It's like the audio, isn't it? Answers are everywhere but many couldn't see them.In my country there are many languages with very different accents. And I speak around 10 languages...
What makes the accent remain unchanged, is when the accent is associated with an identity of a group (area, culture, groups, whatever). For example, "I'm from Texas. My father from Texas, my mother from Texas. And this is how we speak" (*using Texas accent of course*).
I remember getting lost soon after We arrived in the UK in 1993. We were looking for a place called Meopham in Kent which we pronounced as meo-fam. Anyway, after driving around for 30 minutes in the dark with the wife yackety-yacketing at me to stop and ask directions and the kids (5 and 7 at the time) whining in the back seat, I pulled into the parking lot of a supermarket and asked a local. Its pronounced 'mep-am' and was about half a mile up the road.
There's no doubt though, the range of accents in the UK is amazing for such a small geographical area. I mean , where does the brummie accent come from? Its only about 80 miles from London. Scouse as well - just 40 miles from Manchester - may as well be another country!
There's no doubt though, the range of accents in the UK is amazing for such a small geographical area. I mean , where does the brummie accent come from? Its only about 80 miles from London. Scouse as well - just 40 miles from Manchester - may as well be another country!
Like the way they discover Arkansas isn't just Kansas with a nautical inflection.
that is interesting indeed and may hold the key to accents and how they develop. even more so, throw in class/ economic standings.
In the eastern seaboard USA it can be much the same. for example ppl in Mass can place you within a city 10 miles apart, be it Glouster , Boston, Fallriver, and more.
Quite true!
There's also the small town of Conetoe, pronounced kuh-nee'-tuh, and Bahama, which is pronounced buh-hay'-muh...
Then there's the Lumbee tribe of Robeson County - or should I say, "Thyre's the Lumbee troibe uh Robiss'n Ki-nee". Good folks, I should say. Their relative isolation has helped them maintain patterns of speech very similar to those found on Ocracoke and Tangier Islands. I've read those dialects are an artifact of those spoken by the original English colonists.
-Larry - a North Carolinian in exile...
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Canada was largely populated by the Scots - as was the North of Ireland. To many here the accents of both Canada and N.Ireland have more in common than the fact of this historic connection.
This part of Scotland not only has a very broad accent, but one which varies between towns as close as 16 miles from each other. [The broadest versions can be very broad indeed].
[My ex-wife is English and came to live in Ireland back in the mid 60s. She had absolutely no problems understanding (in full) everything which was said by a broad accented lad with a severe cleft palate, whereas his lifelong friends could hardly understand a word he uttered].
This part of Scotland not only has a very broad accent, but one which varies between towns as close as 16 miles from each other. [The broadest versions can be very broad indeed].
[My ex-wife is English and came to live in Ireland back in the mid 60s. She had absolutely no problems understanding (in full) everything which was said by a broad accented lad with a severe cleft palate, whereas his lifelong friends could hardly understand a word he uttered].
Btw the tribe the romans called 'Scotti' was an irish one who settled western Scotland after the Romans left Britain and eventually replaced the entire indigenous pictish population of Scotland.
That was about a thousand years before the english language came into use in those areas through conquest by England.
(knick knack, Paddy Whacker. Give the Dag a bone)
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