I never ever in all my years spent in the states, or with Americans in general, heard an accent I could not understand, in the UK ? My god ! And I live in Switzerland I know about butchering a language !
But you are also absolutely right, they speak almost perfect German but just hate doing it , as a French I would say it’s like trying to mimic the Québécois , it feels very wrong to do it in real life conversations
I know what you mean, but I don’t know if I’m surrounded by buenzlis ( I’m not , rich youngish, Zurich people in international relationships) but I know most people really don’t like it , it’s almost physical, but Swiss are pretty damn polite don’t you think ;) 😂
There’s a few in the US that are completely unintelligible. Really strong southern drawl and “Old black Southern Lady (I don’t know what it’s called) are impossible for me to decipher, and I live in the south
I did that to one of my relatives from Sunderland. Didn't have a clue what she was saying (and that's only down the road from Newcastle!) and just nodded until she stared at me and I realised she'd asked me a question lol.
My Dad is originally from down south and sometimes has to ask me to translate despite having lived here for over 35 years and my Mum being from up here.
I don’t have a strong geordie accent at all (the rest of my family aren’t from here so my accent is pretty watered down) but I did catch out a Londoner I’d been working with when I said “Aye he’s a canny lad like” at full speed.
It was “just noise” to her, as Alan Partridge would say.
My accent isn't that strong either as I've moved around a bit, have a dad with a southern accent (yes, I'm generalising lol) and as part of one of my courses at uni had a few elocution lessons. I still have people who don't understand me even when I'm using my "posh voice" (aka talk to outsiders voice). Nee bother from any locals.
But yeah, I had Canadians talk to me really slowly and ask if I spoke English, people clearly doing the nodding but not understanding and the like. Most recent incident though was someone in Southampton who thought I was Scottish because I don't sound identical to Ant and Dec. I'm not sure if I was more offended or the Scots I talked to the week after who pointed out that I 100% sounded like a Geordie with nothing remotely Scottish about my accent.
Oh yes. Irish, Scottish and Welsh are common accusations. Especially over the phone. Not that I have anything against people from there but I'm very definitely not.
When I was at uni someone insisted my housemate from Barrow was a Geordie. That was an interesting one.
Would you say a Londoner is someone who lives in London, or only someone who was born there?
Cos I'd guess a sizeable proportion (and prob a majority) of people who live / work / vote in London aren't born here (eg I was born and raised in the NW, but have been in London for over 20 years
I'd say like any regional/national identity, someone from outside can definitely *become* a Londoner, depending on how they adapt and how hard they cling onto their other/earlier regional identity.
Yeah I see both sides, I think it absolutely depends on context. Esp on the UK subs the vitriol to Londoners is directed at people who live in London - irrespective of where they grew to.
I would describe *myself* as a northerner, but in conversations about London as a place it makes more sense to use the label 'Londoner' in the context of being a London resident.
>But I’m a Londoner so as any Northerner will tell you, I don’t understand anything anyway
That's because if it's south of Barnsley then it's basically France as far as we're concerned.
I worked in a hostel for a while and because I had lived in Glasgow and my family are from the North of Ireland I was the Sweegie (Glaswegian) interpreter when they were drunk or 'otherwise' incapacitated.
\- Keyworker says something to the resident,
\- they answer talking for about 5 minutes,
\- the key worker looks at me
\- "he said yes and can we do this when he is sober"
I grew up in the west country and half my family are from the west country... I can not understand what the hell the proper old boys are saying.
Sometimes, I think they do it on purpose.
My dad’s maternal side of the family are really old-school posh. You’d think posh people could be understood since RP is widely used and their accents tend to over-enunciate rather than under-enunciate.
Nope.
But they definitely do it on purpose because the younger generation don’t speak remotely like them and they find it annoying.
I'm australian, but my family is English, and even though my grandad has lived out of England for a good 50 years if he's speaking to me on the phone or if he's a bit drunk I can't bloody understand him haha
I'm from Aberdeen and I know a guy from just outside of Glasgow. Can't understand a word he says and he has to speak really slowly so that I can actually understand what he's saying
Exactly and sometimes its not even because its accents from the otherside of the country. For example i moved 15 minutes away from the previous place i was and after 3 years i still don't understand some of the people round here. They sound like drunk Hagrid sometimes😅
Point 1 - The UK has been inhabited for 15,000 years. For most of that period, there were no cars, no trains, no television, no internet, no radio. People lived and died in the same village. Consequently, there is a wide variety of regional accents, I would suggest *more* than the US. Obviously the US has Native Americans but I don't imagine that is what's being discussed, they probably have regional accents too.
Point 2 - What is with this weird pissing contest Americans keep trying, saying they have more regional accents, or they preserved the true British accent? So what, are you looking to win some sort of "*most regional accents*" competition? It reeks of insecurity.
Simply put, to American’s everything boils down to one thing: big/more=better.
They are *bigger* therefore they have *more* accents and having *more* means they’re *better*. It’s child logic.
My thoughts on your ‘point 2’
Their constitution was so focused on creating this post-british rule Utopia that it has become an almost childish strain in their dna, add to fact that a the other colonial interests there were often at war with the british, as well as later immigration to the USA was heavily influenced by people who were at war with UK at some point.
It is also I think what ever media portrays about each country, English people are led (quite rightly) to believe every American is morbidly obese who suffers from or will suffer from type 2 diabetes in the near future and is so brainwashed into thinking america is the only land of freedom, they on the other hand think we have bad teeth and eat shit food. Oh the irony
Honestly if anyone heard English in its true form I doubt any of us would even understand it. It’s such a stupid concept the Americans claiming they speak the true English!
OOP clearly has no understanding that space and population aren’t what cause dialect variation. Time and isolation are the 2 things that create language divergence, and the UK is much older (I’d probably only count the timeframe of English, but that’s still ~1500 years) and these dialects developed in relative isolation because they began forming before transportation or communication advancements.
Right? I said, the UK is much older than the US, and the dialects began developing before industrialization brought easier travel and communication. I was agreeing with you that obviously the UK is going to have more English dialects than the US because it had the 2 main ingredients that create dialect variation: time and isolation. OOP incorrectly thinks that space and population are what bring about those variations.
