Useful site...

[concertigrossi]

Courtesy of sharpiefan and snakey, Teach Yourself the Devon Dialect. Basically, it's a series of lessons in how to sound Devonian. I just spent WAAAY, WAAAY too much time messing around here.

There's also the the BBC's Voices project, which catalogs regional dialects and accents around Britain. Very, very cool!

Comments

[rexluscus.livejournal.com]

Ohmygosh I am about to lose hours of my life to that Voices site. Between this and aos_macros...

[concertigrossi.livejournal.com]

Fascinating, isn't it?

[soubie.livejournal.com]

OH! I was just wondering back in your journel (because I am that bored)... four days ago, I did a talk on Voices for my archives MA class! (My particular favourites are the Black Country guys talking about people trying to disguise the accent, and the poem in praise of regional speech, and the Guernsey-French speakers swearing. Oh, and the Salford teens thinking of thier words for 'ugly'. I was born in Manchester, so it always raises my blood pressure slightly when I hear the expression 'British Accent' and know that someone is thinking of the Working Title films...

[concertigrossi.livejournal.com]

Man, you WERE bored. :)

Oh, cool! I'm really glad they're working on archiving examples of all these... it's such a neat aspect of history and culture. How did your talk go? Did the class enjoy it?

Yea, I can see how that would be annoying... but then, how many people outside of England ever hear any accent other than RP, even on British TV? (Is "RP" even the correct term for BBC English?)

I got interested when I started reading the Herriot books, because of the way he described Yorkshire accents.

It's funny, in the 30s, when people first started hunting out dialects in the US, they found that on some remote islands on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, they were still speaking Elizabethan English... :)

[soubie.livejournal.com]

I think I have an lj problem; if nobody I know is updating, I start wondering through those of people I've only spoken to once or twice.

My talk was amazing! Alas, I had to cut it down, so I didn't get to play most of my audioclips, but the tutor apparantly said in a cafe at lunchtime that I'd been excellent.

Yes, 'RP' is more or less correct (though the BBC are trying to shake that reputation recently- well, there are noticably Scottish announcers and a definatly Welsh newsreader, though they all still have thier regional slant on RP). What it isn't, is the Queen's English- the Queen speaks an English that's more or less unique to her (what's even sillier is that that expersion seems to have been coined in the Victorian age, and Victoria's mother tongue was German, and she never completely lost the accent). What's really irritating, well, apart from getting told 'Well, all British accents sound posh and educated to me,', is when forign networks make mistakes when somebody really should have put them right; for example, in Frasier, when Daphne and her brother had accents from different ends of England, because some producer seemed to have the idea that all working-class English people are Cockneys.

When it comes to a true picture of the chippy culture battle between the different regions of England, I truly reccomend Stuart Macconie's Pies and Prejudice. All English people know that the north of England is a very different place to the south- it's just something never talked about to forigners.

I'm not really suprised about the Carolina thing- I mean, in Herriot's Yorkshire, they still had the two forms of you after about 50 years of near-universal literacy, reasonable roads and radio broadcasts (in fact, we had a Yorkshire girl in our class in the late nineties who still used 'thou' and '-sen' for '-self', all those Herriot things. And they say that some features of American speech are closer to 15th-16th century English than the English of 21st century England anyway (though I doubt that it's an exact match- and anyway, factors like the elongated 'a'- as in 'bath' having the long a of 'car' instead of the short 'a' of 'apple', which are a late 18th century development in England (yes, even the Swanns and Navy officers shouldn't actually be using them, but that would totally confuse the average audience member) are, as you know, only actually a feature of south-easten English anyway (well, they are in West Country (ie Barbossa-speak), but they've always been there, and prior to about 1780 were actually considered rustic and not classy in the slightest).

(Best bit? The expression 'arr'- despite what T'n'T seem to think- is not a meaningless piraty ejaculation, but West Country dialect for 'yes'. Probably associated with scurvy dogs because the West Country was a convieniant place for smuggling, wrecking etc..)

[concertigrossi.livejournal.com]

The way the Queen speaks... I thought I'd read someplace that that's a descendant of the affectations of the 18th century Devonshire house set?

I just got _Pies and Prejudice_, though I haven't had a chance to read it. Thanks for the rec! :)

"in Frasier, when Daphne and her brother had accents from different ends of England, because some producer seemed to have the idea that all working-class English people are Cockneys."

Believe me, that drove a lot of Americans nuts, too. :)

[soubie.livejournal.com]

The way the Queen speaks... I thought I'd read someplace that that's a descendant of the affectations of the 18th century Devonshire house set?

I'd never read that, but... WELL, the Duchess Georgiana was standing in place of a queen for setting fashions at the time (because nobody liked the queen much and the queen spoke mostly German anyway), I THINK that she did come from the south-west. HMMMMMMMM....... (don't tell me we still put up with accent-prejudice because of that bloody adulterous-compulsive-gambling-clothes-horse...)

I just got _Pies and Prejudice_, though I haven't had a chance to read it. Thanks for the rec! :)

*bounces* You like?

[concertigrossi.livejournal.com]

I'll have to look it up... I do remember reading that it got imitated like CRAZY, and, from her biography says, sounds enormously dorky.

I did! It's a very interesting book... :)

[concertigrossi.livejournal.com]

(And I always did feel a bit sorry for Caroline of Brunswick.. I mean, it sounds like she had some serious issues, but the Prince Regent was kind of an asshole, too..)