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Category Archives: British English
Was There Ever a ‘Veddy British’ R?
One of the supposed traits of older types of British Received Pronunciation is that /r/ can be a tapped sound (for those reading this week, this sound is similar to the ‘tt’ in American ‘butter’). In ‘traditional’ RP, this typically occurs … Continue reading
Auld Lang Syne FAQ
Last night was New Years’ Eve, which brings about the yearly revival of the song Auld Lang Syne. Originally penned by Robert Burns (the melody is traditional), the lyrics are in the Scots language (or dialect, depending on your point of … Continue reading
Leeds or Manchester?
Turning back to the world of accent minutiae, a reader emailed me with a conundrum regarding the difference between Leeds and Manchester accents. This concerns ‘punk poet’ John Cooper Clarke, from Salford in Greater Manchester: I like to think of … Continue reading
Posted in British English, Uncategorized Tagged celebrity accents, Northern English accents, phonetics 30 Comments
Accent of a Contrarian: Christopher Hitchens
Christopher Hitchens passed away yesterday. His controversial life is far beyond the purview of a blog about dialects, yet I can think of few people with an accent as inextricably linked with their personality. Here is a brief clip of … Continue reading
The Cornish Accent?
Half of my last name is ‘Trawick,’ which is a Cornish surname. Or rather, Anglicized Cornish–it apparently derives from ‘Traweek.’ I’ve seen a few competing ‘Trawick’ etymologies, but after some ancestral research, this seems the most plausible contender. As such, I’ve developed … Continue reading
Anovver Fing About Th-Fronting
In our discussions of dialect evolution in the UK, a common denominator is th-fronting. To review: th-fronters turn ‘th‘ words into ‘f’ or ‘v’ words: ‘thing’ becomes ‘fing,’ ‘bother’ becomes ‘bovver,’ and ‘both’ becomes ‘bof.’ It’s a feature common in … Continue reading
Multicultural London ‘Oo’
One of English’s most rapidly evolving dialects is what is known as Multicultural London English (MLE). In a nutshell, MLE is a ‘young’ dialect (one might mark the birthday cutoff at 1970) that incorporates elements of Caribbean English and other ‘non-native’ … Continue reading
Posted in British English Tagged Cockney, Multicultural London English (Jafaican), phonetics 20 Comments
Accents at the Renaissance Faire
Yesterday I went to the Renaissance Faire. For those unfamiliar with this tradition, the Ren Faire is a type of festival set in a milieu vaguely indicative of the Renaissance, with jousts, fortune tellers, mead, period music, and Elizabethan costumes. … Continue reading
Why Geordie is Hard to Understand
Of the many wonderful sections of the British Library site, one of my favorites is this fabulous dissection of the Geordie dialect of English (i.e. the dialect spoken in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne). It presents, in immaculate detail, all of the salient phonological … Continue reading
The Most Controversial Thing I Said on this Site
Writing about dialects (or anything language-related), it’s hard to avoid disagreement. Yet of all the things I’ve said here, my most controversial statement, it seems, is something fairly trivial. That would be my assertion that comedian Ricky Gervais speaks with an … Continue reading