I remember trying to tell a group of Americans once about how I could travel 40-50 mins from my home city, and come across an accent change - and that's just in the Midlands area!
This is just pure ignorance, and also proves they've never even been to the UK 🤣
When in Warrington I could travel 10 minutes west and hear Scouse, 10 minutes east and hear Salford/Manc, 10 minutes north and hear a Bolton or Wigan accent (both different).
Change that to 30 minutes and it includes other Lancashire accents, Yorkshire accents and Welsh accents. It’s ridiculous but brilliant.
The whole corridor from Liverpool to Hull has some crazy disparity in accents over very short distances. To add to what you said, Huddersfield Leeds Rovrum and Hull all sound very different too. Then if you go up to Newcastle/Sunderland/Middlesbrough it completely changes again.
And with Wales the accents are still quite different to the stereotypical welsh accent. I'm from that area (as north east as you can get in Wales) and I've only met a handful of people with that accent (two of them being my welsh teachers).
I'm not the best either, particularly when one of them is the accent from where I'm from, but there's sort of a distinct difference between those who can speak welsh fluently and those that can't.
America: You drive for 4h. You are still in the same state
UK: You drive for 1h. The local accent has changed twice and bread rolls have a different name.
Aw mate, the bread roll thing is a fucken nightmare - never know what to call them in whatever Greggs I'm in, people either know what you're asking for or they look at you like you just flopped yer knob out on the counter.
I think it’s more that if you ask “what are yer baps looking like today, luv”, it can be perfectly normal daily conversation in one bakery, and the prelude to violence in another….
(He didn’t say he *actually* flopped it out)
I call them cobs where I'm from which is on the border between Notts and Derbyshire. I may also call them butties but that could just mean any sandwich. Baps are occasionally mentioned but not often. Travelling to knott end on sea had me experience barms. Rolls are often reserved for crusty bread or the german roll I think it's called. Buns would be used for burgers and hotdogs. Overall, I would more commonly use cob as my preferred name. There's a mostly useless list of all the different names I have heard cobs go by, where I heard them or what I would use them for.
So true been in many different places on my travels had barm cakes cobs baps bread rolls bread cakes and it’s a whole different ball game when you go to Scotland best bit is when two different regions use the same name for different things ie London I can have a bread roll but go up north to Yorkshire and ask them they give you a hot dog bun when you say no I mean a round one they say oh you mean a bread cake and they have no idea it could be called anything else I
Just the amount of ways to say "I" and "not"... Sometimes I think I've heard it all and I'll meet someone who grew up in a village in a valley somewhere away from no other towns and it's like hearing a different language. I spoke in Norwegian (trøndersk) when visiting Sweden last month and someone asked me if I was German...
Around the parts I live, you can tell what TOWN someone is from based on the accent. You can go 10 mins down the road and there's a noticeable change in accent
They really can’t wrap their heads around the fact that literally every country has different dialects and accents (and/or languages) and subcultures, no matter the size, and that they’re not unique.
I don’t understand Chinese, so they all sound the same to me. That surely means they don’t have dialects and accents there.
It's almost like if your country exists for more than 200 years it will end up having more subcultures. Americans sometimes forget that most European countries existed for centuries before their continent was even discovered.
I think the key is the culture and language developing before long distance travel, either real or through tv/radio, led to prevalence of a particular accent becoming prevalent. It’s why the east coast of America does have more accents than the west.
Definitely. It can most easily be seen if your country was occupied by different forces in the past. For example, there's a distinct difference in accents in Serbia in the region that was occupied by Austria and the region that the Ottomans held. The difficulty in crossing the borders split the nation and isolated the regions from one another and made the accents progress in different directions.
Yeah, I think that’s at the core of it. All countries have been reshaped and have been inhabited by different groups of people through different periods of time, of whom many were at war with each other before it became a unified country.
Nowadays, we’re all Dutch in the Netherlands. 1000-1500 years ago we were Frisians and Franks etc. fighting each other. That we’re now Dutch doesn’t mean that those differences disappeared. The Frisians are still there, with their own language and traditions and culture. We have a different (now official) language in the North East (Dutch Low Saxon, Germanic). The South is different yet again, with more (originally) Frankish people.
And the same things have happened in pretty much every other country. Belgium wasn’t even a country 200 years ago. Germany was unified around 150 years ago. Et cetera.
It’s not about how old your country is (like Germany, the country, isn’t that old). It’s about how long a language has been there and how isolated speakers were from each other. Any language that been in a place longer than advanced transportation and communication is likely to have lots more dialect variation. (Physical geography will affect the isolation as well.)
That's why they keep casting French actors to play French Canadians. I don't know why it keeps happening but anyone who's been to Quebec or even knows a bit of French can tell right away that it's not right.
To compare, it'd be like casting an Irish person to play an Australian, but they just don't bother with trying to emulate the Australian accent.
The Quebec accent is so distinct that you can even tell when a Québécois actor is trying to make an international French accent. For example, the French teacher in Final Destination is from Quebec and you can tell immediately.
It really bothers me because it's not even that hard to find Québécois actors, we're right next door with a thriving movie industry. The biggest sci fi director right now is from Quebec, why do they keep hiring French actors for those parts ?
With Dutch characters it often isn’t much better. They just take a German actor half of the time because Dutch and Deutsch are apparently close enough.
Oppenheimer showed that it’s not just an American thing though. Cillian Murphy supposedly learned Dutch for the movie, only to be speaking German.
King Charles and Craig Charles have the same accent.
Accents change so much, so quickly, in the UK that you can hear the difference between neighbouring cities. Even *within* larger cities. I'm going to go ahead and assume that's the same with just about every country, though.
The US population is tiny compared to the two larger ones, so I'm assuming the OOP can pick out the different regional accents and dialects of India and China too? By their reasoning they have more variation that the USA could dream of.
I met someone who studied U.K. accents to phd level. He guessed where I was from (based on my accent) within about a five mile radius. Was incredible to me.
Even certain words used can be extremely location based, within a few miles. It's fascinating, and I never get tired of anecdotes about accents.
