The Word Cloud

9 Comments

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  by RichardB 9 months ago

  Nice one, Squidge.
  
  Accents and dialects fascinate me. Years back, before I was married, I had a holiday with some mates in Rimini, and we stayed in a little hotel run by an Italian family who'd spent about ten years living in London before returning to their native land. They had three children, quite widely spaced. The eldest, who'd been been to London and back with her parents, spoke English like they did, well but with an Italian accent. The youngest, who'd been born after the return to Italy, didn't speak English at all. But the middle child, a boy who'd been born during their stay in London, spoke totally fluent English with a strong Cockney accent. Loved it...
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  by AlanP 9 months ago

  One night in a hotel bar in Milan I had a conversation with this Turkish guy, in French. And it worked, although I have to confess we didn't use a wide ranging vocabulary.
  
  The power of Grappa :D
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  by Bren 9 months ago

  :) Nice one Squidge - holday sounds wonderful
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  by Skylark 9 months ago

  :-) That's funny :-) I've lost track of what my accent does now. Grew up in Edinburgh and have since lived variously in Sheffield, Cambridgeshire, New Zealand, County Durham and Derbyshire. I sound more Scottish when I'm talking to other Scottish people but I have been asked if I am Irish, American, Canadian and Australian at various points. The one that made me laugh the most was a lady who said
  'What is that I can hear in your accent?'
  'Probably Scottish,' I replied. 'That's where I grew up.'
  'No, it sounds more like Irish to me.'
  'That'll be Scottish then, seeing as I've never lived in Ireland.'
  'No, it's definitely not Scottish, it's definitely Irish.'
  Um, ok then!
  :-D
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  by Squidge 9 months ago

  When I first started at uni, I had a habit of shortening my 'the's' to 't'. As in 'It's t'other one you want.' Midlands born and bred (ey-up, me duck!), yet that one slip made my flat mates think I was from Yorkshire. (With apologies to all Yorkshire folk on the cloud!)
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  by Skylark 9 months ago

  That's a North Derbyshire-ism too so not too far from home :-)
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  by Skylark 9 months ago

  Although mostly the 'the' gets missed out altogether...
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  by Amarantha 9 months ago

  West Riding, me Squidge. Sheffield, which is as near the Derbyshire border as dammit is to swearing and 'ey-up', 'duck' and the t' are all very South Yorkshire so your flat-mates were not far wrong - I say they weren't far wrong! The Yorkshire dialect also puts the t' in place of thee and thou if it suits, as in: "Has t' seen our Billy lately?"
  
  North Yorkshire folk and they further into the beyond consider Sheffield to be the Midlands anyway, so there's a pool of shared idiom were the Counties meet.
  
  Also, as Skylark shows, moving from one area of the country to another can produce some strange mixtures. My cousin was born and grew up in Luton but moved to Ellesmere Port after marrying and having two children. We kept in touch by post but when I saw her a few years later I was surprised by how much her accent had changed.
  
  "Yes, I know," she said, "I thought I was talking Scouse but when I visit the south on holiday everybody thinks I'm from Birmingham!"
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  by RichardB 9 months ago

  Here I go again. Love those accents...
  
  The only time we stayed with my brother in Milwaukee, the natives went bananas over our accents. Every time we opened our traps in a shop or restaurant or whatever, it was: 'Oh, wow! LOVE your accents!' or: 'Hey! where are you guys from?'
  
  My brother's old school friend, who is a lecturer at the University of Wisconsin, speaks with a strong London accent (or at least he did the last time I heard him, decades ago), but my brother tells me that most of his students think he's Australian...
  
  As for hybrid accents, my late father was born in Cardiff to parents who came from London, then moved to Bristol (where I was born) in his teens, and then to the Surrey suburbs. His accent could have been quite interesting, but he spoke with hardly any regional accent at all - sort of BBC (as they used to say) without being posh.
  
  My mother, Bristol born and bred, still has a Bristol accent, though she hasn't lived there since her early thirties.
  
  And I'm pure London suburban / Home Counties, as far as I can tell.