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Category Archives: British English
Singing in Dialect, Part 2: When Brits Go GenAm
Like many young urbanites in the 2000s, I was obsessed with Joy Division. I’m not sure why this two-decades defunct* band from Manchester touched a nerve, but touch a nerve it did. Yet I always found it perplexing the way … Continue reading
Has North Wales “Gone Scouse?”
Many feel that accents in North Wales have begun to resemble those of Liverpool. Unlike similar notions, this one has evidence behind it, as I’ll discuss later. But first, let’s hear for ourselves. Below is a snippet of the speech … Continue reading
Is Rhyming Slang Irish?
An old saying goes “the Brits may have invented English, but the Irish perfected it.” Or maybe that refers to stout. Either way, there is truth to the sentiment: Ireland (besides providing the language with some of its most colorful … Continue reading
The Cockney v/w Mystery
When I think of ‘Cockney,’ my mind goes to gritty 1960’s tough guy films: Poor Cow, Get Carter, that kind of thing. That is, I imagine something like the hilarious ‘duelling Michael Caines’ from the Michael Winterbottom comedy The Trip: We … Continue reading
British ‘LOT’, 2012
The last post inspired a brief debate in the comments section about the LOT vowel (i.e. the ‘o’ in ‘not,’ ‘Todd,’ and ‘rot’) in contemporary British English. The question, it seems, is whether this sound has shifted closer to the vowel space … Continue reading
Whatever Happened to the Northumbrian /r/?
As I’ve previously discussed, English accents exhibit various types of /r/ sounds. Yet few are as peculiar as the /r/ once typical of an accent known as the Northumbrian burr, spoken in rural areas of Northeast England. The burr was notorious … Continue reading
The Englishness of H-Dropping
Longtime readers may notice that I rarely discuss h-dropping. Novices might remember this accent feature from some unfortunate community theatre production of ‘My Fair Lady‘ in which the actress playing Eliza Doolittle bleats ”enry ‘iggins!’ Systematic h-droppers drop the letter ‘h’ at … Continue reading
Posted in British English Tagged class and accent, Cockney, Northern English accents, phonetics 37 Comments
How Dirty was ‘Bloody?’
When I was in elementary school, a teacher informed me that “in England, ‘bloody‘ is a dirty word.” Even at eight years old, this sounded like an exaggeration, the linguistic equivalent of those stuffy Victorians who were shocked by ankles. … Continue reading
The Accents in Downton Abbey
I am apparently the last person in the English-speaking world to watch Downton Abbey, but got a chance to see the first series over the past two evenings. For the unfamiliar, the show takes place in an English country estate … Continue reading
Circumstances – Circumstnses
Forgive the trivial nature of today’s post, but I’m curious about a minute detail of British pronunciation. That would be the word ‘circumstance.’ To clarify, when I say ‘British pronunciation’ here, I’m referring to the word’s pronunciation in British RP and … Continue reading