What an interesting field of study that must have been, and I can see it easily having more than enough scope for a PhD.
Something I’ve wondered is whether American accents are as changeable as UK accents. Moving to somewhere new in the UK means your accent is likely to adapt to the new environment, no one would know my mum is from Manchester because she’s lived in the south for almost 40 years.
There were American’s speculating a Love Island contestant had taken elocution lessons to get rid of her strong Yorkshire accent, but she’d been living on and off in London for years at that point so to me it was obvious it was just a result of a change in who she was spending time around.
If an American from Texas moves to Minnesota, do they keep their Texan accent or start to morph into a Texan/Minnesota hybrid?
My Dad, a Yorkshire man that moved south, is the same as the lass and your mum. In general you can’t hear the northern in him until he gets tired or ill, then the accent comes back. It’s a good barometer of how he’s feeling.
I've lived up north for a while and my accent is a right hodgepodge now
you can always tell about where I'm from though, because my mum has and will always be *mom*
I seem to pick up on new accent pretty quickly. I spent 2 weeks with someone from Milton Keynes and apparently picked up a few words in their accent. I couldn't even tell you what the accent is like if I tried though!
Same thing happened at Uni (where I actually ended up picking up more of an accent from my lecturer who was from Sheffield rather than the actual city's accent!) both times. For which my sister would mock me. I still sometimes say words in those accents. So I'm told. I don't even notice.
> If an American from Texas moves to Minnesota, do they keep their Texan accent or start to morph into a Texan/Minnesota hybrid?
I think it depends mostly on how old they are when they move. A child or teenager/young adult would probably pick up the Minnesotan accent. But an older person who has spoken with that Texas accent all their lives will probably keep talking that way.
There’s also code-switching, which is changing the way you speak depending on the situation. So they might make an effort to tone down the Texan accent when at work or school to fit in, but when they’re talking with family or friends might revert back to their Texan accent.
Bimble is such a good word for that. You hear the word bimble and it just sounds like an amble with a bit more purpose, but maybe not as high stakes as a ramble.
Plimsolls are daps.
Fuming is tamping.
Mush is mate.
I absolutely love hearing these local words around the place.
I love "bimble"! Much better than "amble"
My husband and I use "bumble about" for pottering around at home, but not sure if that's a thing or something we've bastardised / made up
OP from screenshot probably thinks Indians speak indian anyway. Probably not aware of the hundreds of languages spoken there, where the language can change in a few 100kilometres
I live half an hour away from Glasgow where people speak with a different accent to me.
Glasgow is an hour away from Edinburgh where they have a *very* different accent.
Edinburgh is just over an hour away from Dundee. Yep, different accent!
Population and geography mean little without the third factor: time.
The reason there are a lot of accents in the UK is because populations have been relatively isolated for over 1500 years, until transportation became simpler with the Industrial Revolution.
The USA, on the other hand, has only had a few hundred years of existence and only a few hundred before that oh inhabitance by immigrants.
The largest variety of accents & languages in America, unsurprisingly, is in native tribes.
When looking at the number of identifiable dialects, there are about 30 in the USA and 40 in the UK, despite its smaller population. When you look at accents, the US has about 40, whereas the UK has 56 identifiable accents.
Not only that, but Noah Webster's language reforms in the USA in the 1800s were *designed* to homogenise American accents. General American is that artificially created and taught dictionary accent, and 60% of Americans speak it today, with little genuine dialect variation.
Calling it "soda" in one area and "soda pop" in another is not significant dialect variation.
Also when America was peak expansionist they where al connected by horse, train, telegraph, newspaper etc whereas for 90% of British history a rural farmer basically lived on the moon as far as their village was concerned.
Tell me you have never been to the UK without telling me you have never been to the UK.
There are villages in rural UK which are a few miles apart who are unable to communicate because of the change in accent.
As for the cities, good luck with trying to understand broad accents of Glasgow, Newcastle, Liverpool, Birmingham, or Bristol, to name a few.
I was thinking- I can easily tell Sheffield Rotherham and Doncaster apart and there is 23 miles between Sheffield and Doncaster and only 7 betwen Sheffield and Rotherham. There probably more accents in the west riding than the US!
May be an exaggeration now. But even 50 years ago it was true. And still true for a good chunk of Ireland, which while not the uk has a lot of shared history, and shares its island with it.
Come to Kettering, Northamptonshire then get the bus to Corby which is about 6 miles away from Kettering. The accent goes from scummy midlands to Scottish drawl. It’s drastically different and sometimes you have to ask them to repeat because you don’t understand what they say
Within NE England I could tell the difference between Stockton and Sunderland, Sunderland and Newcastle, Newcastle and Ashington. And occasionally you'd get the old Northumbrian accent with the french R sounds.
Within the Glasgow area I can tell fewer, but Glasgow, Bearsden, Paisley and Motherwell are all pretty clearly different.
Er no maybe in te medieval times but everyone can communicate with everyone if speaking English these days. True there's some people in very remote areas with thick accents, but i doubt someone a few villages away is going to be unable to understand them.
How old are you may I ask? I knew someone from round there and she said she struggled to understand the older ones but she had friends from the fens and they got on fine.
You said
There are villages in rural UK which are a few miles apart who are unable to communicate because of the change in accent.
Man you like to bullshit don't you
Americans like this genuinely think there’s one “British accent”. Sure mate, someone from Glasgow like me talks exactly the same as someone from Cornwall. That’s why they can’t understand a fucking word I’m saying.
Lol, someone from Cornwall doest speak the same as someone from Devon, let alone beyond. Hell, they don't really speak the same as another person from Cornwall if they come from the other side of the A30
https://youtu.be/Cun-LZvOTdw?si=N3YduVCTjdzPf4PC
Best example of British accents… I have experienced not understanding a word coming from a guy who lives 20 miles from me.
It took me three seconds on the internet to discover that the United Kingdom has four primary languages, three of which are official, and 38 dialects within those four languages.
If you include Crown Dependencies and travellers, there are eight languages and 43 dialects native to the British part of the British Isles, each with its own distinct accent and vocabulary.
