Then who shall we do?

West Country yokels?

Welsh sheep-shaggers?

Thick paddies?

Drunken jocks?

Liverpudlian dolies?

Come on, lads, let's have fun!



The Skin

that most of the rest of the UK would give their right arm to possess.

It always ranks high on most polls way ahead of poor old Brummies though personally I think their accent is Bostin too


http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/blog/2010/mar/31/regional-accents-divide-opinion
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/apr/04/6?intcmp=239

Last edited Tue Aug 28, 2012, 02:52 AM - Edit history (1)

And yes I was at this gig. The Everley Pregnant Brothers playing on the roof of the Fat Cat pub's toilets.

If we're going to piss out of other members' regions, can we at least make it funny?

The Skin

... taken the piss out of my own accent in this very forum. And, as far as I recall, so did the rest of us, including you. To recap, as a sufferer from Estuary English, as far as I'm concerned all nouns in English end in "innit". Oh, and the only vowel sound in English is /ə/. And /t/ doesn't exist. it should be /ʔ/.

And sorry if I over-reacted = but I still don't get the joke in your photo.

The Skin

thought it just meant "why of course"

I still think its funny anyway.

To take example Ironsides gave above, the Estuary English "innit" is - supposedly - repeated like a mantra at the end of every sentence, like the London "didn't he"? So the humour is in the repetition.

But "Why aye" is an exclamation, a bit like the Scots "Och aye," or the Welsh "Indeed to goodness" so it isn't something you'd repeat over and over again. So I don't get why it's repeated over and over again on the chart ....

The Skin

I don't think so.

And no one in Wales says, "Look you" either.

Photo? I put up the video link. Maybe you mean the original post?

The last sentence was me taking my job home. It's phonemic script. Not letters, but sounds. For example, the upside down e (I can't be arsed to search for the symbol on this keyboard at this time) is a schwa - the most common vowel sound in English. Say "river", or "lover" and the last sound isn't an "errrr" as you would expect from an -er ending, but rather an "uh". That's the schwa. Most English accents and dialects use it to a greater or lesser extent for unstressed vowels, but it doesn't really exist in German (to digress for a second, I had a group of Bundeswehr officers repeating "uh" after me this morning to get the sound right -hilarious) and is one of the reasons they pronounce words differently. Any Americans reading this will probably be baffled because they have a different default sound, depending on where they grew up.

Because Cockneys and Estuary English martyrs tend to swallow their vowels, we appear to have more schwas than the average Brit, but it really depends how closely you want to analyse it.

The weird question mark (still not arsed to look for it) is the glottal stop. That's the difference between when Joanna Lumley says "butter" and when Harry Redknapp does it.

And here endeth the lesson.

I always end up speaking pure Estuary English when I get angry, excited or drunk including all those glottal stops.

Strangely, when I lived in the West Country for a period I started to pick up the local accent very quickly. Many of my ancestors came from that part of the world so I always wondered whether it was an atavistic response.

Personally I think that certain Edinburgh Scots have the best English speaking voice as it combines both clarity, diction, character and emphasis on the correct syllables of words.

... I lived in Wolverhampton for a few years in the 90s and picked that accent up quite quickly. It still rears it's head when I'm moaning.

I passed on watching the Al Murray video as I find him about as funny as most people here find Jimmy Carr.

And yes, I got the phonetics - my first degree was in English Lang and Lit - but I missed the reference. I put it down to the rather nice half-bottle of Sauvignon Blanc with a late lunch, a rare indulgence for me.

The Skin

What's this?

It's a copper, innit.

What's this?

It's a balti, innit.

What's this?

It's a Rolls Royce Merlin 62 with a 2 stage, 2 speed supercharger, innit.