Scottish/Irish Accents

[highlander_Daz]

he is speaking slowly presuambly so people can understand, and in a lot of places people speak fiarly slowly, again thats a Glasgow thing to speak very quickly, its a good opportunity for any to study becasue he is speaknig verys slowly, howevr there is a very distinctive English "geordie" twang to his accent which you often find in border accents, again its yet another example of one of many Scots accents.
Archangel -the lady in 3 lives of Thomasina was Susan Hampshire who now plays "Molly" in Monarch of the glen. when Monarch first started Molly had an English accent you could have cut glass with , now she has an Edinburgh "lilt"

[Graham]

I just got an email to say that it's been shipped, took them long enough, I'll report back when it arrives!

[Jimmy Carbomb]

What an absolutely fantastic thread! Nicely done... and one that's interesting.

My Grandfather has the classic Irish/Canadian accent. Lord, was he hard to understand?!!!

There was a show on PBS around May that was all about American dialects and accents. According to the narrator, the producers had identified some 90 unique dialects in the lower 48 states. By "unique", that means that Brooklyn and Jersey City are not all that different to garnish their own dialect... but North Boston and South Boston were a distinct difference. The East Coast and the Heartlands carried the load.

[Macman]

This whole thing on accents is great. I like to try to mimic most accents I hear, but I don't do it that well. The one accent I couldn't even try to mimic was from a guy at an Indian take-out in Edinburgh; he spoke English with a blend of East Indian and Scottish that I can't even begin to describe.
I have a client who was from Newfoundland, but had no trace of the typical Newfie accent. He sounded like he was from Tronna, and I guess it was from living in Ontario that he lost his Newfie accent.
My wife and her brother were both born in Brooklyn. He has a big, loud, New York voice and accent that I totally love. She has no discernable accent, to me anyway. When she tells people here in Victoria, B.C. that she's from New York City, they can't believe it.
Of course, I speak English with no trace of any accent whatsover!;)

[davedove]

I felt sort of sorry for some of the working people in London when I visited. As anyone who's been to London knows, many of the lower paying jobs like waiters are filled with people from Eastern Europe. So these people have learned to understand english as spoken by people from the London area. Then someone like me shows up with my southern midwestern US accent and they could hardly understand me.

[An t-Ileach]

A few years ago I was in the Post Office on The Promenade in Cheltenham (long story) buying stamps. As I was sticking them on my letters, this voice said over my shoulder in a thick nasal Brummie accent "Can I have some First Class stamps, please?". I glanced at him, and to my surprise he was a Sikh!

[Schultz]

My wife was born and bred in the Highlandtown neighborhood of "Bawlmer, Murlin" (That's Baltimore, Maryland) and has no discernable accent, even though both her parents have the classic Baltimore accent.

The real odd thing is that Miranda has a tinge of a Pittsburghese accent nowadays, just from hanging around me and my family.

I love accents and the study of them.

[Archangel]

...then there's Basque...

[macsim]

I've always loved accents myself and I've always been a bit of a mimic. Just as fascinating I think, are words and phrases that come down through the years. We've mentioned the book "Albion's Seed" on the forum before and Fischer takes an interesting look at how language in various regions of the USA can be traced back to certain parts of Great Britain. We use the word "honey" here in the south a lot as a term of affection for instance, mostly in a boy-girl kind of way but my grandfather used to call everyone honey. I always thought that was odd until I read the book and found that it was a term that came into the backcountry area from the borders of North Britain and my dad's family lived among these people for two or three hundred years after arriving in America. Not sure yet where they originated in the old country. Or, the way the Scots-Irish in the backcountry pronounced "there" as "thar." My grandmother and dad both say it that way.

Sadly I think we're losing some of the regional dialects, at least to some degree. I have a real southern/country sort of accent but I don't say "thar." I'd say, if I were not being very careful - "I'm goin' ov'ere" for "I'm going over there." My wife was born 70 miles down the road and she has a completely different accent. I don't think I could even spell the way she says a simple word like "bag" and get it across to you. My kids though - I don't know what's happened but they have very clear enunciation, not quite northern but not very southern at all. Maybe it's the great numbers of "furr'ners" that have moved into NC. Talk about yer Tower of Babel! (That's Tire o' Babel for my fellow southerners. )

[bubba]

The loss of regional accents is mostly due to mass media and television. Most programs try to be as accent neutral as possible.