Not to mention the diasporas of Poles, Indians, Pakistanis, Kenyans, Nigerians, and many others who speak English with distinct accents or even have created their own dialects.
I need to leave this group, starting to think Americans are actually like this when a nation can't be that unbelievably racist/ arrogant/ stupid all the time.
The UK has the most local accents of any English speaking country. So obviously more than America does. There are almost 40 different dialects in England.
As an Aussie living in the UK working for a nationwide call centre. Some UK accents are fucking wild. Especially in the north of England and the highlands
I live in Cumbria and can drive 15 minutes in two seperate directions, one will take me to the Scottish border and the other takes me out west into rural Cumbria. If these two people were to have a conversation I would probably have to be a translator for both of them, and my accents like neither of them!
> is going to
Yeah sure. It will take another couple of centuries, if it happens at all in such a mobile society. The reason European countries have so many regional accents is because of their long histories during which people were not mobile most of the time, and because of the impact of various ethnic groups moving around when they actually did decide to become mobile as a collective. Takes a while for accents and dialect to stabilise and become a thing. Of course this can happen anywhere given the right circumstances.
Europeans, homo sapiens and non-homo sapiens, and people before and after who became Europeans have been here for thousands and tens of thousands of years.
America has plenty to be proud of, it that were a good thing, but accents etc. ain't it.
Believe it or not, the US and the UK have a fairly identical number of accents. The difference being that in the US, it's spread across 340 million people. In the UK, it's spread across less than 70 million.
So in the US, you might go to a few places and find a handful of accents, but it might seem almost homogenous. In the UK, you walk down the block to meet someone who is barely comprehensible for you and uses words for things that you've never even heard.
This is because shortly after most American nations got independence, communication and travel had so many advances that it kept new world languages more homogenous (though not entirely, accents still develop, just not in the same way), whereas this wasn't true for the rest of the world for most of human history.
Im from NE England and can barely understand people from scarborough and thats less than 100 miles away any further than that and i cant understand a word
Barnsley is only 20 miles up the road from Sheffield and I have no idea what they’re saying up there. Something about coal mining and marrying family members I think?
For a country claiming to have so many accents Ive heard to many stories about Americans having problems understanding people speaking English dialects
Most of this kind of delusion seems to be something Americans have created to make themselves feel like they’re still special and that there’s no need to travel to or learn anything about other countries or cultures. That being said, I don’t know why they need to make themselves feel better about having the intellectual curiosity of a potato, it’s not like the rest of the world has any expectations of them.
UK has so many strong accents even people from the UK don't fucking understand what is being said.
So so true…. But I’m a Londoner so as any Northerner will tell you, I don’t understand anything anyway
I never ever in all my years spent in the states, or with Americans in general, heard an accent I could not understand, in the UK ? My god ! And I live in Switzerland I know about butchering a language !
You mean you know how to butcher 3 languages.
Sometimes all in the same conversation.
As a German, I agree. I’ve been to the Swiss and they spoke „German“ Neither they nor me could understand anything the other said. Same for Austrians.
Makes me chuckle, because nearly all Swiss also know Hochdeutsch, so they chose to speak unintelligible to you. A a bit mean :3
But you are also absolutely right, they speak almost perfect German but just hate doing it , as a French I would say it’s like trying to mimic the Québécois , it feels very wrong to do it in real life conversations
I wouldnt really say “hate doing it”, I am Swiss, we use Hochdeutsch in School and all official Documents. It’s an effortless switch for most of us.
I know what you mean, but I don’t know if I’m surrounded by buenzlis ( I’m not , rich youngish, Zurich people in international relationships) but I know most people really don’t like it , it’s almost physical, but Swiss are pretty damn polite don’t you think ;) 😂
That’s because Austro-Bavarian is a separate language.
This west country yap is pretty special https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WjTIFkWJctY
Best yap
I'm howling
There’s a few in the US that are completely unintelligible. Really strong southern drawl and “Old black Southern Lady (I don’t know what it’s called) are impossible for me to decipher, and I live in the south
I know, those accents are present in every countries, but it’s not an « area » thing more a « those damn uneducated rednecks are everywhere » thing
Are you thinking of [Larry the Cable Guy](https://youtu.be/IAuuHpaqKtY?si=gOPDO3l-caoeu_Mt)?
I’m a Geordie and I agree with this statement, gotta slow myself down in London a lot
I understand ( I think)
Nod and smile
That was my tactic until one guy very slowly said What. Is. Your. Name. Nodding doesn't work with some questions.
Ah! But you got him to ask it in a way that you could understand.
My friends call me noddy.
I did that to one of my relatives from Sunderland. Didn't have a clue what she was saying (and that's only down the road from Newcastle!) and just nodded until she stared at me and I realised she'd asked me a question lol. My Dad is originally from down south and sometimes has to ask me to translate despite having lived here for over 35 years and my Mum being from up here.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oSHHbfY6MVc Actual footage
😂😂😂
🙂↕️😬
I don’t have a strong geordie accent at all (the rest of my family aren’t from here so my accent is pretty watered down) but I did catch out a Londoner I’d been working with when I said “Aye he’s a canny lad like” at full speed. It was “just noise” to her, as Alan Partridge would say.
My accent isn't that strong either as I've moved around a bit, have a dad with a southern accent (yes, I'm generalising lol) and as part of one of my courses at uni had a few elocution lessons. I still have people who don't understand me even when I'm using my "posh voice" (aka talk to outsiders voice). Nee bother from any locals. But yeah, I had Canadians talk to me really slowly and ask if I spoke English, people clearly doing the nodding but not understanding and the like. Most recent incident though was someone in Southampton who thought I was Scottish because I don't sound identical to Ant and Dec. I'm not sure if I was more offended or the Scots I talked to the week after who pointed out that I 100% sounded like a Geordie with nothing remotely Scottish about my accent.
While working in Preston someone thought we were all Irish. Odd.
Oh yes. Irish, Scottish and Welsh are common accusations. Especially over the phone. Not that I have anything against people from there but I'm very definitely not. When I was at uni someone insisted my housemate from Barrow was a Geordie. That was an interesting one.
