. NORTH words are often pronounced somewhat as they are in New York City English (i.e. [nU@T]).

I haven't included rural variants here, and also left out Tyneside English, which is something different entirely.
AJC   Tue Aug 12, 2008 6:42 pm GMT
I'd prefer to state the difference as being with North East rather than specifically Tyneside English. The differences within the region are small compared with those between the North East and the rest of the North of England.
Trawicks   Tue Aug 12, 2008 6:57 pm GMT
<<--COT-CAUGHT quality-merging: traditional /Q/ and /O/ phonemes are usually only distinguished by quality (eg. 'pod' [pQd] vs. 'pawed' [pQ:d]).>>

Sorry, I mean distinguished by LENGTH here.