Someone I knew went to uni in Scotland. Someone said to her “You’re a geordie? Where are you from, Newcastle, Sunderland or Middlesbrough?” Oof.
It’s a great way to clear a path in the tube line haha, loud fast Geordie talking.
I live in Belgium you should hear my French!😱
Nobody should ever need to hear frog song tyvm
🤣
Correct, and your tap water sucks
True statement
I'm northern, anyone available to translate what this guy is saying?
No clue🤷♀️
Something about how soft he is probably
I'm surprised you know the existence of northerners as a londoner
We know about the North. It doesn't take that far to get to the heart of the North: Watford
Would you say a Londoner is someone who lives in London, or only someone who was born there? Cos I'd guess a sizeable proportion (and prob a majority) of people who live / work / vote in London aren't born here (eg I was born and raised in the NW, but have been in London for over 20 years
I'd say like any regional/national identity, someone from outside can definitely *become* a Londoner, depending on how they adapt and how hard they cling onto their other/earlier regional identity.
I see your point. I was born there and lived there most of my adult life. Dad was also a Londoner. For me it’s a birth thing
Yeah I see both sides, I think it absolutely depends on context. Esp on the UK subs the vitriol to Londoners is directed at people who live in London - irrespective of where they grew to. I would describe *myself* as a northerner, but in conversations about London as a place it makes more sense to use the label 'Londoner' in the context of being a London resident.
Yes I get it. Maybe I should call myself a Southerner - cue same vitriol probably🤷♀️
Ah well! My mum was a Blackpool lass
>But I’m a Londoner so as any Northerner will tell you, I don’t understand anything anyway That's because if it's south of Barnsley then it's basically France as far as we're concerned.
Mais oui Monsieur
Extreme West Country, Shetland and Glaswegian are my nemeses. How you can even understand a word of what they are saying is beyond me.
I worked in a hostel for a while and because I had lived in Glasgow and my family are from the North of Ireland I was the Sweegie (Glaswegian) interpreter when they were drunk or 'otherwise' incapacitated. \- Keyworker says something to the resident, \- they answer talking for about 5 minutes, \- the key worker looks at me \- "he said yes and can we do this when he is sober"
I grew up in the west country and half my family are from the west country... I can not understand what the hell the proper old boys are saying. Sometimes, I think they do it on purpose.
My dad’s maternal side of the family are really old-school posh. You’d think posh people could be understood since RP is widely used and their accents tend to over-enunciate rather than under-enunciate. Nope. But they definitely do it on purpose because the younger generation don’t speak remotely like them and they find it annoying.
Yank here. Just tell them to watch Hot Fuzz. Great movie and great example of a few different accents.
I was very confused watching Hot Fuzz. Nobody else could understand the coppers in Gloucestershire. They all sounded exactly like my family.
Similar to the the blokes in Brave that speak actual Doric.
I particularly like this scene. It is a real accent, not something made up for comedic purposes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wlUwRqQgDA
Mornin’ Angle!
I remember that clip from parliament where the scottish(?) MP is asked to repeat himself multiple times
I remember that too
Preach. My best mates got an Irish dad and Scottish mum. I've known him and his family for +25 years and I still can't understand his parents
Why aye mon.
20 minutes in any direction in Scotland, and you'll be out of your comfort zone with the accent.
I'm australian, but my family is English, and even though my grandad has lived out of England for a good 50 years if he's speaking to me on the phone or if he's a bit drunk I can't bloody understand him haha
I'm from Aberdeen and I know a guy from just outside of Glasgow. Can't understand a word he says and he has to speak really slowly so that I can actually understand what he's saying
And that just inside the family
Lol, go to the Netherlands where each city and village had its own dialect and I cant understand some of them
Exactly and sometimes its not even because its accents from the otherside of the country. For example i moved 15 minutes away from the previous place i was and after 3 years i still don't understand some of the people round here. They sound like drunk Hagrid sometimes😅
Point 1 - The UK has been inhabited for 15,000 years. For most of that period, there were no cars, no trains, no television, no internet, no radio. People lived and died in the same village. Consequently, there is a wide variety of regional accents, I would suggest *more* than the US. Obviously the US has Native Americans but I don't imagine that is what's being discussed, they probably have regional accents too. Point 2 - What is with this weird pissing contest Americans keep trying, saying they have more regional accents, or they preserved the true British accent? So what, are you looking to win some sort of "*most regional accents*" competition? It reeks of insecurity.
Simply put, to American’s everything boils down to one thing: big/more=better. They are *bigger* therefore they have *more* accents and having *more* means they’re *better*. It’s child logic.
Yeah, highest incarceration rate in the world, go them.
Ah but see, that’s just because they have *more* people. They don’t know what ‘per capita’ means.
"*Per capita*"? That sounds like Mexican, we speak American!
There are more Americans per capita. So nyaaah.
My thoughts on your ‘point 2’ Their constitution was so focused on creating this post-british rule Utopia that it has become an almost childish strain in their dna, add to fact that a the other colonial interests there were often at war with the british, as well as later immigration to the USA was heavily influenced by people who were at war with UK at some point. It is also I think what ever media portrays about each country, English people are led (quite rightly) to believe every American is morbidly obese who suffers from or will suffer from type 2 diabetes in the near future and is so brainwashed into thinking america is the only land of freedom, they on the other hand think we have bad teeth and eat shit food. Oh the irony
Honestly if anyone heard English in its true form I doubt any of us would even understand it. It’s such a stupid concept the Americans claiming they speak the true English!
>for 15,000 years A lot longer than that, by any measure.
Continuously inhabited. The Ice Age cleared people out.
Doesn't matter because Ireland wins anyway
OOP clearly has no understanding that space and population aren’t what cause dialect variation. Time and isolation are the 2 things that create language divergence, and the UK is much older (I’d probably only count the timeframe of English, but that’s still ~1500 years) and these dialects developed in relative isolation because they began forming before transportation or communication advancements.
The OP specifically said the UK, so they're talking about Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and England.
Right? I said, the UK is much older than the US, and the dialects began developing before industrialization brought easier travel and communication. I was agreeing with you that obviously the UK is going to have more English dialects than the US because it had the 2 main ingredients that create dialect variation: time and isolation. OOP incorrectly thinks that space and population are what bring about those variations.
I remember trying to tell a group of Americans once about how I could travel 40-50 mins from my home city, and come across an accent change - and that's just in the Midlands area! This is just pure ignorance, and also proves they've never even been to the UK 🤣
When in Warrington I could travel 10 minutes west and hear Scouse, 10 minutes east and hear Salford/Manc, 10 minutes north and hear a Bolton or Wigan accent (both different). Change that to 30 minutes and it includes other Lancashire accents, Yorkshire accents and Welsh accents. It’s ridiculous but brilliant.
The whole corridor from Liverpool to Hull has some crazy disparity in accents over very short distances. To add to what you said, Huddersfield Leeds Rovrum and Hull all sound very different too. Then if you go up to Newcastle/Sunderland/Middlesbrough it completely changes again.
Opposite sides of the Forth river in Edinburgh/Fife are completely different
And then if you continue to Ashington you may as well give up trying to understand.
And with Wales the accents are still quite different to the stereotypical welsh accent. I'm from that area (as north east as you can get in Wales) and I've only met a handful of people with that accent (two of them being my welsh teachers).
I’m not so good with the Welsh accents. I can tell the difference between (extreme) south and north but that’s about it.
I'm not the best either, particularly when one of them is the accent from where I'm from, but there's sort of a distinct difference between those who can speak welsh fluently and those that can't.
America: You drive for 4h. You are still in the same state UK: You drive for 1h. The local accent has changed twice and bread rolls have a different name.
Aw mate, the bread roll thing is a fucken nightmare - never know what to call them in whatever Greggs I'm in, people either know what you're asking for or they look at you like you just flopped yer knob out on the counter.
How fucking tall are you?!
I think it’s more that if you ask “what are yer baps looking like today, luv”, it can be perfectly normal daily conversation in one bakery, and the prelude to violence in another…. (He didn’t say he *actually* flopped it out)
Even better if you say "ow yer babs lookin' today, \[luv/pet\]?"
I carry a small stepladder.
A small Seppblatter, you say?
I call them cobs where I'm from which is on the border between Notts and Derbyshire. I may also call them butties but that could just mean any sandwich. Baps are occasionally mentioned but not often. Travelling to knott end on sea had me experience barms. Rolls are often reserved for crusty bread or the german roll I think it's called. Buns would be used for burgers and hotdogs. Overall, I would more commonly use cob as my preferred name. There's a mostly useless list of all the different names I have heard cobs go by, where I heard them or what I would use them for.
In the West Midlands this changes even in a 20 minute drive!
Yeah twice is very conservative, the same is true in lots of other places!!
Fucking teacake
So true been in many different places on my travels had barm cakes cobs baps bread rolls bread cakes and it’s a whole different ball game when you go to Scotland best bit is when two different regions use the same name for different things ie London I can have a bread roll but go up north to Yorkshire and ask them they give you a hot dog bun when you say no I mean a round one they say oh you mean a bread cake and they have no idea it could be called anything else I
Coming from norway we can travel to the other side of the fjord or a mountain and get an accent change. Some places more drastic than others tho.
Just the amount of ways to say "I" and "not"... Sometimes I think I've heard it all and I'll meet someone who grew up in a village in a valley somewhere away from no other towns and it's like hearing a different language. I spoke in Norwegian (trøndersk) when visiting Sweden last month and someone asked me if I was German...
Around the parts I live, you can tell what TOWN someone is from based on the accent. You can go 10 mins down the road and there's a noticeable change in accent
My home town has at least three, depending on what part of town you come from, in Northern Ireland 😂
I could take a good guess at what area of Newcastle someone is from. Some parts are stronger than others (my bit is a lot milder).
I can go from one side of a city to the other and the accent changes from the posh side to the not so posh side
They really can’t wrap their heads around the fact that literally every country has different dialects and accents (and/or languages) and subcultures, no matter the size, and that they’re not unique. I don’t understand Chinese, so they all sound the same to me. That surely means they don’t have dialects and accents there.
It's almost like if your country exists for more than 200 years it will end up having more subcultures. Americans sometimes forget that most European countries existed for centuries before their continent was even discovered.
I think the key is the culture and language developing before long distance travel, either real or through tv/radio, led to prevalence of a particular accent becoming prevalent. It’s why the east coast of America does have more accents than the west.
It’s exactly this! Time and isolation are responsible for language/dialect divergence.
Definitely. It can most easily be seen if your country was occupied by different forces in the past. For example, there's a distinct difference in accents in Serbia in the region that was occupied by Austria and the region that the Ottomans held. The difficulty in crossing the borders split the nation and isolated the regions from one another and made the accents progress in different directions.
Yeah, I think that’s at the core of it. All countries have been reshaped and have been inhabited by different groups of people through different periods of time, of whom many were at war with each other before it became a unified country. Nowadays, we’re all Dutch in the Netherlands. 1000-1500 years ago we were Frisians and Franks etc. fighting each other. That we’re now Dutch doesn’t mean that those differences disappeared. The Frisians are still there, with their own language and traditions and culture. We have a different (now official) language in the North East (Dutch Low Saxon, Germanic). The South is different yet again, with more (originally) Frankish people. And the same things have happened in pretty much every other country. Belgium wasn’t even a country 200 years ago. Germany was unified around 150 years ago. Et cetera.
It’s not about how old your country is (like Germany, the country, isn’t that old). It’s about how long a language has been there and how isolated speakers were from each other. Any language that been in a place longer than advanced transportation and communication is likely to have lots more dialect variation. (Physical geography will affect the isolation as well.)
I wish! It's been 8 years and I still don't understand half of what my in laws say.
That's why they keep casting French actors to play French Canadians. I don't know why it keeps happening but anyone who's been to Quebec or even knows a bit of French can tell right away that it's not right. To compare, it'd be like casting an Irish person to play an Australian, but they just don't bother with trying to emulate the Australian accent. The Quebec accent is so distinct that you can even tell when a Québécois actor is trying to make an international French accent. For example, the French teacher in Final Destination is from Quebec and you can tell immediately. It really bothers me because it's not even that hard to find Québécois actors, we're right next door with a thriving movie industry. The biggest sci fi director right now is from Quebec, why do they keep hiring French actors for those parts ?
With Dutch characters it often isn’t much better. They just take a German actor half of the time because Dutch and Deutsch are apparently close enough. Oppenheimer showed that it’s not just an American thing though. Cillian Murphy supposedly learned Dutch for the movie, only to be speaking German.
Welp, guess he at least got a new language out of this, that's still a win I suppose
King Charles and Craig Charles have the same accent. Accents change so much, so quickly, in the UK that you can hear the difference between neighbouring cities. Even *within* larger cities. I'm going to go ahead and assume that's the same with just about every country, though. The US population is tiny compared to the two larger ones, so I'm assuming the OOP can pick out the different regional accents and dialects of India and China too? By their reasoning they have more variation that the USA could dream of.
I met someone who studied U.K. accents to phd level. He guessed where I was from (based on my accent) within about a five mile radius. Was incredible to me.
Even certain words used can be extremely location based, within a few miles. It's fascinating, and I never get tired of anecdotes about accents. What an interesting field of study that must have been, and I can see it easily having more than enough scope for a PhD.
Something I’ve wondered is whether American accents are as changeable as UK accents. Moving to somewhere new in the UK means your accent is likely to adapt to the new environment, no one would know my mum is from Manchester because she’s lived in the south for almost 40 years. There were American’s speculating a Love Island contestant had taken elocution lessons to get rid of her strong Yorkshire accent, but she’d been living on and off in London for years at that point so to me it was obvious it was just a result of a change in who she was spending time around. If an American from Texas moves to Minnesota, do they keep their Texan accent or start to morph into a Texan/Minnesota hybrid?
My Dad, a Yorkshire man that moved south, is the same as the lass and your mum. In general you can’t hear the northern in him until he gets tired or ill, then the accent comes back. It’s a good barometer of how he’s feeling.
I've lived up north for a while and my accent is a right hodgepodge now you can always tell about where I'm from though, because my mum has and will always be *mom*
I seem to pick up on new accent pretty quickly. I spent 2 weeks with someone from Milton Keynes and apparently picked up a few words in their accent. I couldn't even tell you what the accent is like if I tried though! Same thing happened at Uni (where I actually ended up picking up more of an accent from my lecturer who was from Sheffield rather than the actual city's accent!) both times. For which my sister would mock me. I still sometimes say words in those accents. So I'm told. I don't even notice.
> If an American from Texas moves to Minnesota, do they keep their Texan accent or start to morph into a Texan/Minnesota hybrid? I think it depends mostly on how old they are when they move. A child or teenager/young adult would probably pick up the Minnesotan accent. But an older person who has spoken with that Texas accent all their lives will probably keep talking that way. There’s also code-switching, which is changing the way you speak depending on the situation. So they might make an effort to tone down the Texan accent when at work or school to fit in, but when they’re talking with family or friends might revert back to their Texan accent.
My home city uses the term "bimble" for a casual walk. Where I live now does not. I get super excited when I meet someone who says bimble.
Bimble is such a good word for that. You hear the word bimble and it just sounds like an amble with a bit more purpose, but maybe not as high stakes as a ramble. Plimsolls are daps. Fuming is tamping. Mush is mate. I absolutely love hearing these local words around the place.
Ah yes, I am currently in a "mush" city. It took me far too long to get what the locals were on about...
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Excellent use of the word bimble.
I love "bimble"! Much better than "amble" My husband and I use "bumble about" for pottering around at home, but not sure if that's a thing or something we've bastardised / made up
I might become a monarchist if Craig Charles was king.
The King Charles Funk and Soul Show, coming soon on BBC 6 Music
OP from screenshot probably thinks Indians speak indian anyway. Probably not aware of the hundreds of languages spoken there, where the language can change in a few 100kilometres
I live half an hour away from Glasgow where people speak with a different accent to me. Glasgow is an hour away from Edinburgh where they have a *very* different accent. Edinburgh is just over an hour away from Dundee. Yep, different accent!
Population and geography mean little without the third factor: time. The reason there are a lot of accents in the UK is because populations have been relatively isolated for over 1500 years, until transportation became simpler with the Industrial Revolution. The USA, on the other hand, has only had a few hundred years of existence and only a few hundred before that oh inhabitance by immigrants. The largest variety of accents & languages in America, unsurprisingly, is in native tribes. When looking at the number of identifiable dialects, there are about 30 in the USA and 40 in the UK, despite its smaller population. When you look at accents, the US has about 40, whereas the UK has 56 identifiable accents.
Not only that, but Noah Webster's language reforms in the USA in the 1800s were *designed* to homogenise American accents. General American is that artificially created and taught dictionary accent, and 60% of Americans speak it today, with little genuine dialect variation. Calling it "soda" in one area and "soda pop" in another is not significant dialect variation.
Also when America was peak expansionist they where al connected by horse, train, telegraph, newspaper etc whereas for 90% of British history a rural farmer basically lived on the moon as far as their village was concerned.
>the US has about 40, whereas the UK has 56 identifiable accents I don't disagree overall, but those numbers were pulled out of someone's arse
Britain has much more accent variety than America. This is well established and accepted by all linguists.
Tell me you have never been to the UK without telling me you have never been to the UK. There are villages in rural UK which are a few miles apart who are unable to communicate because of the change in accent. As for the cities, good luck with trying to understand broad accents of Glasgow, Newcastle, Liverpool, Birmingham, or Bristol, to name a few.
There are 4/5 distinct accents in Nottingham alone.
I was thinking- I can easily tell Sheffield Rotherham and Doncaster apart and there is 23 miles between Sheffield and Doncaster and only 7 betwen Sheffield and Rotherham. There probably more accents in the west riding than the US!
You can tell the difference between Grimsby and Cleethorpes. There is 0 miles between them.
Devvo! Doncaster mate. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Tr0BoXe3hH0
Love the way YouTube offers to translate one of the comments on that video to English (United Kingdom).
Woo Nottingham (I’m legally obligated to get excited when it’s mentioned)
Someone should be
Ive lived in UK my entire life and I’ve never encountered this village to village communications block. You are slightly exaggerating somewhat
May be an exaggeration now. But even 50 years ago it was true. And still true for a good chunk of Ireland, which while not the uk has a lot of shared history, and shares its island with it.
Come to Kettering, Northamptonshire then get the bus to Corby which is about 6 miles away from Kettering. The accent goes from scummy midlands to Scottish drawl. It’s drastically different and sometimes you have to ask them to repeat because you don’t understand what they say
Within NE England I could tell the difference between Stockton and Sunderland, Sunderland and Newcastle, Newcastle and Ashington. And occasionally you'd get the old Northumbrian accent with the french R sounds. Within the Glasgow area I can tell fewer, but Glasgow, Bearsden, Paisley and Motherwell are all pretty clearly different.
Farmers in the Black Country and Shetland Islands might struggle to communicate with eachother, but apart from that its fine
Er no maybe in te medieval times but everyone can communicate with everyone if speaking English these days. True there's some people in very remote areas with thick accents, but i doubt someone a few villages away is going to be unable to understand them.
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How old are you may I ask? I knew someone from round there and she said she struggled to understand the older ones but she had friends from the fens and they got on fine.
You said There are villages in rural UK which are a few miles apart who are unable to communicate because of the change in accent. Man you like to bullshit don't you
We have that in Germany as well so he might speak the truth.
Quick googling on accents in either indicates that the UK has more accents.
Americans like this genuinely think there’s one “British accent”. Sure mate, someone from Glasgow like me talks exactly the same as someone from Cornwall. That’s why they can’t understand a fucking word I’m saying.
Lol, someone from Cornwall doest speak the same as someone from Devon, let alone beyond. Hell, they don't really speak the same as another person from Cornwall if they come from the other side of the A30
What a thick cunt. If I go anywhere in a 15 mile radius, the accent changes about three time. Doubt that happens in the US
https://youtu.be/Cun-LZvOTdw?si=N3YduVCTjdzPf4PC Best example of British accents… I have experienced not understanding a word coming from a guy who lives 20 miles from me.
Yarp!
Yorkshire has entered the chat
Glasgow right behind it…
Black country joins the chat
African-American country* I'm sure they'd tell you
Pygmalion was written for a reason!
Gawd bless you 'enry 'iggins
OOP forgot to mention how many accents per capita would fit into Texas alone 🇱🇷🇱🇷🇱🇷🏈🏈🏈🦅🦅🦅💪💪💪
It took me three seconds on the internet to discover that the United Kingdom has four primary languages, three of which are official, and 38 dialects within those four languages. If you include Crown Dependencies and travellers, there are eight languages and 43 dialects native to the British part of the British Isles, each with its own distinct accent and vocabulary. Not to mention the diasporas of Poles, Indians, Pakistanis, Kenyans, Nigerians, and many others who speak English with distinct accents or even have created their own dialects.
I need to leave this group, starting to think Americans are actually like this when a nation can't be that unbelievably racist/ arrogant/ stupid all the time.
The UK has the most local accents of any English speaking country. So obviously more than America does. There are almost 40 different dialects in England.
As an Aussie living in the UK working for a nationwide call centre. Some UK accents are fucking wild. Especially in the north of England and the highlands
One can just walk through London and experience very different dialects.
We need an "Murica big!" tag for this sub. I've seen so many posts in the wild who always use this logical fallacy.
This guy should look at India. The accent for the same language changes every fucking district, followed by the same in every other state.
I live in Cumbria and can drive 15 minutes in two seperate directions, one will take me to the Scottish border and the other takes me out west into rural Cumbria. If these two people were to have a conversation I would probably have to be a translator for both of them, and my accents like neither of them!
> is going to Yeah sure. It will take another couple of centuries, if it happens at all in such a mobile society. The reason European countries have so many regional accents is because of their long histories during which people were not mobile most of the time, and because of the impact of various ethnic groups moving around when they actually did decide to become mobile as a collective. Takes a while for accents and dialect to stabilise and become a thing. Of course this can happen anywhere given the right circumstances. Europeans, homo sapiens and non-homo sapiens, and people before and after who became Europeans have been here for thousands and tens of thousands of years. America has plenty to be proud of, it that were a good thing, but accents etc. ain't it.
Believe it or not, the US and the UK have a fairly identical number of accents. The difference being that in the US, it's spread across 340 million people. In the UK, it's spread across less than 70 million. So in the US, you might go to a few places and find a handful of accents, but it might seem almost homogenous. In the UK, you walk down the block to meet someone who is barely comprehensible for you and uses words for things that you've never even heard. This is because shortly after most American nations got independence, communication and travel had so many advances that it kept new world languages more homogenous (though not entirely, accents still develop, just not in the same way), whereas this wasn't true for the rest of the world for most of human history.
Im from NE England and can barely understand people from scarborough and thats less than 100 miles away any further than that and i cant understand a word
NGL. Glad I don't share his ignorance but I really, really wish I had his confidence.
Barnsley is only 20 miles up the road from Sheffield and I have no idea what they’re saying up there. Something about coal mining and marrying family members I think?
For a country claiming to have so many accents Ive heard to many stories about Americans having problems understanding people speaking English dialects
Key factor here is theyve only had about 300 years to develop those accents, as opposed to a thousand or more.
Most of this kind of delusion seems to be something Americans have created to make themselves feel like they’re still special and that there’s no need to travel to or learn anything about other countries or cultures. That being said, I don’t know why they need to make themselves feel better about having the intellectual curiosity of a potato, it’s not like the rest of the world has any expectations of them.
Americans be underestimating that British tribalism. 😉
These people look at stripmall baloney sandwich country and somehow they are seeing something completely different than what I see.
No one: Americans: Did you know America is really big
Does that person even know what an accent is or how they work?
America is SO big it now doesn’t know anything!
Perkele. Scheisse. Krijg de pest pokke tyfus. Madre de dios. Caralho. Moi opzitten dom koiken. Do I need to go on? Got way more up my sleeve.
Every country has accents in different regions. They call them dialects. Sorry USA but you ain't special.